Empathy is a muscle. Like any muscle, it gets trained by habit, context, and convenience. For a lot of people and institutions, that training looks like selective empathy: compassion for the familiar, indifference or condemnation for the unfamiliar. That’s not a soft moral failing — it’s an organizational and cultural failure with material consequences. When we decide who is worthy of anger, grief, forgiveness, or accountability along the lines of race, class, or tribe, we steer public policy, media coverage, and organizational responses in profoundly unequal ways.
Let’s be concrete. High-profile public mass shootings and school massacres in the United States are overwhelmingly committed by men, and white men make up a large share of those perpetrators in many datasets of public mass shootings. Multiple databases and analyses show the gender skew is enormous and that white males are highly represented among high-fatality public shooters. That pattern shapes which stories are told, which motives get parsed, and which language — “troubled loner” versus “terrorist” — is deployed. (The Violence Project)
At the same time, there’s a persistent rhetorical move in certain political circles to deploy crude racialized statistics — the “13/50” or “12/50” style claims — as proof of an innate pathology in Black communities. Those claims are repeatedly debunked because they conflate incomparable measures (population share, arrest counts, types of crime, local vs national contexts) and ignore structural drivers. The shorthand statistic is a political cudgel, not a factual diagnosis. (jtspratley.com)
So what do we get? Two parallel truths that sit together very poorly. First: much everyday and structural violence — intimate partner violence, non-public offenses, and many serious crimes — is committed by men across races; intimate partner violence research points to complex gendered patterns but confirms that men are overwhelmingly the primary perpetrators of the worst physical violence in relationships. Second: public discourse and political narratives often treat crimes associated with minorities as proof of community pathology while treating crimes by white men as individual pathology, mental health failures, or tragic but unrepresentative aberrations. The result is a cultural double standard in accountability. (CDC Stacks)
This is not just rhetorical. Media framing studies show that mass shooters of different races are described differently — language about backgrounds, motives, mental health, and humanity shifts with the shooter’s race. Where someone is racialized as white, coverage is more likely to include sympathetic life-history explanations; where someone is racialized as Black or Brown, coverage is more likely to emphasize criminality, threat, or pathology. That differential framing shapes public emotion, which in turn shapes policy priorities. (Ohio State News)
What explains selective empathy? Social psychology has long documented ingroup favoritism, moral exclusion, and motivated reasoning: people are more likely to empathize with those they see as “like” them, and to exclude outgroups from the circle of moral concern. That isn’t some abstract academic quirk — it’s the cognitive machinery that lets institutions excuse the same behavior when committed by an insider and punish it when committed by an outsider. (Princeton University Library)
If your goal is to rebuild trust (and to do anything close to moral consistency), you can’t fix selective empathy with pep talks or virtue signalling. You need structures that make equitable responses automatic, visible, and measurable. Here are the practical moves that actually change incentives:
• Measure who you center. Track whose stories get amplified, whose harms get resources, and whose misdeeds are disciplined. Audit media and internal communications for framing bias. If a newsroom or HR team can quantify which employees or communities receive empathetic language or remediation budgets, they can stop pretending “bad luck” is the cause. (Yes — data reveals bias.) (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
• Institutionalize accountability norms. Create identical processes for investigating, reporting, and acting on harm regardless of the perpetrator’s social identity. Train leaders to follow the process rather than dictate discretionary outcomes. That reduces the “we’ll handle it differently because we like him” problem. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows why predictable norms matter for honest reporting and learning. (SAGE Journals)
• Design empathy into workflows. Don’t leave compassion to individual goodwill. Build mandatory restorative conversations, third-party mediations, and transparent follow-up schedules into incident responses. Structural care beats sporadic feeling. (scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu)
• Call out rhetorical bad faith explicitly. When public figures weaponize misread or misleading stats to stoke fear about particular groups, treat that as political theater with measurable effects: it diverts attention from the structural drivers of violence and corrodes trust. Fact-checking matters, but so does naming the intent behind the data abuse. (See multiple debunks of “13/50” myths and how they’re used politically.) (jtspratley.com)
• Center survivors, not trope narratives. Media and organizations should prioritize survivor testimony and systemic analysis over reductive personality portraits. That means funding longitudinal support and ensuring survivor voices inform prevention design.
This all sounds like organizational engineering — because it is. Selective empathy is not fixed by more moralizing; it’s fixed by redesigning incentives so empathy isn’t a stylistic, optional choice but a predictable output of how your systems operate.
One last practical point: calling out selective empathy doesn’t mean denying patterns where they exist. It means refusing to let patterns be weaponized into prejudice. Crime and violence are real and require real solutions — but those solutions should target the causes we can change (access to firearms, social isolation, misogynistic subcultures, economic marginalization, failed mental-health systems), not scapegoat entire communities with half-baked statistics and theatrical outrage.
If you want the short version to hang on the TrustWorks page: we stop pretending empathy is optional and make it operational. That’s how you rebuild trust — not with platitudes, but with systems that produce consistent, equitable outcomes when people get hurt.
Sources and further reading (selected):
- The Violence Project mass-shooter database; Mother Jones mass shooting data. (The Violence Project)
- FBI Uniform Crime Reports / Table 43 (arrest and race breakdowns). (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
- National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey / CDC resources on IPV. (CDC Stacks)
- Media framing and race studies — Ohio State research and subsequent coverage on differential descriptions of shooters. (Ohio State News)
- Social-psych literature on moral exclusion and ingroup favoritism (Opotow; Tajfel & Turner). (PMC)
- Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and team learning. (SAGE Journals)
