Yes, but that's their whole point, I think. Some parents don't model empathy and don't help their kids learn it, and if the vital window is missed in early childhood, it's not something that can be taught later on.
If you're not given the nurturing to develop emotional and reflective empathy before about 3, you just will never have it.
You can force yourself to learn cognitive empathy, but, it's fucking hard.
A HUGE number of adults have zero cognitive empathy. It forms in preteen to early 20's. You can define political alignment completely by the lack of cognitive empathy.
Psychopaths very frequently ONLY have cognitive empathy. They will never have the capacity to have the other types.
> You can define political alignment completely by the lack of cognitive empathy.
I was believing the rest of what you wrote, but I know this is not true (at least not shown empirically), which makes me question if the other stuff is true too. There is much more variation within political alignment categories than between them.
Its both genetics, and learned behaviour. There is some genetic limit to everything, and in some people they are very low in the empathy department. Ofc her parents still failed in noticing that and helping her to find workarounds.
Even if you have genetically predispositioned super low empathy, you can be a productive and helpfull member of society, as long as you are aware of your disability and willing to work on working around it.
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u/Sugarlightgirl 5h ago
Parents teach their children empathy everyday. Empathy is very teachable!