May 13, 2026

WE ARE INCAPABLE OF EMPATHY:

The Fiction of Self-Knowledge: Good sociology listens to personal narratives without mistaking them for complete explanations of behavior. (C.D. Cunningham, May 12, 2026, Public Square)

Imagine you live in an apartment with roommates. One is a bit of a slob, struggles with school, and eventually stops doing the dishes altogether.

A sociologist is curious about what’s happening and comes to interview you and your roommate. The sociologist asks you why you think your roommate stopped doing the dishes. You tell the sociologist that your roommate is probably struggling in his broader life, doesn’t have a very clean personality, and might even be a bit lazy.

The sociologist then asks your roommate why. The roommate answers that it was because the rent was too high, school got busy, and you weren’t doing your fair share in other areas.

The sociologist then announces that you didn’t know why your roommate stopped doing the dishes.

Replicate this experiment across dozens of apartments, and suddenly the sociologist announces a trend: “roommates who do the dishes know the least about why people stop doing the dishes.”

The headline is absurd. We all know this intuitively.

People can’t truly be trusted to self-report their rationales. We barely understand our own rationales sometimes.