The United States Is Somehow One Of The Most Empathetic Countries In The World
While we may be able to imagine the predicaments of people less fortunate than us, we don't always seem eager to help fix them.
While we may be able to imagine the predicaments of people less fortunate than us, we don't always seem eager to help fix them.
The United States might be a land of free-market individualism and up-by-your-bootstraps success, in a way that seems counter to the caring social democracies of Europe. Our foreign aid budget is laughably small, our homeless population is out of control, our health care system often fails the neediest. But according to one study, it turns out we're actually pretty concerned about others. In an international survey of people's ability to empathize with others, Americans rank quite high. We're in seventh place among 63 countries. But we're apparently less empathetic than folks from Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, or Peru, the nations in the first three places in the study.