5 Things to Know About Empathy

This week's article summary is 5 Things to Know About Empathy, and it's a follow up to last week's.

We hear a lot about the need for more empathy in the world. At Trinity, we stress to our students how important it is to be empathetic.

However, as you’ll see in the article, empathy is somewhat innate while also requiring much conscious effort.

During Preplanning, I talked about how human beings need and crave to belong but are much less forthcoming when it comes to accepting others. Unfortunately, our go-to instinct is to exclude. 

To resist excluding others, we need to be hyper aware of this predilection to protect ourselves and our group at the expense of others.

As we all know, exclusion at school can happen anywhere—in the classroom, at recess, in the Dining Hall, in the hallways.

Most of the time our students aren’t being bad, immoral, or unethical when they exclude. Rather, they are just letting their innate instincts direct them versus their rationality. 

Being more empathetic and more accepting are skills and habits that must be cultivated, practiced, and reinforced. Over time they can become more automatic. 

In many ways we as teachers—and parents—need to be our students’ conscience in treating others with care, concern, and acceptance. Kids are adept at saying the right things (let’s share, include, and be nice to everyone), yet we also know in application they can be selfish, exclusive, and insensitive. 

We need to be ever vigilant of their behavior to peers and continuously reminder them why being inclusive and accepting is so important. 

Joe

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A tortoise lies on its back, legs waving in distress, until a second tortoise crawls up to turn it over. Millions have watched this scene on YouTube, with many leaving heartfelt comments. “Great sense of solidarity,” says one. “There is hope,” says another.

The viewers are responding to what many interpret as empathy — a sign that even in the animal world, life isn’t just dog-eat-dog. Alas, they’re probably wrong. As one reptile expert observed, the second tortoise’s motives were likelier more sexual than sympathetic.

Consider it a cautionary tale for our times, in which politicians urge us to cultivate more empathy, and scientists churn out volumes of work on the subject. For all its popularity, empathy isn’t nearly as simple as so many blogs and books make it seem.

Several experts to help elucidate this surprisingly elusive concept. Here are the top take-aways:

Empathy is primitive… Evidence of the most basic sort of empathy — emotional contagion, or the sharing of another being’s emotions — has been found in many species, suggesting it’s innate in humans. Abundant evidence exists for emotional contagion in animals. Rats that watch other rats suffer electric shocks show their shared fear by freezing in place. Rats will even avoid pressing a lever dispensing a sugar pellet if it means another rat won’t get shocked, in what scientists suggest is an effort to avoid that shared fear and pain. That vicarious sense of pain is evident in humans as well: Even newborn infants will cry reflexively on hearing another infant cry. Empathy evolved because of all the ways it served our ancestors. The ability to feel others’ feelings helps parents be more sensitive to the needs of their children, increasing the chance that their genes will endure. This basic sort of empathy also inspires us to take care of friends and relatives, encouraging cooperation that helps our tribe survive.

But empathy isn’t automatic: Despite its deep and ancient roots, the quality of human empathy can vary, depending on the context. Some studies have suggested that we get less skillful at empathy as adulthood progress. That may be because empathy demands cognitive skills such as paying attention, processing information and holding that information in memory, all resources that usually become scarcer with age. Older adults can perform equally well in those skills, however, when a topic of conversation is more relevant or pleasant for them — in other words, when they care more, which presumably increases their willingness to invest those resources. The nature of empathy also appears to have changed throughout human history. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that our ability to empathize with others has expanded over the past several centuries, due to trends such as increasing literacy and global commerce that make people more interdependent.

Empathy is often selfish: Empathy itself tends to be selfish, in that it’s usually directed toward those we care about the most — reflecting those evolutionary drives to care for children, relatives and others similar to ourselves. Empathy’s bias toward those nearest, dearest and most familiar is its preference for individuals over groups. Donations from all over the world flooded to refugee aid organizations after the publication of a photo of a drowned Syrian toddler on a Turkish beach. Yet they leveled off after six weeks, even as the media continued to report on the deaths of many other would-be migrants.

Empathy can be learned: Despite the controversies over empathy, most people say they want to be more empathetic. The good news is that they can be. The first step is believing that empathy is a skill that can be improved. People who believe they can grow their empathy will spend more time and effort expending empathy in challenging situations, such as trying to understand someone from a different political party. Through the years, studies have found that readers of fiction tend to be more skilled in empathy. The idea is that reading about other people helps us extend empathy to a wider circle.

Empathy only goes so far: In its simplest form, as emotional contagion, empathy may fail to lead to altruistic action, because altruism often demands some sort of sacrifice. Instead of more research on empathy, we need to see more work on understanding what he says are more powerful moral drivers, such as anger, disgust, contempt, guilt, the joy many people feel in helping others, and solidarity, the sense of agreement among people with a common interest. Amid today’s renewed concern about racial justice, it’s less helpful for a white person to tell a Black person: “I feel your pain,” than to say something like: “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you. I see what’s happening and will not stand for it.”