Empathy and Its Boundaries: Understanding the Selectivity of the Human Heart

Empathy has long been presented as the moral cement of modern societies. It is invoked in political speeches, celebrated in school textbooks, and called upon in times of crisis, as if it were the key to social peace and universal justice. Yet behind this appealing word lies a far more complex reality. Empathy, far from being a universal and impartial feeling, is deeply selective, malleable, and, as neuroscientist and author Samah Karaki reminds us in Empathy Is Political, profoundly… political.

Empathy: A Biased Faculty

Neuroscience and social psychology have firmly established it: our empathy is not a light that shines equally on everyone. It follows specific neural circuits, sometimes competing with other cognitive networks, and, above all, it activates more easily for people we consider close, similar, or members of our own group.

In other words, we empathize more readily with those who resemble us. This identification bias, forged by evolution - which shaped empathy as a tool for intra-group cohesion - remains deeply ingrained. One only needs to observe our collective reactions to suffering: the emotion we feel upon seeing the image of a local child, victim of a heinous crime whose face and story dominate the headlines, is not the same as the emotion we feel for anonymous victims of a distant conflict.

Karaki goes further: she shows that social norms, media narratives, and political structures shape the very biology of our emotions. Empathy is therefore not a pure moral resource; it is conditioned by what society deems worthy of compassion, and, conversely, by those it relegates to the gray zone of indifference.

When Yesterday’s Victims Close Their Hearts

This mechanism is tragically visible in contemporary history. One of the most troubling examples concerns the relationship between the memory of the Holocaust and the abject cruelty being exerciced on Gaza. How can we understand that the Jewish people, marked in their very flesh by extermination, can today, within large parts of Israeli society, appear indifferent to the suffering of Palestinian civilians? Historian Omer Bartov, a specialist in genocide studies, summed it up starkly: “There is no room in our hearts for the children of Gaza.”

This chilling observation does not reveal innate cruelty, but rather the power of context: fear, a sense of siege, national narrative. Empathy folds inward, retreating to the confines of the group, closing itself to the outside.

Nor is this an isolated case. In Rwanda, thirty years after the genocide of the Tutsis, studies show that both survivors and their children display a weaker empathic response toward members of the perceived opposing group. Trauma, far from expanding compassion, can sometimes constrict it. Collective wounds harden into emotional frontiers.

The Collapse of Compassion

Another, more insidious limit is what researchers call compassion fade, the collapse of compassion. The more victims there are, the less emotion we feel. The human mind, saturated with images of disaster, protects itself by shutting down. Mass suffering becomes an abstraction. One death moves us; a million leave us cold.

In modern wars, where screens relentlessly broadcast faces of horror, this desensitization has become a collective reflex. It does not signify moral failure, but rather a neurological inability to absorb everything. Yet its political consequences are immense: it enables indifference, and thus, the continuation of violence.

Empathy as a Political Weapon

Because it is malleable, empathy also becomes a weapon. Media, governments, and institutions can direct this sentiment, highlighting certain victims while rendering others invisible. Narratives create a hierarchy of compassion. Karaki speaks of a “geopolitics of emotion”: a space where public discourse appropriates empathy either to legitimize policies or to neutralize critique.

This is why empathy, if left untempered by reason, can become an instrument of manipulation. We may cry for a Ukrainian child and remain unmoved by a Yemeni one. We may condemn one massacre and justify another. Empathy chooses, sorts, discriminates. It is not justice.

Lessons from History: Modulating Our Instincts

Should we, then, mistrust empathy? Not exactly. But we must understand it, refine it, discipline it. Anthropology and history remind us that humans are not prisoners of their biology. We have learned to tame our impulses, to broaden our moral circle. As psychologist Steven Pinker has shown, physical violence has declined dramatically over the centuries. This progress is not due to genetic mutation, but to the spread of norms, institutions, and educational efforts that have, at least partially, domesticated our tribal instincts.

In the same way, empathy can be cultivated, not by exalting it as an emotional absolute, but by pairing it with critical awareness. To be empathetic is not merely to feel another’s pain; it is to understand the structures that produce it and to act toward their transformation.

Toward a Lucid and Collective Empathy

The future of our societies likely depends on this evolution: moving from instinctive empathy to lucid, regulated, collective empathy. That means learning to put ourselves in the place of those who do not resemble us, rejecting affective hierarchies, and questioning the narratives that assign “worthy” and “unworthy” victims.

For empathy alone does not make justice. But without it, justice becomes inhuman.

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References

Samah Karaki, L’empathie est politique : comment les normes sociales façonnent la biologie des sentiments

E.A. Caspar et al., On the Impact of the Genocide on Intergroup Empathy Bias in Rwanda, American Psychologist, 2023.

Omer Bartov, Infinite licence, The New York Review

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

British Psychological Society, The Limits of Empathy.