1.1 Self-awareness and Empathy
Is empathy a skill we can learn?
Differentiating empathy from sympathy is difficult. Through the work of neuro-psychologists and academics, we explore its definition and real-world application. Students can explore their own reactions to situations and judge for themselves the impact employing empathy can have. This is particularly helpful for the reflective project and navigating multiple perspectives. See this page as part of an 'empathy toolbox' for the students' personal development.
This page explores the way empathy and compassion play a part in emotional intelligence and how we can develop them. Whilst all the themes, topics and sub-topics suggested in the guide interlink, this particularly focuses on the topic of 1.1 self-awareness and Emotional Intelligence.
ATL Focus: '94% of employers say that in the workplace, social and emotional skills are as important as academic qualifications'[1]
'Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.
Simon Baron-Cohen, British clinical psychologist, and professor of developmental psychopathology, University of Cambridge[2].
Starting with definitions
- the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
A definition of empathy will only get you so far. Even breaking it down to its stems - from Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’ - leaves us with only a little bit more.What does it really mean to be 'in feeling' with a person, people or situation?noun: compassionSympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it[3].
Developing an understanding of empathy[4]
Discussion questions to support the TEDTALK
(these can be used to pre-empt the talk as a research-based or discussion task or to structure a debate once the talk has been viewed)
1. What do you think of the 'Roddenberry Theory', so named by Zaki: that people are either born empathetic or unempathetic? Or is it a skill that can be learnt or taught?
2. Why is there a stereotype that women are more empathetic than men?
3. Do you think you would be more empathetic if you knew it was a skill you could practise rather than something that you were born with?
4. Can people with great prejudices ever be seen as empathetic?
5. How might you work harder at empathy? How can empathy be seen as what Zaki calls a 'renewable resource?
We're experiencing an empathy shortage, but we can fix it together
Visible thinking activity1. Just listen. After the excerpt, write down any words or phrases that stuck with you.
2. Listen again. This time, draw as you listen. Create an illustration/mindmap/diagram of what empathy means from your perspective.
3. Reflect on what your key takeaway from the excerpt is and how it has helped your understanding of empathy. Now look at your fellow classmates illustrations and note the similarities and differences. Reflect on this method as a thinking tool.
Cognitive Empathy: 'Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person might be thinking or feeling. It need not involve any emotional engagement by the observer'[2]
Emotional Empathy: 'Emotional empathy is the ability to share the feelings of another person, and so to understand that person on a deeper level. It's sometimes called "affective empathy" because it affects or changes you'[2].
Compassionate Empathy/Empathic Concern: 'Compassionate empathy is the most active form of empathy. It involves not only having concern for another person, and sharing their emotional pain, but also taking practical steps to reduce it'[2].
Teacher notesConversations about the different types of empathy and where they are demonstrated in society can vere convesations towards contextual considerations where the students do not just consider individual action but the role of empathy on a wider scale. It can easily move towards discussion of responsibility of the individual for others - considered from a global/local/religious/political/industrial perspective. Be sure to use these sets of activities for students to keep explicit notes in their journal of thinking processes so they can get a clear perspective of their starting point, where they are going, and the impact it has to focus on the specific development of ATL skills.
Perspective 1: Jamil Zaki and 'The War for Kindness'
This source is a passage from an article 'Random Acts of Kindness - how we can learn to care' in The San Francisco Chronicle, 13th June 2019. This can be found in full in Teachers' Notes below with accompanying citation.
'My own research demonstrates that simply believing empathy is a skill, rather than an innate trait, inspires people to try harder at it, even connecting with people of different races or political persuasions. My students worked at kindness and grew as a result. If more of us follow suit, we have a chance to mend our social fabric.
We are in a struggle for our moral lives. It feels right for my students and their generation to lead the way. Whichever future we produce, they will be the ones inhabiting it'.
Jamil Zaki is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and head of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory. He is author of the forthcoming book “The War for Kindness.”
The students’ goals went beyond academics. They were there to remake themselves into more caring people.
I designed this class, “Becoming Kinder,” in response to a hopelessness I see creeping through our culture. For the past 15 years I’ve studied empathy, the ability to share and understand one another’s feelings.
This has often been uplifting work: My colleagues and I have discovered that when individuals feel empathy in abundance, they are more likely to donate to charity, help strangers and avoid bias.
But recently, those of us who study empathy have started to feel like climatologists studying the polar ice. Each year we discover more about how valuable empathy is, only to watch it receding all around us. According to one study, the average American college student in 2009 was less caring than three quarters of students in 1979.
Bedrock social norms have liquified, giving way to extreme voices that savor the other side’s pain. In this bizarre ecosystem, empathy feels useless or dangerous, and people often give up on it. Conservative Israelis report a desire not to empathize with Palestinians. American Democrats and Republicans pay to avoid hearing each other’s opinions.
