Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others

MY PERSONAL INTRODUCTION to the need to study empathy began back in August 2005, although I did not know that at the time. I had the TV news on constantly, watching the horror of Hurricane Katrina from thousands of miles away. The weather maps were interspersed with images of the storm and of residents trying to survive the hurricane. I watched from the very dry comfort of my Arizona home. I had never lived in a hurricane region, and after ten years of living in the desert, rain had become more of a miracle than a danger. I was glued to my TV watching sheets of rain come down in torrents, wind blowing trees horizontal to the ground, and rushing water turning roads into rivers. But what really captivated me was the human drama of survival, and I kept thinking how awful it would be to face such a sudden life-threatening danger. I immediately wondered about what I would do. I hoped I would be brave and help others show empathy and compassion and share what food and water I had. But I honestly thought “hell no, I would do anything I needed to do to survive.”

Then came the reports of looting and the commentary on how lawless the people of New Orleans had become. I remember images of people grabbing groceries and bottles of water, stereos and clothing. The pundits condemned these people as ransackers and law breakers. Yet at that moment, I felt certain that I would be among them, taking anything I could. When the stories came in of people helping others, sharing what little water or canned food they had, I was heartened by this generosity and embarrassed by my own first reaction to want to grab whatever I could to survive. At the time I thought there was something wrong with this reaction, that I was not all that compassionate or concerned about the welfare of others. Over the years I have come to understand what I was experiencing. I was having an intense physiological reaction, the drive to survive, while I was watching the events in New Orleans. I later learned that this feeling can go on to be a foundation of empathy but does not guarantee it.

Fast forward to today. We can see national and world events instantaneously. The news, with pictures and voices from catastrophic events, is available 24/7 on our TVs, smartphones, and computers. We have watched multiple shootings, such as those taking place at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and during an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas. We have also watched people mowed down by a truck driving through crowds out to celebrate a national holiday in Nice, France. Sometimes events are posted on social media before the police are even on the scene. The young people hiding in classrooms at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, recorded and transmitted events live from their smartphones while shots were being fired by the gunman. We feel the horror and pain literally in real time. How do we make sense of our reactions to such events? Are we compassionate or numb? We might also wonder, what could possibly lead a person to commit such heinous crimes, to kill mercilessly? Where is their empathy? As with my struggle to understand my reactions to Hurricane Katrina, I have found studying empathy helps me better understand what may lie beneath some of these deeply disturbing behaviors that suggest a lack of empathy.

Sometimes empathy is confused with related emotions, such as sympathy, compassion, pity, or concern. But as I will explain later in this chapter, these emotions might involve empathy but are not the same.

I define empathy as a broad overarching concept that includes two parts: interpersonal empathy and social empathy. Let’s start with the narrower application, that of interpersonal empathy. This is the expression of empathy between individuals or in small group settings. It is the most common use of the term “empathy” in research and popular usage. This view of empathy is what you have probably encountered and used in your own life. “I feel your pain” may sound trite, but when someone else understands what you are feeling or what you are going through, you feel “heard” and validated. That is what we know as interpersonal empathy. Interpersonal empathy includes three distinct parts: mirroring the physiological actions of another, taking the other’s perspective, and while doing so remembering that the experience belongs to the other and is not our own.2 Neuroscientists who map brain activity regard interpersonal empathy as the activation of neural circuits in the brain that allow us to do these three things: share another’s actions and feelings physically and mentally, process those inputs so we can understand what the other person is experiencing, and at the same time keep our own feelings under control.³

I have spent my professional career studying public policy. My work includes analyzing the laws and social welfare programs of our country to see what we do or do not do as a nation that supports people, neglects people, or even hurts people. Throughout my decades of study, I have been struck by the contrast in those policies. We as a nation have had laws that institutionalized treatment of people that demonstrated a lack of empathy, like slavery and segregation. We have also passed laws that have affirmed empathy through the abolition of slavery and promotion of civil rights. Over the years I have asked myself, why at times do we develop policies that seem to lack empathy, while at other times we create policies sensitive to the needs of others? My attempt to answer this question led me to develop the concept of social empathy.

