It's not thought at all. It's the experience of vicarious pain. It might even be the basis for our social tendencies. Best example I know of are neurological studies that suggest that witnessing footage of someone getting stabbed forces you to experience at least a tiny, compartmentalized version of the stabbing, even feeling it in the same spot. It's probably one of the most fundamental parts of the human experience but I personally don't understand it as something I do rationally, but in a good way, if that makes sense?
I messed up my search history so you don't have to: There is no such study. The "source" is a book by Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor, called "The Parasitic Mind," which has a quote from Jordan Peterson on the cover. I'm assuming that and the absence of any reviews in the scholarly lit give you an indication of how seriously it should be taken.
"People care too much about things" has long been the message of South Park
South Park routinely trips over itself as it sprints between "only an insufferable liberal would care about things" and "why are people so unfathomably cruel to each other?" Empathy isn't unknown to the writers. It just slips in and out of their memory whenever a punchline necessitates it.
ideals and aspirations for 15 year old edgy children and 50 year old edgy manchildren
The dirty truth of the human condition is how easy it can be for people to stop maturing (or outright regress) far earlier than we would like to acknowledge. And it certainly doesn't help when Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.
It really frustrates me too since imo empathy isn't the end-all be-all of virtue. Hyperactive empathy can create a constantly open wound in a world full of systemic cruelty, and it can be visceral enough to be the grounds for manipulating people. But for these ghouls to extrapolate from that the lesson of "we'd be FREE if I didn't get weighed down by these PARASITES with their NEEDS and TRAUMAS" is so god damn evil that I usually keep my trap shut wrt empathy in most circles.
Y'know he may be onto something...our (humanity in general, Hexbear not so much) willingness to humanize billionaire monsters like Elon Musk and his ilk is going to doom the planet. Glad we have science to back us up now
There's something deeply ironic about this understanding he and people like this have of some kind of dichotomy between the brain and the heart. The only reason their fucking imbecilic brains even have the plasticity to try and "reason" their way out of feeling empathy is because they have been kept healthy by the altruistic efforts of their fellow humans, which is likely downstream of the very empathy they treat like a liability.
There's a type of ant parasite (a type of fluke I think?) that is classified as a "social parasite" because it takes advantage of ant eusociality. It infects a host ant and makes it smell and look more like a queen, and the other ants start to tend to it like they would a queen, meaning that they get overworked and sometimes even choose to care for the infected individual at the expense of their actual queen.
Edit: and the species' name? Capitalensis inheritoraejust kidding