Inherited wisdom suggests that there’s nothing we can do to reverse these trends. Empathy is a fixed ability, encoded in our genes and hardwired into our brain.
This is all well and good when it comes naturally, like helping a child we love or a friend we admire. But it also means that in situations where we find it difficult to empathize, we’ve reached the limits of our circuitry. As our culture becomes more divided, we have no choice but to sit and watch its emotional foundations crumble.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Empathy is in fact “soft-wired.” Our genes play a role in how much we care, but so do our circumstances. The recent decline in empathy is a sobering reminder of this — but what goes down can also come up.
Researchers have discovered a set of habits that lead people to become more caring. Through the right sort of meditation practice, individuals can become more generous and attuned to others. People who immerse themselves in fiction grow slightly but reliably more empathic. And when individuals make friends from different social groups — moving from “us and them” to “you and I” — they can form deep connections even across bitter cultural divisions.
In other words, empathy is like a muscle, which atrophies or strengthens depending on how we use it.
I designed “Becoming Kinder” as an empathy gym for my students. At the end of each week, I handed them a “kindness challenge,” designed to help them push past their social comfort zones and connect with others in new ways.
Students volunteered at a local shelter and expressed gratitude instead of letting others’ kindness go unnoticed. They acknowledged their own empathic failures and planned what they could do differently the next time.
After each challenge, we reconvened and reflected. What had gone well? Gone poorly? What had surprised them?
The most successful challenges collided with their assumptions. In one, students spent time on someone else. Simple enough, except many of them didn’t feel like they had any time to give. They are drowning in deadlines and responsibilities. Random acts of kindness seem like unaffordable luxuries.
One student, Julio, was buried in a challenging math problem set. Like many Stanford freshmen, he had loaded up on classes in his second quarter and was perpetually worried about falling behind. But his dorm-mate had recently expressed her disappointment that no one had attended the opening of her new play. Julio felt overwhelmed with work, but decided to pick up a ticket and support his friend anyway.
Afterward, he texted her a sort of digital “bravo” and she was moved. So was Julio. Later that night he wrote, “I am now here in the dorm doing the same work I would’ve done in that time either way, just with a much happier spirit ... knowing that I did something special for her.”
Other students, too, were surprised that helping left them renewed, not depleted. This accords with recent data. We live under an epidemic of “time poverty,” constantly squeezed and harried, and people predict that spending time on others will make things worse. For every minute they give to someone else, they’ll be a minute poorer.
The opposite is true. After helping others, individuals experience “time affluence,” or a sense of effectiveness and abundance.
In another challenge, students found someone whose views they disliked, and tried to disagree better. Rather than debating, they were encouraged to figure out how their counterpart had come to hold their view in the first place.
The class was nervous but game. Roommates were waylaid. Facebook-happy uncles were contacted.
A student named Baker found himself in a disagreement with a classmate about political correctness. He began as any of us might, by pushing the other student on their perspective, “looking for pieces I could break down in order to ‘win’ the argument.”
Midway through, his friend pointed this out. Baker realized what was happening, pulled the kindness challenge I’d handed out the day before out of his bag, and asked to reset the conversation. They switched from arguing to storytelling. Baker grew up in a supportive, open-minded home, with a diverse group of friends. He is aware of these privileges and wary of stepping on others’ perspectives.
His peer had grown up in an isolating, competitive setting and everyone learned to keep their feelings to themselves. This student found the openness with which some college students express emotion — especially offense — jarring.
Baker and his friend realized their reaction to campus debates reflected different biographies and vulnerabilities. Though they still don’t agree, they respect and understand each other more deeply.
At our last meeting, the class took stock. Had we become kinder? How would we know?
Students had noticed changes. When they saw classmates or neighbors struggling, they were quicker to stop what they were doing and ask how they could help. Baker, a tutor in computer science, was giving his students more compassionate feedback. Another student, prompted by a challenge, braved a difficult conversation with her sister that brought them closer together.
Students also worked at becoming kinder to themselves. They didn’t judge their friends by their failures; now they tried to apply that same principle to themselves.
Of course, the class wasn’t a true experiment; we had no pre-post tests or control group. But the students’ willingness to grow was an inspiration. Our world makes kindness hard, but these brand-new adults were fighting back. I couldn’t help but see them as also fighting something else.
Gen Z is roundly stereotyped as thin-skinned, selfie-obsessed and callous. But the data are harder to parse than we might imagine. Yes, college students report being less empathic now than they did 40 years ago. But it’s unclear whether this reflects a failing of their generation, or broader trends that make caring difficult for young and old alike.
Other evidence points in the opposite direction. Compared to older generations, Millennials are more concerned with the welfare of minority individuals, the poor and even the planet.