Social empathy is the broader application of interpersonal empathy. It is the ability to understand people and other social groups by perceiving and experiencing their life situations. To do so involves learning about and understanding the historical context of group experiences, including the structural inequalities that have shaped communities. Going back to the example of Hurricane Katrina, using social empathy would require going beyond experiencing what people were going through in those first hours of the crisis. In the days following the hurricane, investigative reporting and continued news coverage helped us to learn about who lived in the flooded neighborhoods, how neglect in the upkeep of the levees contributed to the problem, and how this neglect impacted most severely those who lived in the areas of New Orleans that were poorest and were often not included in planning around emergencies. We also learned that those poor areas were almost entirely made up of African American communities, many of whom were the descendants of slaves and who experienced ongoing discrimination and segregation. These insights helped me to expand my feelings of interpersonal empathy to then experience social empathy, although at the time I did not have the concept of social empathy fully developed.

A full experience of social empathy would have taken me beyond those first moments of viscerally sharing the struggle for survival, and even beyond the later feelings of compassion and concern. Social empathy would have carried me to a place of deeper understanding of what happened. It would have helped me to see the historical conditions that made the immediate moments what they were. Using a socially empathic view of people’s experiences can create the type of insight that makes us want to change social conditions, to move us toward building a better world.

In this way, empathy became known as the term that described the psychological experience of inner imitation of another person while seeing the actions or experiences of that other person. Once this term had a place in psychology, it was used by later psychologists such as Heinz Kohut and Carl Rogers to influence therapeutic practice. Psychotherapists began to use empathy to describe ways to understand what their clients were truly feeling. However, precise and consistent definitions of empathy were lacking. For example, during the 1970s, more than twenty different definitions of empathy could be found in counseling literature that explored how to be more empathic in therapeutic practice.⁵

Through the 1980s and 1990s, empathy was primarily discussed and researched among social and developmental psychologists. Empathy research was conducted primarily through two avenues: to observe it in people’s behaviors, typically in a lab setting, or to ask people to describe their behaviors and then determine if those self-reports showed empathy. Although both methods have weaknesses (just because a person acts a certain way in a laboratory does not mean those same actions will happen out in the real world, and self-descriptions of our behaviors can be biased), a lot of helpful information was gathered about empathy between people. We know this to be the case because of major scientific breakthroughs that came in the early 2000s with the advent of cognitive neuroscience, which verified through brain scans and other modern technologies many of the earlier psychology findings. Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the neural circuits or brain activity behind psychological processes. Over the past fifteen years, cognitive neuroscientists have applied their work on mapping brain activity to learning about the physiological and psychological experiences of being empathic.

Much of the discussion in this book about empathy is built on what we now know through the contributions of cognitive neuroscience. But long before there were brain scans, there were efforts to understand what others were thinking and feeling. For example, religious references to putting ourselves in the place of others can be found across most of today’s modern religions, originally dating back thousands of years. One of the famous biblical quotes admonishing us to think about others is “love thy neighbor as thyself,” which can be found in both the Old and New Testaments (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). This command could involve parts of empathy, such as taking another person’s perspective, but it could also be interpreted as caring and compassion for others in ways that you would like to be cared for yourself. However, such a position may not require you to actually understand what it is that the other person feels. Closer to empathy are the passages “the stranger that dwells with you shall be unto you as the homeborn among you” (Leviticus 19:34) and “do unto others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12 and in Luke 6:31) suggesting greater imagining of being in the place of another. This perspective of reciprocity in how we deal with others is often referred to as the “Golden Rule” and can be found in many religions. The prophet Muhammad taught “as you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them” (Kitab al-Kafi, vol. 2, p. 146). Often the Golden Rule is found in the negative, that is, to take care not to treat others in ways you would not like to be treated. This view is sometimes referred to as the “Silver Rule.” Confucius included in his philosophical and religious writings the admonition to “never do to others what you would not like them to do to you” (The Analects of Confucius, 6:28). Hindu sacred literature includes the command “let no one do to another that which would be repugnant to oneself” (Mahabharata, bk. 5, ch. 49, v. 57). The Jewish teacher and philosopher Hillel taught “what is hateful to you do not do to others” (Talmud Shabbat 31a).

