Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Decline of sympathy

According to the Books Ngram Viewer, usage of sympathy,empathy can be compared. Sympathy has been declining since 1900. Empathy has been slowing rising since World War II. Empathy might have caught up with sympathy, except that the trend stopped in 2000.

I think that the rise of empathy comes from mindreading psychologists. The Wikipedia article on empathy lists about 15 definitions.

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