By virtue of taking a class called Becoming Kinder, my students were likely a kind bunch already. But they also understand how urgently we must reclaim empathy. Empathy is an ancient engine for kindness, much older than our species. It is the scaffold on which human culture is built. Our house might be teetering, but we don’t have to let it collapse.
My own research demonstrates that simply believing empathy is a skill, rather than an innate trait, inspires people to try harder at it, even connecting with people of different races or political persuasions. My students worked at kindness and grew as a result. If more of us follow suit, we have a chance to mend our social fabric.
We are in a struggle for our moral lives. It feels right for my students and their generation to lead the way. Whichever future we produce, they will be the ones inhabiting it.
Jamil Zaki is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and head of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory. He is author of the forthcoming book “The War for Kindness.”
Alternative perspectives
Perspective 2: Paul Bloom
Now that we have explored some of the arguments that Jamil Zaki puts forward for the importance of empathy, it might seem that it is a topic where alternative perspectives are not so readily available or indeed believable. I mean, who can argue against being empathetic? However, there are often other viewpoints on a topic like this that do differ even thought the difference might feel quite nuanced. This is good as it shows that perspectives are not black and white in their difference but there is often an overlap and subtle differences.
Paul Bloom is a contemporary of Jamil Zaki and proposes that we should be more compassionate than empathetic. Here he outlines his reasons for finding the concept of empathy tricky:
'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'
Source 1: Paul Bloom:
'My beef is with empathy in particular, with its role in decision making. Empathy has certain design features that do make it positive in certain restricted circumstances. If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple. Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased.
I’m likely to feel empathy toward you, a handsome white guy, but somebody who is repulsive or frightening I don’t feel empathy for. I actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in my culture, who don’t share my skin color, who don’t share my language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens. There’s dozens, probably hundreds, of laboratory experiments looking at empathy and they find that empathy is as biased as can be.
The second problem is the innumeracy. Empathy zooms me in on one but it doesn’t attend to the difference between one and 100 or one and 1,000. It’s because of empathy we often care more about a single person than 100 people or 1,000 people, or we care more about an attractive white girl who went missing than we do a 1,000 starving children who don’t look we do or live where we don’t live.
So it might feel good but empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions'
From an interview with Paul Bloom https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/19/14266230/empathy-morality-ethics-psychology-compassion-paul-bloom updated 16th January 2019
Source 2: Paul Bloom: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
What do you identify as Bloom's main issues with the concept of empathy?
In a personal reflection, consider the following steps:
a) Note down the first thing this excerpt made you think about.
b) Note down if there is anything he states that makes you feel uneasy.
c) Note down any points you would fact check
d) Note down your thoughts on the very last line: So it might feel good but empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions'
Is there a difference between empathy and compassion? Does it matter? Discuss
The sources above have been cut down to give a snap shot of different views. You may want to refer to the full article which is included below with its website reference. Some parts of this have been put in bold as particular soundbites you might want to explore further. Students might find that distinguishing between compassion and empathy as a matter of semantics. They may, however, see a clear distinction.
Conversations can go towards considering this on a local and global contexts and who in society is the main giver and receiver of empathy. Is this misdirected? Where is there a lack of empathy? They also might then consider its role within their career-related subject - this is particularly pertinent when the subject is Business but actually applicable to all career-related areas when considered through the lens of leadership. Simon Sinek's talk as Perspective 3 is particularly poignant in this area and gives students a sense of context.
Article on Paul Bloom who advocates for compassion not empathy
The Case against Empathy
Why this Yale psychologist thinks you should be compassionate, not empathetic.
Who can be against empathy? If our moral intuitions align on anything, is it not on the idea that empathy for other human beings is a good thing? What harm could come from identifying with the thoughts and feelings of our fellow creatures?
According to Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, most of us are completely wrong about empathy. The author of a new book titled Against Empathy, Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.
“I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.” Such is the plea that Bloom makes in the opening pages of the book. What follows is a lucidly argued tract about the hazards of good intentions.
I sat down with Bloom to talk about his case against empathy. To be perfectly transparent, I read Bloom’s book — and entered into this conversation — with a fair degree of skepticism. I’ve long believed empathy to be the basis for human solidarity (for reasons I explain below). So if he’s right, then I’ve been wrong for virtually all of my life.
After reading his book and engaging him in this conversation, I think he’s (mostly) right.
Sean Illing
How do you define empathy? And how is it distinct from, say, compassion or sympathy?
Paul Bloom
It’s a great question because a lot of people freak out when they see my title. I’ve come to realize that people mean different things by empathy. Some people take empathy to mean everything good or moral, or to be kind in some general sense. I’m not against that. There’s another sense of empathy which is narrower and which has to do with understanding other people. And that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. I think that understanding people is important, but it’s not necessarily a force for good. It can be a force for evil as well.
