In my article in the magazine this week, I made the case against empathy. Our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of others—to feel their pain, to make their goals our own—might well be essential for intimate relationships. Nobody would deny that parents should feel empathy toward their children, or that romantic love requires the bond that empathy provides. But when we use empathy as a guide to policy, it often takes us in irrational and cruel directions.
This is particularly clear when we look at the criminal-justice system. People are understandably empathetic toward the victims of crime, particularly when they are young and vulnerable, when they are attractive, and when they share our race or ethnicity. It is far harder to empathize with those who are accused or convicted of these crimes. Rather, we want these individuals to suffer. Some would argue that this is a properly moral reaction, but this retributive impulse can motivate legal and policy decisions that many see as unjust, such as three-strikes laws, harsh mandatory sentences, and the mass incarceration of racial minorities.
Sometimes, though, empathy has a quite different effect. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is accused of setting bombs in Boston that killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and that maimed many others. He seems like the perfect villain. But in a blog post on Slate, Hanna Rosin writes about the warmth and compassion directed toward Tsarnaev by certain teen-age girls and, weirdly, by mothers: “In the past week and a half I have not been to a school pickup, birthday, book party, or dinner where one of my mom friends has not said some version of ‘I feel sorry for that poor kid.’ ”
Rosin explores different explanations for this reaction, suggesting that it stems from how Tsarnaev was initially described—“a hapless genial pothead being coerced into killing by his sadistic older brother.” But she later settles on an account which I believe is both unsettling and correct: “Dzhokhar is cute.” In a recent discussion with Robert Wright, the law professor and blogger Ann Althouse makes a similar point, commenting, sarcastically, on the media coverage: “Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?”
Psychologists have long observed the importance given to the face. The most striking demonstration I know of has to do with how competent one looks. The psychologist Alexander Todorov and his colleagues showed people black-and-white headshots of the winners and runner-ups in elections for various House and Senate races. After ensuring that their subjects were unfamiliar with the politicians, the psychologists simply asked: Who looks more competent? Over two thirds of the time, subjects selected the photo of the winning candidate.
Tsarnaev might not look particularly competent, but he is attractive—Althouse describes him as “a hot-looking young man.” Many studies have confirmed that individuals with attractive faces are judged to be happier, kinder, and more intelligent than their homelier counterparts; they are paid more, and are treated better in just about every venue of life. Experiments with simulated juries find that, when the victim of a crime is attractive, the defendant tends to get a longer prison sentence; if the defendant is attractive, he or she gets a lighter sentence. Even better for Tsarnaev, he is baby-faced: studies find that baby-faced individuals also tend to get lighter punishments, perhaps because they inspire parental warmth.
There is a long tradition of scholars who argue that the face reveals deeper truths. In “Essays on Physiognomy,” written in 1772, Johann Kaspar Lavater gave specific guidelines, such as ‘‘the nearer the eyebrows are to the eyes, the more earnest, deep, and firm the character.” In the late nineteenth century, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso proposed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks who could be identified by their primitive features, such as sloping foreheads and large jaws. Nobody would now endorse these views, but there is something to the idea that you can tell a lot from someone’s face. One recent study found that subjects are better than chance at detecting a person’s sexual orientation when viewing their face for just a fraction of a second (and these were unposed pictures—Facebook photos tagged by other individuals).
Still, even if faces do tell a story, the shape of a person’s face is no way to allocate justice and mercy. Instead of Tsarnaev, consider Jared Lee Loughner, who pleaded guilty to the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and several others. Rosin’s mom friends are not going to shed tears over this face:
Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers Rosin encounters? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.
Photograph of Tsarnaev: Robin Young/A.P. Photograph of Loughner: Pima County Sheriff’s Dept/The Arizona Republic/A.P.
