Failing to Imagine Emotion

1. It is a common practice that we imagine other people’s emotions. This is how we understand their motives, actions, and feelings [54].
2. Our practice of imagining the emotions and perspectives of other people is a central feature of human social life [56].
3. Perspective is our ability to imagine the point of view of another. By perspective we plan our actions and predict the actions of others.
4. It is possible that we misimagine others however. We might imagine a loved one to be in distress even though they are not.
5. Imagined fictional personalities are not an illusion. The characters themselves have real motives and actions. However, they can be an invitation to isslusion by allowing us to connect possible characters, personalities with possible motives and actions.
6. “We are rarely aware of the limits of our imaginative grasp of one another in everyday live, and of how often we do not manage to imagine at all” [88]. Sometimes we are unable to predict the motivations and emotions of others. This is because of an asymmetry between actions with good outcomes and others with not so good outcomes. “The asymmetry is that admiration often blocks the desire to understand, while frustration or disapporval often prompts it, so that we are more aware of the difficulties in imagining uncooperative people” [91].
7. While we might understand why someone commits an awful act, we cannot understand how they are able to commit the awful action. This is because we “raise the stakes for explanation of evil actions” [94]. These sorts of actions require a more thorough explanation. Yet, these do not have a special motive, but it seems that Morton attributes these to a weakness of will. I am not convinced.
8. Distinctions between empathy and sympathy may either be:
9. emotional resonance - feeling what another feels (e.g., Peter Goldie 2004 “On Personality,” or 2011 “Anti-empathy”)
10. emotional appropriateness — having a suitable reaction to another person’s situation
11. emotional identification — having an emotion that makes you take their purposes to your heart and their troubles as your concern.
12. When we attempt to understand, by imagining, someone else’s experiences and motivations, we have to “manage a tradeoff between completeness and accuracy” [109].