By empathy I mean feeling the feelings of other people. So if you’re in pain and I feel your pain — I am feeling empathy toward you. If you’re being anxious, I pick up your anxiety. If you’re sad and I pick up your sadness, I’m being empathetic. And that’s different from compassion. Compassion means I give your concern weight, I value it. I care about you, but I don’t necessarily pick up your feelings.
A lot of people think this is merely a verbal distinction, that it doesn’t matter that much. But actually there’s a lot of evidence in my book that empathy and compassion activate different parts of the brain. But more importantly, they have different consequences. If I have empathy toward you, it will be painful if you’re suffering. It will be exhausting. It will lead me to avoid you and avoid helping. But if I feel compassion for you, I’ll be invigorated. I’ll be happy and I’ll try to make your life better.
Sean Illing
I take all the points you just made, but empathy still strikes me as a largely positive — or useful — emotion. One could argue that having empathy actually opens the door to more compassion.
Paul Bloom
My beef is with empathy in particular, with its role in decision making. Empathy has certain design features that do make it positive in certain restricted circumstances. If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple. Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased.
I’m likely to feel empathy toward you, a handsome white guy, but somebody who is repulsive or frightening I don’t feel empathy for. I actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in my culture, who don’t share my skin color, who don’t share my language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens. There’s dozens, probably hundreds, of laboratory experiments looking at empathy and they find that empathy is as biased as can be.
The second problem is the innumeracy. Empathy zooms me in on one but it doesn’t attend to the difference between one and 100 or one and 1,000. It’s because of empathy we often care more about a single person than 100 people or 1,000 people, or we care more about an attractive white girl who went missing than we do a 1,000 starving children who don’t look we do or live where we don’t live.
So it might feel good but empathy often leads us to make stupid and unethical decisions.
Sean Illing
Is empathy necessarily a spotlight? Does it have to be focused on one or two people at a time? Is that part of the structure of empathy or is that just the most common manifestation?
Paul Bloom
I think it’s part of what empathy is. Empathy as we’re talking about it is, “I put myself in your shoes.” So how many people can you do that with? Well maybe I could do that with you and some other guy at the same time. You’re feeling different things and I kind of got them both in my head. Can I do it for 10 or 12 or a 100 people? No. Maybe an almighty god could do that, could empathize with every living being. But typically, we zoom in on one.
And so it’s different from morality more generally. When I make a moral judgment, I can take into account, if I do this, 10 people will suffer but a thousand people will benefit. And with health care, gun control, or something like that, you deal with numbers.
But empathy, by its very nature, is like a spotlight.
Sean Illing
So it’s your view that empathy is not only a poor guide for moral reasoning; it actually makes people — and the world — worse?
Paul Bloom
I think empathy is a great for all sorts of things. It’s a wonderful source of pleasure, for instance. The joy of fiction would disappear if we couldn’t, on some level, empathize with the characters. A lot of our intimacy would fade. I think empathy is central to sex. It’s great for all sorts of things.
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.
Sean Illing
Can you give an example of empathy gone wrong in everyday life?
Paul Bloom
I’ll give a controversial one and then a less controversial one. The controversial one has to do with the role of empathy in our criminal justice system, specifically victim statements. In many states, not all, there are victim statements, and these victim statements allow people talk about what happened to them and what it was like when their family member died or when they were assaulted; these often determine sentencing.
I could not imagine a better recipe for bias and unfair sentencing decisions than this. If the victim is an articulate, attractive, white woman, it’s going to be so much more powerful than if the victim is a sullen, African-American man who doesn’t like to talk about his feelings. You suddenly turn the deep questions of how to punish criminals into a question of how much do I feel for this person in front of me? So the bias would be incredibly powerful. So that’s case one.
Case two is about Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims was often framed, particularly early in his campaign, in terms of the suffering of people. He would actually tell these stories. In his rallies, he would tell stories of victims of rape and victims of shooting. He would tell stories of people who lost their jobs. And he was appealing to the empathy of supporters, whose concerns extended mostly to their own tribe.
Three hundred years ago, Adam Smith noted that when you feel empathy for someone who’s been abused or assaulted, it translates into anger and hatred toward those who’ve done the abuse. And I think we see that in the real world all the time. Whenever somebody wants you to kick a bunch of people out of your country or go to war, they’ll tell you a really sad story of some poor person who looks like you and got victimized in some way. Sometimes the story is false, sometimes it’s true, but it is a case in which empathy really goes wrong.
Sean Illing
I find your broad arguments about empathy persuasive, but I think your critique doesn’t hold as well for interpersonal relationships or parent-child dynamics. On some level, aren’t we obliged to care more about the people that we love or the people we call friends? And if that’s true, doesn’t that require something like empathy?
