MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children copertina

MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children

MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children

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In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality.The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assumption is that Trump supporters lack empathy, that something is missing, that there is a deficit or a gap where the ability to recognize and respond to suffering should be. That assumption is wrong, and what Neumann actually found is considerably worse.Trump supporters are not blind to your pain. They can see it perfectly well. They enjoy it.The Three Dimensions of EmpathyUnderstanding what Neumann’s data shows requires understanding that empathy is not a single capacity. It is at least three distinct psychological processes, each operating through different neural pathways, each measurable independently, and each telling a different story about how a person relates to the suffering of others.Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand what another person is feeling. It is a perceptual skill, closer to reading comprehension than to emotional experience. A person with high cognitive empathy can look at someone’s face and know they are in pain. They can read body language, vocal tone, and social cues with accuracy. Cognitive empathy does not require caring about what you perceive. It only requires perceiving it.Psychopaths typically score high on cognitive empathy. They are excellent at reading people. That is often what makes them effective manipulators. They can see exactly what you are feeling. They simply do not care.Affective empathy is the capacity to feel what another person feels. It is the process by which observing someone else’s pain produces a corresponding emotional response in your own nervous system. When you see someone stub their toe and you wince, that is affective empathy. When a child cries and your chest tightens, that is affective empathy. It is automatic, involuntary, and operates below the level of conscious decision-making.Affective empathy is what makes cruelty feel wrong. It is the internal alarm that fires when you witness suffering, the signal that tells your brain that what is happening to that person matters. Without it, the suffering of others is neutral information, the way a stock ticker is neutral to someone with no money in the market.Dissonant empathy is the third dimension, and it is the one that changes everything. Dissonant empathy is not the absence of a response to another person’s pain. It is the presence of the wrong response. A person with high dissonant empathy sees suffering and experiences pleasure. The signal fires, but it fires in the wrong direction. Where affective empathy produces discomfort at the sight of someone in pain, dissonant empathy produces satisfaction.This is not sadism in the clinical sense, though the overlap is significant. Dissonant empathy describes a specific empathic inversion: the neural architecture for responding to others’ emotional states is intact and functional, but the valence is reversed. Pain in others registers as reward in the observer.What Neumann FoundNeumann and his co-author Darlene Ngo surveyed over 9,000 American adults across two national samples, one collected before the pandemic and one during it. They measured a comprehensive battery of personality traits, empathy dimensions, and political attitudes, including favorability toward Donald Trump.Three findings emerged that, taken together, paint a portrait of a political base that is psychologically distinct from the general population in ways that go far beyond policy disagreement.First, Trump supporters scored the same as everyone else on cognitive empathy. They can read the room. They can see what you are feeling. They understand facial expressions, social cues, and emotional states at the same level as moderates and liberals. There is no perceptual deficit.Second, Trump supporters scored significantly lower on affective empathy. They are measurably less likely to feel distress when observing another person’s suffering. The internal alarm that makes cruelty feel wrong fires less strongly in this population than in the general public.Third, and most critically, Trump supporters scored significantly higher on dissonant empathy. They are measurably more likely to experience pleasure or satisfaction when observing another person in pain.These three findings together produce a profile that is qualitatively different from what most critics of MAGA assume they are dealing with. The common framing is that Trump supporters “lack empathy,” as though there is a hole where empathy should be. Neumann’s data suggests the picture is more disturbing. They do not lack the ability to perceive suffering. That ability is fully intact. What is different is ...
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