In light of these writings and teachings, it is surprising that empathic behavior has been absent in so much of human history! Thousands of years of violence across all parts of the world show us that people often treat others in ways that, given the choice, no one would choose to be treated.6 Those who commit torture, genocide, and enslavement rarely, if ever, see themselves in the same positions as their victims. So how does the long history of religious and philosophical attunement with empathy square with the reality of people’s behaviors? Maybe empathy is a goal to be attained, an ability to be worked for. While I think this is partially true, it is also much more complicated. Analyzing the biology, psychology, and social aspects of empathy can help us to understand the apparent disconnect between the Golden Rule, the Silver Rule, and the reality of human history.

Thus, this book is not only a presentation of social empathy as a tool for building a better world but also the story of the journey of human evolution to become empathic with those close to us, with those who are strangers, and even with those who we may consider our enemies. It is not an easy journey, and neither is it a straight line. But today we have more tools to understand empathy, and building on that understanding, we can enhance interpersonal and social empathy within and between people.

Although the term is relatively new, “empathy” is actually a key part of human evolution. The noted primatologist Frans de Waal, who has spent decades studying social relations among primates, considers empathy the key to our survival and social living.7 Empathic ability helps us to read others. Imagine being startled by the scream of someone shouting “fire” and seeing that person running. Even if you did not understand the word “fire,” you would likely have a physical reaction to want to run yourself, not thinking about where to go, just mimicking the actions of the other. This is a completely understandable reaction and might be instrumental in saving your life. In early human life, the surrounding world was dangerous, and not heeding the warnings of others would likely have ended in death. There are also more subtle ways that empathy helps with our survival. Remember being scared as a child and having a parent or other adult “read” the fear in your face? When that person responded with soothing words and maybe a hug, the fear passed. You were lucky to have an adult in your life who understood what you were experiencing enough to respond appropriately.

The human infant is completely dependent on other human beings for survival. In fact, this dependence lasts for years, far longer than among most other species. The survival of human young relies most on the ability of caretakers to “read” their needs. Is the child crying because she is hungry? If her cries are interpreted correctly, then the child gets fed and grows. If they are not, she could starve. And that would mean that baby, and likely any other genetic offspring of the caretaker who lacked the ability to read the needs of that baby, would not survive. This relationship is the basis for the survival of so many species. As de Waal writes, “When pups, cubs, calves, or babies are cold, hungry, or in danger, their mother needs to react instantaneously. There must have been incredible selection pressure on this sensitivity: Females who failed to respond never propagated their genes.”8 Thus, the earliest need to be understood by others is part of our survival.

This selection pressure was first articulated by Charles Darwin, considered the father of the science of evolution. Because an infant cannot do anything to care for her- or himself, there is total dependence on adult humans for all things necessary to live. The most important concerns are eating and safety; an infant cannot take care of those needs without humans who are older and have access to resources. Of course, this physiological caretaking is critical for babies to survive, but besides laying the foundation for physical life, this care can be the beginning of babies’ learning the emotional parts of life. We have already talked about the emotional attachment that can occur through the caretaking process. Darwin sees other emotional parts of life that emanate from our earliest survival.⁹ From a physical perspective, we see two basic skills that had to be mastered for species survival: cooperation and competition.¹⁰ Gathering and hunting are more successful when done in groups, as is protection from the elements, predators, and enemies. The demands for survival encourage such cooperation. At the same time, competition to secure enough for you, your family, and the group that you belong to emerges when there is a real or perceived shortage of those items necessary for survival.

