Why do people think lack of empathy is the cause of violence

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It's been pretty obvious to humans for the last few thousand years, probably longer, that burning hatred is the primary cause of violence, not lack of empathy. Why have so many people recently forgotten this? Why do so many people assume that someone is likely to randomly commit an act of violence without external stimulus, simply because they don't care? In order for a person to have the capacity to hate someone, they have to be able to relate to them on a human level to some extent, therefore have some level of empathy. For example, a lot of people with Schizoid Personality Disorder are incapable of hatred because they lack the ability to relate to people as other human beings, therefore they have no motivation to commit acts of violence.

All this stuff about violence and lack of empathy is probably related to the tragedy at Sandy Hook, because Adam Lanza had Asperger's, and Asperger's is often associated with lack of empathy. We can't completely lack empathy though, otherwise we'd be a lot more like people with Schizoid Personality Disorder. I guess that's as deep as the media wanted to dig for a convincing stereotype. It worked anyway though, because they succeeded in making it look like lack of empathy can be the primary cause for someone to commit an act of violence. But it can't, it either has to be caused by an external stimulus such something provoking anger, or an internal stimulus related to psychosis. A lot of animals probably don't feel any empathy towards me, but they don't randomly attack me for no reason. Why would a person who feels no empathy towards me randomly attack me for no reason either?

I think it's partly confusion over the definition of "empathy" in the context of ASD:

Most people think it means being able to feel compassion for someone else, even when applied to Autism disorders. So they think that means we have no sense of compassion, and they reason that if we can't feel for other people then we are inevitably prone to hurt them. (Why lack of feeling implies malicious feeling to them, I don't know.)

Clinically, what psychologists mean when they talk about lack of empathy is more along the lines of having trouble correctly perceiving and reacting to other people's emotions, which has nothing to do with whether we have our own emotions or recognize that others do too. And it's a huge leap to thinking we don't realize it's possible to cause others pain, or to thinking that anyone wants to hurt them intentionally just because they have ASD.

So I suspect that a big chunk of the problem is people just hearing the word "empathy" and running off with it, assuming psychologists use the word the same way as everyone else and extrapolating everything else from that.

Sometimes people kill others to see if they can get away with the perfect crime e.g the Leopold and Loeb case. They can often pick a stranger as a victim as they have nothing against them, they just want to get away with the murder by outwitting the police.

Having a complete lack of empathy is equated with having no conscience ie being a sociopath/psychopath

They often do things just for kicks

I don't think lack of empathy causes violence. I think, rather, that uncontrollable anger does.

I guess being antipathetic like a Sociopath is connected with lack of empathy, but a lot of people who lack empathy are just apathetic like Schizoids. Someone who is just apathetic probably wouldn't be willing to take the risk of committing a crime like that because they would be more concerned with self-preservation and lack the motive to commit it anyways. Apathy implies that someone just doesn't relate to other people at all, whereas antipathy implies that they relate to other people in a negative way. They're used synonymously a lot of the time though.

Psychiatric labels need to be used in context. Empathy is too complex. Motivation of people is too complex. Personality is too complex.

Anyone can kill, and anyone can help. People swing around psychiatric lables and have litte to no understanding what they are saying. Has anyone considered to actually talk in a more accurate context?

Empathy means we are aware of other peoples suffering. Cognitive empathy probably means that we are capable of relating to other people, but only intellectualy, not based on feelings. (just speculating here)

"Empathy" is not the same as "sympathy".

Thats what one book on aspergers says. You can have lots of sympathy for the unfortunate but still lack empathy-meaning not have a theory of mind.

But Ive never understood how aspergers and autism have to do with lack of 'empathy" anyway. To me its a nonsequitar.

But be that as it may-conflict, and strife, are not necessarily the result of people NOT seeing themselves in others. Often it is because folks DO see themselves in others- they often project their own nefarious motives onto others.

I was more unhappy with Monday's announcement that The Sims Social and SimCity Social, which I have been playing for several months and obviously wasted real money on, will soon be "retired" on Facebook than with the bombings in Boston, and annoyed by all the posts telling me to "Pray for Boston" because I don't believe in prayer. If I'm that cold and callused I guess I'm not supposed to care about being violent, either. I also can't help but have some sick, evil admiration for the timing of the killer's bombs going off and this morning I was annoyed that a fake picture of an 8-year-old girl running in the marathon was the child reportedly killed and telling me to pray for her family was also posted on FB, but then I got a message under it that it wasn't true, it was a really a boy watching the marathon, I don't know why someone would try to pull off a stupid hoax like that, other than the fact they were probably hoping people would donate to them or something. I posted on FB that Americans have terrorists living among them in their own country and they couldn't even prevent this from happening, even with all their security and so-called "intelligence" watching over everyone, so what gives them the delusion they're a strong, powerful country that can resolve the mess going on in the other side of the world and anywhere else? Stupid.

Violent psychopaths have a monopoly on self-empathy: that is, they cannot empathize with anyone but themselves. Asperger's makes it difficult to empathize with others, but it's not completely directed at oneself, and in fact in many cases most of the empathy is directed outward to try to understand the confusing world.

That strikes me as correct, I find that I'm making an effort to redirect all my available empathy outward most of the time.

Hatred is the cause of a lot of violence, but there are cases where someone is violent towards a person that they felt no bad feelings towards.

Robert Hare described this one guy who broke into an old guy's house to steal some stuff. The homeowner found him and starting yelling at him, so he hit the guy in the throat to shut him up. Then the guy started making gurgling noises, so he hit the guy again and again until the guy stopped making noise. And then he got himself a beer from the guy's fridge, and fell asleep on the guy's couch.

Lack of empathy (in the psychopathic sense, not the autistic sense) is not exactly a cause of violence, but it greatly reduces the threshold for violence, so that the person might be violent for extremely minor reasons. In the case of the break-in I just described, the guy was violent in reaction to an annoying sound.

Hatred does inhibit empathy towards the one you hate, though.

Does lack of empathy relate to not having the "hive" mentality ?