We're all familiar with this graph, I assume:
Ideological Differences in the Expanse of the Moral Circle by Adam Waytz et.al.
Leftists like to believe that means they have more empathy. After all, the entire world is bigger than your neighbourhood, biggot!
I believe it means they have none.
Rightoids have empathy for things near them. Related to them. Things they can hug.
Leftards have empathy for things that are so far away, they are for all intents and purposes theoretical. Hypothetical. Children in Africa, women in Sudan, baby seals in the Arctic, trees in Brazil.
Meanwhile, their own conservative uncle is dehumanised as evil, as a monster. Their unborn children, arguably the closest thing to them imaginable, are rationalised into being "a bunch of cells", and they kill a third of them because they might become inconvenient.
Conservatives have empathy for things that exist. The people around them, their pets, their towns. Their biblical "neighbour".
What leftists have empathy for, are pixels on the screen.
The biggest issue with the pop psychology empathy discussion is you can have empathy but simply not care. I can empathize with why the Chinese want to kill me but I'm going to kill them anyway because it's in my interest.
Caring about others doesn't mean you're necessarily more empathetic.
What ultimately matters is who you care about and why. Empathy is merely the understanding of another person's position which helps you better choose to whom you will care about and why.
Leftists actually have little empathy because if they truly understood how others thought then they would care less about those people. A leftist imagines others as exactly like himself (equal) which shows a genuine lack of empathy.
Right-wing people have more empathy which is why they care about less people overall but care about the right people one ought to care about.
Exactly. They believe they completely understand how they would feel if they were born in a tree-house in Borneo, but they only project themselves into that situation, with their wants, their needs, their education, their standards, their beliefes and their world-view. "I couldn't live without my iPhone, so how could they?" In reality they can't even understand their lifelong neighbour who voted for Trump.
It's why they keep voting in 3rd-world migrants who hate everything that means anything to them. Because they believe that deep down everyone is like them.