BY JAKE KLEINMAN, Men's Health
This article quotes Daryl Cameron, director of SSRI's Consortium on Moral Decision-Making.
“It's a game about empathy. It's a game about forgiveness.”
That’s how Neil Druckmann, the director of The Last of Us Part II, described his new video game in a 2020 interview with Eurogamer. But anyone who’s played either of Druckmann’s post-apocalypse zombie epics knows that’s not exactly true. The Last of Us games have a way of using empathy—basically, the ability to understand someone else’s feelings—to manipulate the player, twisting their emotions and forcing them to justify the horrible actions they’re forced not just to watch, but actively participate in.
The HBO adaptation, co-created by Druckmann and Chernobylshowrunner Craig Mazin, isn’t any different. At the end of Season 1, audiences watched Joel (Pedro Pascal) murder a room full of innocent people to save the life of his adopted daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey). And if the show’s unique approach to empathy worked its magic, you not only accepted Joel’s actions, you supported them. Season 2 heads down a similar path with the introduction of Abby (Kaitlin Dever), a ruthless soldier who murders Joel in cold blood out of vengeance, but will later be revealed to be a more empathetic figure.
In its obsession with empathy as a storytelling technique, The Last of Us—both the show and the game—reveal that empathy has a dark side. This may sound weird at first. After all, one of our greatest strengths as humans is the ability to understand the pain of others, right? But the truth is, it’s not that simple. Empathy isn’t just some pure source of virtue, it’s a tool that can be used for both good and evil. Once you understand that, you’ll have a better appreciation not just of The Last of Us, but of your own emotional response to the world around you.
What Is Empathy, Anyway?
Empathy is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things in different contexts. “The empathy we often think about is sharing in another person's feelings,” Daryl Cameron, PhD, says. “So if I see someone, or read about someone who's sad, I catch that sadness myself, and I'm in the same emotional place.”
Cameron is an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University whose research explores the psychology behind empathy and how it guides our decisions. He explains that empathy is sometimes conflated with sympathy, which is when you see that someone else is suffering and your instinct is to help them. It can also get mixed up with “perspective taking,” a theory that describes the human ability to understand what another person is going through without sharing their emotional response—like acknowledging why the fans of a rival sports team are sad because they lost, while also celebrating your own victory.
“All three of those are sometimes talked about under this broader term empathy, and they often work together,” Cameron says. “But you can also think about cases where you can have one without the other.”
As for why humans are capable of empathy in the first place, psychology doesn’t have a definitive answer. But it may help us build relationships and communities. It’s a way to both relate to other people, understand when to back away, and know who to trust.
Empathy may also play a crucial role in childhood development. “Children tend to be more empathetic towards larger groups,” Cameron says. “They tend to be more inclusive and empathetic towards strangers and animals and even robots.” Empathy can even facilitate valuable, early-life lessons. If another kid at the playground gets hurt, empathy allows a child to experience that sadness and pain and learn from it. That’s a lot easier than the old adage of learning that fire is hot after you touch the stove and get burned.
But while empathy clearly has its place in society, it also comes with plenty of limitations — and even some drawbacks.
The Dark Side of Empathy
The psychologist Paul Bloom holds that empathy is an inherently flawed human trait. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, he makes the case that it’s biased and unreliable. When contacted for this article, Bloom declined to participate, but in a 2017 interview he told Vox: “Empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions.”
Dr. Cameron tends to agree, adding that empathy can’t always scale up to address the biggest issues where it’s arguably needed the most.
“It can make you miss the big picture, like disease threats or wars or natural disasters,” Cameron says. It doesn’t amplify in the way you would think—“if more people are suffering, you should presumably feel more empathy. If anything, it kind of reverses. People tend to numb emotionally when the numbers of victims increase in a situation like that.”
Empathy can also be selective, with a preference towards other people who look like us.
