Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy is different from sympathy. Empathy is understanding of what another person is going through, good or bad. Sympathy is where you have been in the other person's shoes and know what they are going though. In the packet we read in class, a group of people did a study about having "blind obedience to authority... to the point of overriding their inner morals" about hurting innocent people. Like when the Nazi's were hurting the Jews. Even though I don't agree with what the Nazi's were doing, I do understand how they could hurt "helpless" people because they were "blinded" by their authority and trusted them. Being able to empathize helps to learn and study history because you can understand they did this because it was different times than today.

empathy