Darwin viewed our struggles between cooperation and competition as similar to animals in a basic sense, but he viewed human beings as having additional abilities that made the survival process much more sophisticated. Darwin is most famous for his assessment of evolution as being based on “survival of the fittest,” which describes the process of natural selection in which those who are most likely to reproduce and continue the species are those most likely to survive. This reflects de Waal’s point that reproduction would not have happened for those caretakers who did not respond to their offspring’s needs. For years I have heard the comment “survival of the fittest” as a way of explaining why some people are successful and others are not. In fact, many have tried to apply Darwin’s survival of the fittest to humans to explain why some groups are interpreted to be superior to others based on the success of their lives. Success today is often measured in resources. Explaining survival of the fittest as the reason why some people are rich and others are poor may persist but ignores so many other variables (more on that later, but do think about where people start and what opportunities and advantages come with birth to the right parents—survival of those who start ahead may be more accurate). Social survival of the fittest is not an accurate application of Darwin. Darwin regarded the difference between human beings and animals as the ability to have a moral sense and conscience. Darwin considered our human capacity to develop intellectual powers as the pathway to morality. To balance our social instincts, which can include competition, with our need to be connected to others, we human beings set up rules and codes that help us survive. A society cannot exist when competition runs rampant. Cooperation requires some form of referee to be sure that groups work well enough together to ensure meeting their basic needs for survival. That referee takes the form of our moral and legal codes. For human beings, Darwin felt that our social instincts, our desire to be with others, our intellectual development, and our power of shared language combine to lead us to act for the public good. He felt human beings have an “instinctive sympathy.”11 Although urges to fulfill one’s own needs competed with this instinctive sympathy, Darwin believed that “the social instincts—the prime principle of man’s¹² moral constitution—with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;’ and this lies at the foundation of morality.”¹³ Finding this quote surprised me. Darwin actually believed that we are naturally empathic and he embraced the Golden Rule! Darwin helps us to see an evolutionary path from basic instinctual survival to advanced moral thinking and a built-in capacity for treating others with understanding.

This evolutionary urge for empathy is based in large part on an unconscious innate reaction called “mirroring.” Mirroring is a physiological ability to mimic the actions or emotions of others. The neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni has written a great deal on mirroring and how this ability connects us to other people.¹⁴ This ability is foundational to empathy. Most of us know what mirroring is like. How many times have you seen someone yawn and then, without any conscious thought or plan, you yawn as well? We say that yawning is “contagious,” and in a sense, it is.

Mirroring describes what happens in our brain when we see an action being done by someone else and our brain activity is almost identical to what it would be if we were actually performing the action. Our brain mirrors what it is seeing. Is mirroring empathy? No. It can help us to experience what another person is experiencing, but it does not tell us what the other’s actions mean or confirm exactly what the other person is feeling. Mirroring is important because it can be the first step in experiencing empathy.

Although by itself mirroring is not the full experience of empathy, it appears to be quite important to us. Think about a time when you shared your emotions with a friend—maybe you were excited and happy because you got a promotion or sad and distraught because you found out about the death of a close relative. In both cases, you would be reassured if your friend reflected back to you your same emotions—happy for you with the promotion or sad with you for your loss. These are socially appropriate forms of mirroring. In fact, research shows that mirroring enhances people’s positive social behaviors, both for the giver and for the receiver of mirroring. In a study done in the Netherlands, researchers set up a situation in the center of a busy city in which they approached strangers passing by and asked for help with directions to the local train station.15 Two different conditions were used, one in which the researchers imitated the body postures, facial expressions, and verbal instructions of the passerby and one in which the researchers simply listened without any mirroring. The results were that those who were mimicked while being randomly stopped on the street and asked for directions were more likely to help the researcher and, unprompted, actually go out of their way to accompany the researcher in the direction of the train station. This field experiment confirmed earlier studies done in laboratory situations in which participants engaged in unrelated activities were more likely to help in small tasks or give charitable donations if the researcher had mirrored the posture and movements of the participants.¹⁶

These findings should not surprise us. Who wants to share something important with someone else and have them not react at all or react in inappropriate ways? When I am upset and crying, I do not want a friend to laugh at me; it not only feels disconnected, it makes me feel unheard and misunderstood. Thus, mirroring meets another important human need: social connection. Think about a time in your life when you might have been happy or sad and someone you were with seemed to misunderstand how you were feeling. What did that feel like? It might have made you feel angry or upset, and it likely made you feel unimportant. Or it may have made you want to distance yourself from that person. After all, if the person could not connect with what you were really feeling, what was the point of continuing to interact? Now imagine that situation for a child with his or her adult caretakers. What happens if so much of the time when the child is happy, scared, or feeling some emotion, no one reads those feelings correctly? The child might get enough food to eat and live safely enough to survive, but doing so without the emotional connection of someone understanding what the child is feeling can leave the child without an emotional attachment. And what we know about emotional attachment is that it builds a sense of security, which is critical to connecting with others.