Paul Bloom
This is a great question. I have a whole chapter where I struggle with this. A lot of my book is like, “this is the way it is, man.” But I have a chapter on intimate relationships where I struggle exactly with these questions. It goes off in two directions. So one direction is, “empathy is biased, it plays favorites,” but there are some biases that don’t seem bad. I love my kids a lot more than I love you and I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t think I’m making a moral mistake. And I don’t think it’s a mistake to care more about my friends and my family than about strangers.
I think I’m making a mistake if I care about white people more than dark-skinned people. But friends and family? That seems right. In that sense, the bias of empathy isn’t such a problem. But I think the bias that that reflects is just a more general bias. If you took away empathy from my brain, I’d still love my kids. Because every other emotion is going to go in that direction. In that case, I think empathy’s bias per se isn’t a problem.
The other strand of your question is, the examples we’ve been giving so far have been about policy issues — going to war and victim statements. What about dealing with your kids, with your wife, with your friends? Don’t you want to be empathic to them? And I think the answer to that is mixed. I think the answer is often no.
Suppose you come to me and you’re freaked out, you’re anxious. Do you really want me to get anxious too? Do you want me to empathize with your anxiety, not just understand but feel it too? Presumably not. You want me to be calm. If you’re depressed, you don’t want me to sink into depression. Then you’ve got two problems instead of just one. You want me to sort of be uplifting, cheer you up, put things in perspective.
I think there’s a case for empathy, particularly with positive emotions. If we’re friends and something great has happened to you, you may want me to share your joy, not just be happy that things are well with you but actually share your positive feelings. I see nothing wrong with that.
Sean Illing
You made an interesting distinction there between feeling and understanding, and you alluded to this earlier as well. I wonder if you could unpack that just a bit. Are you saying that to be empathetic is to feel what someone is feeling, and not merely to understand it or relate to it in some way?
Paul Bloom
It’s actually critical to my argument that those are two separate things. Everybody agrees that to be a good person you have to understand other people. You can’t buy someone a birthday present unless you understand them on some level. And you can’t make a kid happy if you don’t understand her. Now as we said in the beginning, understanding is also necessary if you want to ruin somebody’s life, if you want to seduce them or con them or torture them. But understanding still seems to be a necessary condition for doing good. So if it turns out understanding and feeling are essentially entangled, then I can’t argue against empathy. But they aren’t entangled. You can easily find dissociations.
One such disassociation is the competent psychopath. So some psychopaths are not as impressive as you might think. They’re just kind of screwed up people. But some psychopaths are really good with other people. They’re really good with other people because they understand them. They know what you want. They know what you like. They know you better than you know yourself, but they don’t give a shit. They could cause you a lot of pain and not blink.
Sean Illing
Do you see any social utility at all to empathy?
Paul Bloom
I think it leads us to poor moral decisions, but it’s often what people want. There are a lot of cases where people want another person to feel what they feel. Some cases are cases of moral persuasion where I want you to persuade you to help me and to get you to do that I need to get you to feel what I feel. My kid’s in the hospital. I need money for an operation. How would you feel? I try to motivate that as part of persuasion.
Sean Illing
I take your point that empathy is often tribalistic, but must it be it that way or is that what it is for most people most of the time? Consider a Buddhist monk or someone who meditates regularly on compassion. Empathy in these cases is not directed at particular people. I’d argue that empathy, exercised in this way, is an orientation, not an emotion directed at someone or something.
Paul Bloom
Those are two different questions. The monk stuff is interesting. I talk about monks and meditation and Buddhism in my book. They really caution you about empathy. They say to get what you’re talking about, to get where you are, you have to jettison empathy and feel love and compassion, loving kindness. But don’t try to crawl into people’s heads. That will exhaust you. That will cause all sorts of problems.
There’s some evidence that meditative practice and mindfulness meditation makes you into a sweeter person. There’s no definitive evidence of this, but the argument is that mediation makes you more compassionate by diminishing your empathy, so you can help without feeling suffering.
Here’s an analogy I give: Isn’t it unfortunate that people overwhelmingly like delicious and fatty foods? Why can’t they enjoy eating protein powder or spinach day and night? Can you say that it’s impossible to have a person who hates hot fudge sundaes and steaks and enjoys chewing protein powder? Is it impossible to have somebody who isn’t sexually aroused by attractive young people but is instead sexually aroused by virtuous people? Is it impossible there are people who are only angry at global warming but if you chopped off their arm, they wouldn’t mind at all? I don’t know. I don’t think we’re such creatures.
I got into a discussion with a British academic over the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. He says the problem is not enough empathy. I said the problem is too much empathy. He says, but can’t you imagine a person, an Israeli, who feels as much empathy for the Palestinians as he does for his own family? I could imagine it. It’s just not how we typically tend to work.
Sean Illing
I’ve always felt that identification with another’s suffering was the key impetus for human solidarity, and that empathy is a gateway to recognizing the commonality of experience. If we want to make the critical shift from solipsism to collective consciousness, don’t we need something like empathy?
