TOTALLY GEEKED!

Source: CC0 Public Domain, courtesy pixabay.com

Imagine a college student, coping with the death of a family member mid-semester. She is emotionally overwhelmed and finds that her grades are slipping and she’s been unable to complete her work on time and fears she’ll have to withdraw from school. She decides to ask her two professors if they would allow her to postpone papers and exams for some time. Prof. Jones also lost a family member while in college, whereas Prof. Taylor did not have such an experience. Which professor would you expect to be more sympathetic to the student? If you’re like most people, you would assume that Prof. Jones would be more accommodating. However, new research suggests that this intuition is incorrect. Those who have gotten through difficult situations tend to be the harshest judges of those who fail under similar circumstances.

It’s true that if you’ve experienced an event, you’ll sympathize with those going through the same experience^1,2. But you may respond differently when you see someone failing to cope successfully with something that you’ve been able to get past. According to Rachel Rutton and colleagues, seeing someone else fail where you’ve succeeded may cause you evaluate them more negatively, and assume that they are flawed for being unable to deal with something that you were able to handle.³ This happens for two reasons: 1) When we think about our own ordeal, we don’t really remember how emotionally difficult the experience was, and 2) We know that we were able to get through it, making it seem more manageable. So when someone else is struggling, we think “I did it. Why can’t you do it too?”

In a series of studies, Rutton and colleagues demonstrated that those who have successfully gotten past a challenge themselves are less sympathetic toward someone who has failed at that task, and generally evaluate that person more negatively.³

In the first study, 54 people taking part in a “polar plunge” (a jump into icy water) read a story about Pat, a man who was about to take the plunge, but then backed out at the last minute. Some participants evaluated Pat prior to go through with the plunge themselves, whereas others evaluated Pat at some point during the week following their plunge. Those who had successfully completed the plunge had less compassion and more contempt for Pat than those who were anticipating it.  One problem with this study was that those who were anticipating the plunge may have been overestimating how difficult it would be. A second study sought to address this issue.

In a lab experiment, college students were asked to complete a grueling test of their mental abilities. They then evaluated a student who did not complete the test due to fatigue. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Some participants evaluated the failing student prior to taking the test themselves, others did so in the middle of their own test-taking, and others did so after completing the test. Those who had previously endured the test rated the failing student as less competent than those who were currently taking or had never taken the test.

In a third study, the researchers recruited adults in different states of unemployment (currently unemployed, previously unemployed, and never unemployed). The participants read a story about a man who persistently applied for jobs, but nonetheless failed to find employment. One day, the man is approached by a friend who asks him to sell a small quantity of drugs, and he decides to stop his search for a legal job and work for his friend, selling drugs.  Those who had previously endured their own bout of unemployment had less compassion and more negative evaluations of the man, compared to those who were currently unemployed or had never experienced unemployment. In addition, those who had previously gotten past the experience rated getting through unemployment as less difficult, and further analyses revealed that this perception that it wasn’t so hard was the reason they had less sympathy for the man in the story.

A fourth study examined how people would evaluate someone who successfully coped with an ordeal, as compared to someone who did not. Three-hundred and twenty-three individuals who either had or had not endured bullying evaluated a story about a teenager.  Some evaluated a teen who had successfully coped with bullying by managing to endure it. Others evaluated a teen who was not successful, and instead lashed out at his bullies and bystanders, injuring some of them. In order to determine if the effects they had observed in the earlier studies were due to the participants having endured something, rather than the specific event they were testing, the researchers asked one group of participants to evaluate a teen who lashed out at others due to his grief following his sibling’s death, rather than bullying, and found that prior experience with bullying was unrelated to how they evaluated a teen who lashed out in grief. Those who had experienced bullying themselves, compared to those who had not been bullied, had more compassion and more favorable evaluations of the bullied teen who coped successfully with his experience. But, similar to the earlier studies, those who had been bullied themselves had less compassion and less favorable views of the teen who failed to successfully cope with being bullied than those hadn't been bullied in the past.

This research gives new insight into the “empathy gap” between those who are undergoing an experience and those who are not. Prior research examined how people currently coping with an event have greater sympathy for others in that situation than those coolly evaluating it from the outside. But this new research shows that after we’ve gone through an experience ourselves, cooler heads one again prevail, and we lose sympathy for those in the midst of the difficult experience. Thus, the researchers conclude that feeling someone’s pain and knowing what it’s like to experience that pain are two different things.

But what about people who have themselves failed to get through the experience? The studies discussed above don’t really speak to that question. But a small number of participants in the bullying study who said they had failed to deal well with their own bullying experience did have more compassion for the teen who also failed. However, the authors argue that unless you have a clear way of knowing if you personally failed or succeeded, you’re likely to remember yourself has having dealt with it better than you really did at the time. So you’re still likely to see yourself as more successful than someone who has failed.

The authors suggest that once we’ve gotten past something, we lose perspective on what it’s like to struggle and fail. But it’s also possible that those who haven’t gotten past the stressor overestimate how difficult it would be to get past it, leading to more sympathy for those who fail. Much research suggests that we underestimate our own “psychological immune system”, and anticipate that we’ll have a harder time coping with future adversity than we actually do.⁴  Thus, we may see ourselves as potentially failing in that same situation, even if we actually would have gotten through it. So those who have never experienced or are currently experiencing the event may think (perhaps falsely) that they would have failed too, while those who have succeeded do not make this assumption.

Another possibility is that those who have struggled and succeeded see those who have failed as especially different from themselves, and thus actually relate to those unsuccessful people less than those who have never had the experience. It is also possible that those who have successfully coped perceive the situation as more controllable than do those who haven’t experienced it. We tend to have less sympathy for people if we see them as responsible for their own misfortune.⁵ So it could be that those who experienced the event hold the person more accountable for their failure.

Whatever theory best explains these results, they have important implications for deciding who we should turn to for support and how we can best support others. The authors suggest that perhaps those who are trying to empathize with others in a similar situation to one they’ve experienced in the past should actually draw on their own experiences less, and think more about the experiences of others who are going through it. And when you’re looking for kindness during tough times, you may get a more sympathetic ear from someone who hasn’t been through the same experience in the past.

Gwendolyn Seidman

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/close-encounters/201504/sympathy-may-not-come-where-you-most-expect-it