The link between empathy and attachment starts at birth. Perhaps the most famous early researcher on attachment among children was the British psychologist Sir John Bowlby.17 His early life experience of being raised by nannies and separated from his parents during World War I contributed to his interest in child development, particularly how children bond with their caretakers. His work is credited with recognizing that children need connections with their caretakers beyond being fed and sheltered; they need a sense of security and safety. He argued that a child has a better chance at survival and healthy social relations if early life includes a sense of security. Others have built on this concept. The current perspective on attachment is that when we feel secure, it is easier to consider the feelings of others.¹⁸ And when we can consider the feelings of others, we can be empathic. It is circular—without emotional attachment to caregivers at a young age, it is more difficult to do that with others as a person ages. And the cycle continues because those who are empathic are better able to respond to the needs of others, who then feel safe and secure because their needs are met. This is an important cycle to remember, as it comes up in so many examples in which empathy is either promoted or lacking. It is the cycle of “empathy begets empathy”—when we express our empathy, others feel heard and understood, and they in turn feel more inclined to hear and understand others. Consequently, for children, such empathy helps them to develop their own empathy. I do want to note, though, that it is not a guaranteed process. Being cared for and about does enhance empathic abilities, but there are so many variables that contribute to empathy that we cannot say it is a definite outcome. Later in the book you will find conditions that counter early attachment and can block empathy. But for now, it is fair to say that, in general, it is more likely that a child whose needs are met by an empathic caregiver will him- or herself grow up with empathic abilities.

There is no one exact place in the brain nor one specific set of brain actions that represent empathy. Numerous brain regions and neurological actions are involved when people express empathy.19 Maybe someday there will be research that identifies the exact brain action that is empathy, but I doubt it. After studying the neuroscience literature that has blossomed over the past fifteen years, I am convinced that interpersonal empathy is the collection of five different but overlapping abilities, and that social empathy builds on those with two additional abilities. These seven abilities, or components, are what neurologically come together to create the full scope of empathy, which includes interpersonal and social connections. These components are not fixed and exact. The strength or depth of each may vary by person or situation and fluctuate and change. But with the research we have, it is pretty convincing that combining these physiological and psychological actions can result in empathy. The following five behaviors, referred to as components, come together to help us express interpersonal empathy: affective response, affective mentalizing, self-other awareness, perspective-taking, and emotion regulation. When two other components are added, contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking, we can expand our insights to include social empathy.

I have sketched out the five components of interpersonal empathy in figure 1.1. All the arrows are meant to show this is a dynamic process with brain activity moving among abilities and shifting in emphasis depending on the situation. The five interpersonal empathy components (affective response, affective mentalizing, self-other awareness, perspective-taking, and emotion regulation) can vary in intensity and may be differently developed or triggered at various times. Together they give us a complete sense of interpersonal empathy. However, to this point in our knowledge about empathy, it is difficult to say how much of or how deeply each component is triggered to result in the best “recipe” for engaging in interpersonal empathy. But our research suggests that each is important and contributes to the full extent of interpersonal empathy. Each component is related to the others. When all five are engaged, we see the full scope of interpersonal empathy. That does not mean we are not interpersonally empathic without all five components at full speed, but to be able to take in the experiences of others most fully, we need them all. Some situations will demand stronger engagement, while other situations will depend on only a few of the components. In figure 1.2 I have added the two components that complement interpersonal empathy and that reflect social empathy, contextual understanding, and macro perspective-taking. These additional components require that we expand our abilities to take in information about others that includes their differing life situations, the history of their life experiences, and the history of the groups to which they belong. What is valuable about understanding the full scope of empathy as the expression of these seven components is that we can track and monitor our own experience of connecting to others. We can also teach about empathy in understandable ways, component by component.