Paul Bloom
I wouldn’t say with confidence that that’s wrong. In some ways, to the extent that empathy can do it, it’s the effect, not the cause. That is, if you put yourself in somebody’s shoes — a person in Africa, a trans individual, a nonhuman, someone who you otherwise wouldn’t relate to, you already have to acknowledge them as a person. It’s not like empathy is this magical thing.
Empathy is a psychological process of imagination. Basically you’re choosing to make that imaginative leap. But that’s the moral choice. Empathy is just the one way you enact it. But then the question is, do you need to enact it? I think about rights revolutions in our times. The dramatic change in attitudes toward gay people and, more recently, the dramatic change in attitudes towards trans people.
I’m not convinced that everybody’s who’s changed or everybody’s who acknowledges these rights, these groups who are otherwise included, does so because they imagine what it’s like. I imagine what it’s like to be a man who wants to have sex with another man and can’t marry. I imagine what it’s like to be somebody with a penis who identifies herself as a woman. Maybe I do that. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I just say, I hear your argument about human rights, and there’s no reason to deprive them.
Sean Illing
Perhaps it’s better to think of empathy as an instrument, not a virtue. It can be used for good or ill, depending on the person in whom it’s exercised. Con men, as you say, are exceedingly empathic, which is why they’re so effective. Someone like the Dalai Lama is similarly empathic, only his empathy is put to much better ends.
Paul Bloom
I think when it comes to moral reasoning, empathy is just a bad idea. It just throws in bias and innumeracy and confusion. But yes, when it comes to moral motivation, empathy can be used as a tool. If I want to get you to help the baby, I can say, look at the baby’s family, I could do that. If I want you to lynch African Americans in the South, I can say, look at these white women who’ve been raped, feel their pain, let’s go! It is a tool.
My point is that there are better and more reliable tools.
Sean Illing
I’ve argued elsewhere that privilege has a way of blinding the privileged, and that that is a big reason why people fail to notice the role of luck in their own life and, more importantly, the role of misfortune in the lives of others. Obviously the political implications of this are terrible. I’ve always understood this to be an argument in defense of empathy.
Am I mistaken?
Paul Bloom
I’ve never thought of it that way. I actually think attempts at empathy might actually make things worse. A friend of mine, another white guy born into privilege, once said very honestly, “I don’t really understand why poor people would do this or do that. If I were in their shoes, I would do this and that and so on.”
You could argue that he’s just not empathizing strong enough; if he fully appreciated what it’s like to lack the right education and so on, perhaps then he’d understand. I wonder if an appreciation of contingency, of blind luck, isn’t something you get through empathy but through a broader understanding.
I’m not entirely sure, but it’s a great question.
Sean Illing
I don’t share this view, but there some who think that you place too much faith in pure reason as a guide to morality. At some point, don’t you have to smuggle value or emotion into this? You can easily reason your way into eugenics or some other repugnant worldview, after all.
Paul Bloom
I make a distinction. I think reason is how we come to conclusions and, more specifically, how we achieve certain ends. What ends you seek can be derived from reason based on some other goals, but they’re ultimately not determined by reason. I could say, I want to make the world a better place and here’s how we should do it. And you could challenge me and say, why do you want to make the world a better place. I’m just going to say, I just do. So reason has to end somewhere.
I’m most interested in cases where rational people share the same goals and then the question is roughly how to get there. And there I think reason is better than emotions.
This story was originally published on January 19, 2017.
EXTEND: Perspective 3: Simon Sinek - Empathy and Leadership
To extend your understanding of empathy and how it applies to the world around you - in other words giving it context - consider these thoughts from Simon Sinek on the importance of empathy within leadership.
It may be particularly important or relevant to your career-related subject or your future aspirations. What sort of leader will you be? Is leadership being 'in charge' or 'in charge of others' well-being'?
ATL skills - Communication and Social Skills.
Self assessment to set up Inquiry
Here you will find a selection of social skills. Consider how you are utilising these social skills throughout your course and outside school. Which ones do you most associate with showing empathy and compassion? For the next week, pick 2 skills that strike you as particularly important and record where and when you have opportunities to develop that skill. Be sure to come back to this table and reflect on your development throughout the course.
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Worksheet for social skills self assessment
Exercise: I used to think ... now I think
The reflection on the use of Social Skills here can also be done in relation to the stimuli material provided. The Harvard Project Zero 'I used to think ... now I think' is particularyl helpful here to recognise change. For more varied responses or as a matter of differentiation, 3-2-1 Bridge activity is also useful. (3 thoughts, 2 questions, 1 analogy created before and after exploration of a topic). There is also crossover to Communication skills here and an example of such skills that may be explored on this topic and its activities are included below.
ATL Social Skills ... Reflection of skills. How many did you actively explore during these exercises? Pick 5 and order them their effectiveness and impact. (Judge this by how much you think you have had your preconceptions challenged today).
