Why Do We Lack Empathy When Bad Things Happen to Celebs?

At approximately 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint inside her Paris apartment. A concierge in Kardashian’s building was handcuffed, tied up, gagged, and put in a closet before the attackers made their way into the apartment Kardashian keeps in Paris. During the robbery, Kardashian reportedly had a gun held to her head as her hands were tied together and she was locked in a bathroom, during which time the robbers reportedly stole millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry.

The encounter was an unquestionably frightening, violent, and disturbing one — and would have been for whoever had been the victim of such a crime.

And yet, several denizens of the Interwebs still managed to belittle Kardashian and her experience, with Twitter erupting a series of tweets whose content ranged from misogynistic to racist to everything in between.

Many on Twitter, however, were simply not having it, and Kardashian’s friend Chrissy Teigen most of all.

Teigen’s tweets touch on a (not entirely new but still disturbing) cultural phenomenon in which some fail to see celebrities as, well, people. Because it seems that being robbed in your own home at gunpoint, hands bound and then locked in a bathroom while strangers rifle through your personal belongings would be undeniably violating and traumatizing whether you have your own reality show or whether you’ve never so much as heard of Snapchat.

And yet there are people who fail to see Kardashian as someone who might be entitled to empathy and who might experience emotions like fear and be subject to situations that might cause harm, because of the way we are so used to “consuming” her, and all celebrities, as a part of our daily diets.

“Showing empathy can be exhausting for some people, so they will have a tendency to shut down in order to prevent feeling anything,” Stacy Kaiser, licensed psychotherapist, tells Yahoo Beauty.“

“Oftentimes our judgment about celebrities and their lifestyle impacts our ability to have an emotional reaction to them,” Kaiser says. “If we think a celebrity is spoiled, attention-seeking, or if we feel we have been overly inundated by them, that can impact our interest in being empathetic or emotional.”

She explains that for someone like Kardashian, who plays such an ubiquitous role in our pop culture, this effect can be even more pronounced.

“Because we have access to information about celebrities on a regular basis, often times we feel overwhelmed or maxed out on information about them. This oversaturation can make us feel numb, annoyed, or disinterested,” she says.

And forgetting about celebrities’ identities in their private lives, like that of a child’s parent, is particularly dangerous when it comes to empathy resistance.

“Oftentimes their lack of empathy is due to their judgment of the celebrity or their oversaturation of the celebrity in the media and what ends up happening is that they are so focused on that that they forget that a child is involved. It is literally as if a shut-off switch has been hit, and the kindness toward the children and what is going on with them is missed because of the shutdown,” Kaiser notes.

The attacks on Kardashian — because of her wealth, fame, the race of her husband, and past partners — all undermines the fact that Kardashian is an actual living, breathing person in this world who gets up and pees in the morning, just like the rest of us do. And you might not enjoy her public persona, but that doesn’t mean she has any less right to exist as a private person outside that in all the hours and situations that make up her day. And that person is no more “permitted” to be violently attacked than anyone else, even if her rarified status of “famous” seems, in the eyes of public opinion, to shield and deny her this privilege.

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