You're conflating caring with empathy. The definition of caring is caring about others, yes, but that's a different thing from literally feeling their feelings, which is what the study was talking about.

I think it's possible to be caring without *actually feeling* the same emotions as someone else? Like if a friend of mine's mom died or something, of course I'd be there for them, let them cry on my shoulder, etc, but I wouldn't actually grieve myself necessarily.

Aren't you... sometimes wrong? This is a very self-assured attitude

This would seem to imply that all stereotypes are true

I mostly agree, but you can see where they're coming from. "I let him hit it 'cause he slang cocaine" wouldn't have thrilled the administration at my high school either.

My understanding was that he was actually (apparently) confident, kind, and charming in basically all of his interactions except with women he was interested in. Which I mean doesn't really negate your point.

Hey, they only promise that the fish are plentiful

"if he really meant it , he'd have apologized to her secretly."

The apology was a text message he sent to her directly. Was he supposed to use code?

Really? I mean your 5th grade crush probably doesn't even remember this event. For more or less the same reason you do so strongly: he was 13 and 13 year olds are self-centred. Like there may well be some guy out there who feels the same way about you, and you have no idea.

The correct response would have been to refuse the request with an explanation of why she was so upset with him.

Yeah I don't really get that either. I do think she was kind of immature though.

It's terrible that happened to you, but I'm not sure "everyone should be as unforgiving as my pain has made me" is really a great principle

She absolutely doesn't owe him a dinner, but this stunt was kind of immature. Like she could have just said "no, you really hurt my feelings in high school and I don't want to see you" to the initial invite.

Okay really? Like the note itself is clearly an apology. Analogously, when people tell children "it's rude to point" they mean "don't point" without saying those exact words.

"The world would be better if people more often performed dramatic acts of petty vengeance over things that happened a decade ago"

The mature response would have been neither to ignore him, nor to pull a crazy stunt, but to respond to his invitation immediately with something along the lines of "I don't want to have dinner with you because you tormented me in high school".

The first part says that he thinks she is good looking but nevertheless wasn't trying to sleep with her, not that she isn't good looking.

"He doesn't actually apologize". This is a strange reading of the note - I think the whole thing could reasonable be interpreted as a quite grovelling apology, actually.

Noone is saying that only positive judgments are allowed. The complaint is that these specific negative judgments are unreasonable.

Do you... receive a lot of them?

I know Jesus. Also: "The result is a marriage proposal delivered via the infantile scrawling of a GPS map.". Oh, I'm sorry, did I not walk across Japan in a straight enough line for you? Also the article says he's *known for his GPS art*, so it's not exactly out of left field...