Use social media networks effectively to build and develop relationships.
Practise empathy
Delegate and share responsibility for decision making
Help others to succeed
Take responsibility for one’s own actions
Manage and resolve conflict and work collaboratively in teams
Build consensus
Make fair and equitable decisions
Listen actively to other perspectives and ideas
Negotiate effectively
Encourage others to contribute
Exercise leadership and take on a variety of roles within groups
Give and receive meaningful feedback
Advocate for others’ rights and needs
Communication skills
• Negotiate ideas and knowledge with peers and teachers
• Participate in, and contribute to, digital social media networks
• Collaborate with peers and experts using a variety of digital environments and media
• Share ideas with multiple audiences using a variety of digital environments and media
• Read critically and for comprehension
Inquiry: Is being more compassionate and empathetic, a skill that can be developed?
Watch 'Reversing the Golden Rule' video, the first of five 'kindness challenges' from Jamil Zaki's https://www.warforkindness.com/challenges. Record your process in your visual journal[6].
Consider Zaki's reflection questions at the end: 'Reflect on this experience. Were you initially harder on yourself than you would be towards someone close to you? Did reversing the golden rule allow you more self-compassion? How could you apply this strategy during hard times in the future?
Be sure to connect with others over your experience. Feel free to try another 'kindness challenge'. Reflect on whether you think you can become more compassionate and empathetic through practice.
Action: Creative thinking exercise
Your brief: In a pair/group to design an activity/series of activities for fellow students that intends to develop skills in empathy and compassion.
- It should be no longer than the typical length of your lessons (think about the length of time you would pay really good attention for!).
- You can research this topic to get inspiration, but the activity must be your own creation and all sources acknowledged
- Use the model from your Service Learning to design your activity and reflect on its outcomes.
1. Investigation - Research this topic using some of the suggestions here as well as your own research. Remember to record your sources so you are explicit in your academic honesty.
2. Preparation - Decide the structure of your activity, who will be your audience and any materials you need.
3. Action - Deliver your activity. Will it be contained within one lesson or will you demand your participants to complete something over a period of time?
4. Reflection - Reflection here is two fold - you will want your participants to reflect as well as reflect on the reflections of your participants. What did their reflections reveal?
5. Demonstration - Take a step back. What did your activity show you about empathy and compassion? Including your own activity with others' creations, what did they collectively demonstrate and how were they different? What skills did you develop in following this process?
Some inspiration:
https://www.empathylab.uk/empathyday-2020
https://www.empathylab.uk/empathyday-2019
https://www.warforkindness.com/challenges
Empathy in professional contexts
How can everything we have explored so far directly correlate to the working world? Have we ever considered how we learn successfully in school can tell us a lot about successful workplaces that we might want to be part of and/or lead in the future?
'I learn best and understand more from teachers who are more empathetic'. Discuss. (Heatedly?)
'Empathy is the most important leadership skill according to research' by Tracy Brower, a phD sociologist, writing for Forbes magazine 21st September 2021[7].
' You always knew demonstrating empathy is positive for people, but new research demonstrates its importance for everything from innovation to retention. Great leadership requires a fine mix of all kinds of skills to create the conditions for engagement, happiness and performance, and empathy tops the list of what leaders must get right'
Tracy Bower, Forbes magazine, 21st September 2021
Create a visual in your journal that demonstrates what a great leader looks like. What 'fine mix of all kinds of skills' do they have to 'create the conditions for engagement, happiness and performance'?
Group work: Jigsaw reading
There are three excerpts taken from the article. Consider in your group how the author has used evidence to support what they are saying.
There are questions after your excerpt: What types of sources have they used? Are they reliable and how do you know? What claims do they make about the positive impact that empathy can play in the workplace?
Then come back together and piece together your understanding by listening to each other and asking what similarities and differences did you find? If you are a bigger class, groups can be reformed with a member of each group to piece together your understanding from each excerpt.
Teachers notes: opportunities for media literacy development and evaluation
As students explore the concept of empathy from a variety of sources and they consider the approach they take in their own life, it is also important to make the leap to how this all applies to the professional world. It is difficult for any of us to envisage the workplace that students will move into but what we can do is consider the non-negotiable ideas and skills that we want to take with us, that transcend trends and quick fixes. Zaki's idea that empathy is a muscle - that it is a skill that can be practised and developed - is one such area.
The article explored here contains a lot of data to back up research. Prior to evaluating Brower's ideas, students can explore the sources, methodology and evidence used as a real opportunity in fact-checking and exercising their media literacy skills. After this, students can also debate the implications and impact of Brower's findings.
Teacher notes: Full article
'Empathy is the most important leadership skill according to research' by Tracy Brower, a phD sociologist, writing for Forbes magazine 21st September 2021.
