Political orientation and empathic spheres
Whenever I read studies about empathy and political orientation, I find the choice of language a bit odd.
Studies will point out that conservatives have a smaller emphatic sphere (favouring people closer to them, or smaller groups etc), but then go on to say that conservatives do not necessarily have less empathy overall, they just "focus it differently". But this seems dishonest: to me a homophobe is less empathic than someone who isn't. It seems wrong to equate the emphatic capacity of a homophobe and a LGBT-supporting person, just because the homophobe really empathizes with straight people.
These studies also bend over backwards in their wording (and I see people like Jonathan Haidt doing this as well), to say that all political groups have biases against political opponents, and that all groups are equally guilty of not empathizing with outsiders. But surely a group that extends empathy outward (across cultures, to animals, the environment etc), but hates group X who hate the aforementioned subgroups, isn't behaving the same as group X. This seems like a dishonest comparison to me (surely intolerance of intolerance doesn't make a tolerant person as intolerant as an intolerant person).
It just feels like studies, or the journalistic reporting of these studies, are bending over backwards not to offend assholes.