Beyond these “glitchy” issues with empathy, as Cameron puts it, there are also potential health risks in certain situations. “There's a ton of discussion, especially in the health circles, about the risks of empathy,” he says. For physicians, nurses, and anyone else in a caregiving role (including parents), empathy can lead to stress and even an inflammatory response.
All that said, Cameron is careful to note that empathy isn’t a bad thing — it’s just not always a good thing either. “It's not purely rosy,” he says. “There are trade-offs people make.”
Of course, it’s one thing to consider questions like these in our current, relatively stable lives. But the pros and cons of empathy become dramatically more pronounced in a post-apocalyptic story like the one depicted in The Last of Us.
Empathy In The Last of Us
Empathy gets complicated when the niceties of society fall away. In an inhospitable world where every decision is life or death, there’s little room to empathize with a stranger who’s probably planning to kill you as soon as you lower your defenses. In its first season, The Last of Usexplores this primarily through its protagonist, Joel, a weary, middle-aged smuggler who’s learned the hard way not to trust anyone. When Joel is hired to accompany Ellie across a zombie-infested America, he starts to open up to the young girl who reminds him of his dead daughter.
It’s a slow process, and for much of their journey, Joel’s instincts trump Ellie’s empathy. Most of the people they meet along the way are even more dangerous than the fungi-infected zombies.
While empathy plays a major role in the story of The Last of Us, it’s also used as a tool by the show’s creators to manipulate the audience. The best example so far is the Season 1 finale. Ellie possesses a super-rare immunity to the zombie-like fungal brain infection, which the survivors think could help them develop a cure. But when Joel and Ellie finally arrive at the medical facility where doctors are working on that cure, we learn that the process would require killing Ellie by removing a piece of her brain. Joel refuses and proceeds to murder the chief doctor (along with a bunch of other people) as he makes his escape.
It’s a moment that audiences have struggled with ever since. On the one hand, Joel is saving Ellie. On the other hand, he’s killing a bunch of innocent people—and potentially dooming the world. The fact that we spent the entire season with Joel and Ellie complicates it even further. As a viewer, you have far more empathy for these two beloved characters than you do for a bunch of faceless people—even if those faceless people have the best possible intentions.
“It's a classic utilitarian trade-off,” Cameron says. “Sacrifice one person for the sake of a greater good.” The fact that Joel chooses to save Ellie makes a lot of sense when you factor in his own shift towards empathy throughout the story. “In psychology, there's a ton of work on how people who are more empathetic are often less utilitarian.”
The Last of Us Season 2 pushes the limits of empathy even further, both for the show’s protagonist and for its audience. Without going into too much detail, its story is meticulously designed to make you hate one character with every fiber of your being, only to flip that around in one instant and demand empathy instead. It’s a whiplash-inducing moment that divided fans when the game, The Last of Us Part II, first debuted in 2020. Based on what we’ve seen so far, the HBO series may push audiences even further.
Empathy Is a Tool
For Paul Bloom, empathy might not be a helpful tool for real-life decision making, but it’s a crucial one when it comes to enjoying a TV show like The Last of Us. “The joy of fiction would disappear if we couldn’t, on some level, empathize with the characters,” Bloom told Vox.
He continued: “In the moral domain, however, empathy leads us astray. We are much better off if we give up on empathy and become rational deliberators motivating by compassion and care for others.”
For Dr. Daryl Cameron, it’s not that simple. Empathy isn’t a net positive or a net negative. It simply exists. How we use it is up to us.
“You can use a tool for good or bad reasons,” he says. “I could use a hammer to put a nail in the wall, or to break the windshield of my car.”
In the world of The Last of Us, empathy is often wielded as a tool to manipulate others or gain their trust. It’s how the survivors of the show’s zombie apocalypse survive and regain their humanity, but it’s also the thing that most frequently puts them at risk. As for those of us watching the HBO series, there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop the show from manipulating your sense of empathy. Just take a beat to notice that it’s happening, and try not to get too worked up when that empathy leads to pain.