50 Times People Acted Like Shameless Jerks Because They Thought They Would Get Away With It

A few years ago, Daryl Cameron, assistant professor of psychology and research associate at the Rock Ethics Institute at Pennsylvania State University, wanted to understand when, how, and why people choose to avoid empathy in their daily lives.

Often mistaken for compassion — sympathy or concern for others' suffering or misfortune — empathy is the experience of understanding and actually sharing the feelings of someone else.

Empathy, Cameron explained, can be thought of as feeling something with a person, rather than feeling it for them.

One might argue that feelings are automatic—things that happen without our conscious effort.

Cameron acknowledged that sometimes this is true, but he also said that we often choose whether — and toward whom — we're empathetic.

Across several studies, he and his colleagues have demonstrated that we do indeed opt out of being empathetic, and while it can seem like a negative thing, Cameron said the fact that we have the ability to choose has an upside.

“It seems a bit fatalistic and defeatist to say that empathy for large numbers [of people] just isn't how we're wired," Cameron said.

"Research on emotion regulation and mindfulness meditation suggests that people do have ways to change how they relate to their own emotions. Maybe if we further explored such possibilities, new avenues would open up for encouraging empathy."

Together with his colleagues at the time, Cameron conducted several experiments and found that empathy can be boosted by changing the way people think about it.

In one study, simply tweaking participants' expectations — convincing them that empathy would be emotionally rewarding instead of just exhausting — made participants more likely to humanize someone experiencing drug addiction.

In another study, participants increased their levels of empathy for mass suffering when they were convinced that it would not cost them financially.

"It's easy to think that people might avoid empathy because they just don’t want to feel bad," Cameron added. "But what if it's because empathy is effortful, taxing, and fatiguing?"

"It's hard work to try to get inside someone else's head and feel what they're feeling. One might be afraid of getting it wrong, or not knowing someone well enough to know what they’re feeling."

So, the people whose actions produced these pictures probably aren't hopeless. It could very well be that they just need to better understand that selfishness only gets you so far.

A group of scientists, led by Kimmo Eriksson of Stockholm University, tested whether selfish people were more “successful” — as defined by their yearly income and number of biological children — than unselfish people.

After putting the data together, they found that it was actually the people who exhibited more selflessness in their attitudes and behavior who were more likely to have higher incomes and more children. In other words, generous people performed better on these two traditional measures of success than selfish people.

By being a jerk to others, you're not helping yourself. If anything, you're just hurting your chances in life.