Empathy has always been a critical skill for leaders, but it is taking on a new level of meaning and priority. Far from a soft approach it can drive significant business results.
You always knew demonstrating empathy is positive for people, but new research demonstrates its importance for everything from innovation to retention. Great leadership requires a fine mix of all kinds of skills to create the conditions for engagement, happiness and performance, and empathy tops the list of what leaders must get right.
The Effects of Stress
The reason empathy is so necessary is that people are experiencing multiple kinds of stress, and data suggests it is affected by the pandemic—and the ways our lives and our work have been turned upside down.
- Mental Health. A global study by Qualtrics found 42% of people have experienced a decline in mental health. Specifically, 67% of people are experiencing increases in stress while 57% have increased anxiety, and 54% are emotionally exhausted. 53% of people are sad, 50% are irritable, 28% are having trouble concentrating, 20% are taking longer to finish tasks, 15% are having trouble thinking and 12% are challenged to juggle their responsibilities.
- Personal Lives. A study in Occupational Health Science found our sleep is compromised when we feel stressed at work. Research at the University of Illinois found when employees receive rude emails at work, they tend to experience negativity and spillover into their personal lives and particularly with their partners. In addition, a study at Carleton University found when people experience incivility at work, they tend to feel less capable in their parenting.
- Performance, Turnover and Customer Experience. A study published in the Academy of Management Journal found when people are on the receiving end of rudeness at work, their performance suffers and they are less likely to help others. And a new study at Georgetown University found workplace incivility is rising and the effects are extensive, including reduced performance and collaboration, deteriorating customer experiences and increased turnover.
Empathy Contributes to Positive Outcomes
But as we go through tough times, struggle with burnout or find it challenging to find happiness at work, empathy can be a powerful antidote and contribute to positive experiences for individuals and teams. A new study of 889 employees by Catalyst found empathy has some significant constructive effects:
- Innovation. When people reported their leaders were empathetic, they were more likely to report they were able to be innovative—61% of employees compared to only 13% of employees with less empathetic leaders.
- Engagement. 76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged compared with only 32% who experienced less empathy.
- Retention. 57% of white women and 62% of women of color said they were unlikely to think of leaving their companies when they felt their life circumstances were respected and valued by their companies. However, when they didn’t feel that level of value or respect for their life circumstances, only 14% and 30% of white women and women of color respectively said they were unlikely to consider leaving.
- Inclusivity. 50% of people with empathetic leaders reported their workplace was inclusive, compared with only 17% of those with less empathetic leadership.
- Work-Life. When people felt their leaders were more empathetic, 86% reported they are able to navigate the demands of their work and life—successfully juggling their personal, family and work obligations. This is compared with 60% of those who perceived less empathy.
- Cooperation is also a factor. According to a study published in Evolutionary Biology, when empathy was introduced into decision making, it increased cooperation and even caused people to be more empathetic. Empathy fostered more empathy.
- Mental health. The study by Qualtrics found when leaders were perceived as more empathetic, people reported greater levels of mental health.
Wired for Empathy
In addition, empathy seems to be inborn. In a study by Lund University, children as young as two demonstrated an appreciation that others hold different perspectives than their own. And research at the University of Virginia found when people saw their friends experiencing threats, they experienced activity in the same part of their brain which was affected when they were personally threatened. People felt for their friends and teammates as deeply as they felt for themselves. All of this makes empathy an important part of our human condition—at work and in our personal lives.
Leading with Empathy
Leaders can demonstrate empathy in two ways. First, they can consider someone else’s thoughts through cognitive empathy (“If I were in his/her position, what would I be thinking right now?”). Leaders can also focus on a person’s feelings using emotional empathy (“Being in his/her position would make me feel ___”). But leaders will be most successful not just when they personally consider others, but when they express their concerns and inquire about challenges directly, and then listen to employees’ responses.
Leaders don’t have to be experts in mental health in order to demonstrate they care and are paying attention. It’s enough to check in, ask questions and take cues from the employee about how much they want to share. Leaders can also be educated about the company’s supports for mental health so they can provide information about resources to additional help.
Great leadership also requires action. One leader likes to say, “You’re behaving so loudly, I can hardly hear what you’re saying.” People will trust leaders and feel a greater sense of engagement and commitment when there is alignment between what the leader says and does. All that understanding of someone else’s situation should turn into compassion and action. Empathy in action is understanding an employee’s struggles and offering to help. It is appreciating a person’s point of view and engaging in a healthy debate that builds to a better solution. It is considering a team member’s perspectives and making a new recommendation that helps achieve greater success. As the popular saying goes, people may not remember what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel.
In Sum
Empathy contributes to positive relationships and organizational cultures and it also drives results. Empathy may not be a brand new skill, but it has a new level of importance and the fresh research makes it especially clear how empathy is the leadership competency to develop and demonstrate now and in the future of work.