A phrase gaining traction on the American right, "suicidal empathy," posits that progressive values prioritize distant groups over one's own community, ultimately leading to societal decline. Coined by marketing professor Gad Saad and amplified by figures like Elon Musk, this concept critiques the left's focus on aiding asylum-seekers, the homeless, or international aid recipients, arguing it comes at the expense of native citizens and victims.
Musk, in an October 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, stated, "People have empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims of the criminals." This framing, according to analysis, offers a new intellectual justification for those on the right seeking to distance themselves from social responsibilities, presenting policy preferences not as self-interest but as a matter of cultural preservation.
This argument has often been supported by a 2019 study featuring heatmaps that appeared to show liberals focusing moral concern on distant groups, while conservatives prioritized their immediate circles. These heatmaps were widely shared on social media, with figures like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and conservative author Rob Henderson citing them as evidence. The Trump administration also reportedly used these graphics in response to protests against deportations.
However, new research published in the journal Political Psychology offers a contrasting perspective. Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study, was prompted by the popular heatmap memes to investigate the claims directly. "The assertion going around was that liberals had come to care more about strangers and distant causes than about their own families and communities, and that claim is testable," Law stated. He noted that the idea conflicted with existing evidence about social cognition, which generally shows a default tendency to favor close others.
Law and his colleagues argued that the 2019 studies, while accurately measuring the extent of moral concern, did not sufficiently analyze whether concern for distant others came at the expense of concern for close others. Their new research utilized the Moral Expansiveness Scale, which allows individuals to rank various groups independently, providing a clearer picture of relative priorities.
The findings indicated that liberals do not necessarily prioritize distant groups over their families. Instead, they tend to extend their circle of moral concern further outward. "Close others came first everywhere," Law reported. "Across all three datasets and essentially the whole ideological spectrum, people gave their inner circle the highest moral concern, and we found no evidence of an inversion among liberals at any level."
Ideology, in this study, primarily predicted the outward reach of moral concern, with liberals showing greater concern for targets such as animals, plants, and future generations. While liberals were more willing than conservatives to allocate hypothetical resources to outside groups, the differences in resource allocation were minimal. When participants divided a fixed pool of 100 points, individuals close to them consistently received the largest share, between approximately 56 and 62 points. The study concluded that extending concern outward did not diminish concern for close relationships.
The research suggests that the popular heatmap memes do not accurately represent the nuances of liberal and conservative moral concerns. While the study clarifies how different political ideologies approach empathy, the question of how far empathy should extend remains a matter of values, as tradeoffs are inherent in resource allocation. The article concludes that a worldview based on zero-sum competition, as implied by the "suicidal empathy" critique, is as flawed as an extreme excess of empathy, highlighting the historical success of human cooperation and the benefits of understanding diverse global interests.