Page 35 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

There are a lot of people who like to say that psychopaths lack empathy, but

this isn’t always true. In fact, psychopathy is actually more effective when the
person has good cognitive empathic abilities. Basically, the psychopath needs
to understand exactly what the victim is feeling when they are killing or
torturing them. The skill that psychopaths lack is sympathy. They are
completely fine with watching the person suffer and don’t feel the need to
help.

Research has also found that people who have psychopathic traits are great at

regulating their own emotions.

Why Is Empathy Important?

The reason empathy is important is that it gives us the chance to understand
how other people are feeling so that we are able to respond in an appropriate

manner. It is most often connected with social behavior and there is plenty of
research that shows that more empathy can lead to helpful behavior.

This isn’t always the case, though. Empathy can also prevent social
interactions, or cause a person to act in an immoral way. For example, a
person who has witnessed a terrible car accident and becomes overwhelmed
at the sight of the victims in severe pain is something less likely to help them.

Similarly, having strong empathetic feelings from family members or people
in your own racial or social groups can lead to aggression or hate towards
others who are seen as a threat. This is the reason why mothers will
sometimes become “mama bears” when their child is in danger, whether real
or not.

People who can easily read the emotions of others, like psychics, fortune-
tellers, or manipulators, may use their skills to benefit their self through

deceiving others.
What’s interesting, those who have higher psychopathic traits will show more

utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas, like with the footbridge problem. In
this experiment, people were faced with the decision of whether to push
another off of the bridge to stop a train that was getting ready to kill five
people who were on the track.

The psychopath would push the person off the bridge. This goes along with
the utilitarian philosophy that says saving the lives of five people by killing