The human capacity to empathise is among our most celebrated qualities – so it can be rather galling to think this purest of instincts might be infected with bias. Nevertheless, this is what psychologists tell us. We can suffer, apparently, from “compassion fatigue” – present in burnt-out care workers, but also at scale (Ukraine frets that, two years into a war with Russia, supporters in the west will reach compassion fatigue). We also suffer from “compassion fade”: as the number in need increases, tragedies dissolve into statistics.
Both biases have an element of paradox – we are withdrawing sympathy as the need for it increases. But I wonder if there is also a third sort of paradoxical bias lurking within our good intentions; call it “compassion status-bias”. It is among our most ancient instincts to observe, suck up to and imitate people a few rungs up on the ladder – witness the dynamics of any office, the pages of any magazine – but I reckon we also fling a great deal of excess sympathy up there as well.