Suddenly an ambulance siren wails and we jump; we see a baby fall and we pick him up; we turn a corner and smell fresh bread baking. All of these signals touch us through our senses, such as our hearing, sight, or smell. We immediately have a reaction, and it is initially unconscious—we are unaware. This reaction is referred to as affective response.²⁰ Sometimes there is no actual physical stimulus like a sound or smell, but we have an affective response anyway. This is because we can imagine the sound or smell. Think back to the earlier description of a hammer hitting a hand—that description might have invoked your own feeling of being hit by a hammer. When we are thinking about an experience or told about another person’s experience, we can go into affective mentalizing. Affective mentalizing can take place without direct experience. This is what happens when we read a good book. We enter into the character’s situation and develop a mental image of the experience. We might even have physiological reactions that mirror the imagined affect. Like affective response, affective mentalizing is neurologically observable.²¹ Much of what happens with these two components is unconscious; we are not aware that our brain is firing neurons that imitate the action we are seeing or imagining.

Affective mentalizing is a bridge between affective experiences and cognitive reasoning, the connection between what we might think about while we are experiencing feelings or sensations. Take the example of hearing an ambulance siren. When I lived in a big city, I heard sirens often and got to a point where the sound did not even register in my conscious mind. When I moved to a small town, it was rare that I heard a siren. When one went off, I consciously tuned in to hear if it was getting louder and closer and would visualize a vehicle racing off with lights flashing. What is the difference? Awareness of context. The circumstances surrounding the affective response you are unconsciously processing can cause you to shift into cognitive or conscious thinking. So too are the next three components engaged more consciously.

Why is self-other awareness so important to empathy? It keeps us from becoming overwhelmed or distracted by our own emotions. It helps us to shift our focus away from our own feelings to consider others. In fact there is a term for the lack of self-other awareness: “emotional contagion.”²³ Emotional contagion is a feeling that we “catch” from others. Remember in grade school when someone started giggling and then others “caught” it and started giggling too? You may not have known what was going on, but you were swept up with the emotions of others. And it can be awfully hard to stop, even when you know that there is no reason to be giggling. There is a dark side to emotional contagion; when it happens in big groups and includes anger, we refer to it as “mob mentality”: an emotional response spreads through a crowd of people, many of whom do not even consciously understand the reason for their behaviors. Being able to distinguish between ourselves and others when there is an external stimulus is the difference between empathy and emotional contagion. But self-other awareness is not enough to move us from having an affective response to having empathy.

Keeping our self-other awareness strong while figuring out what is happening to another person requires an additional skill: perspective-taking.24 We often refer to perspective-taking as “walking a mile in another’s shoes.” This means we can imagine what it would be like to be in the situation of another person. It is a form of mentally toggling back and forth between being in someone else’s situation and being in your own. However, we may think we are taking the perspective of someone else, but without strong self-other awareness, we process the experience as what it means to ourselves and not to the other person. The difference here is very important. We might think we are empathic, but instead we are viewing things from our own point of view.

I find a common example of this when I teach students about people receiving public assistance, often referred to as people on welfare.²⁵ I often hear points like this: “Why don’t they get a job? I know working at a fast food restaurant is not ideal, but I do after school, so why can’t they? That’s the way out of poverty.” This is what I would call weak perspective-taking. We start with walking in another’s shoes, but then there is a switch. We think “what would I do if I were me” and not “what would I do if I were you.” This is a difficult distinction to make. It may be the hardest part of empathy. There is no way that we can know everything about another person, especially a stranger. It is very understandable to use our own experiences when imagining being in a different situation, but that is not empathy. If it is true that we can never fully know about the situation and experiences of another person, how can we ever be empathic? We can, but it takes work.

Let’s go back to the example of people receiving welfare. Students who have never lived the life of someone on public assistance may be at a loss to understand what choices there are to make and what forces there are that block those choices. This is where social empathy comes in. The two components of social empathy help us overcome the tendency to think about what might fit for us in a given situation rather than what might fit for the other person. But before we get to those components, there is one more interpersonal empathy component that makes all the others work: emotion regulation.

In figure 1.1 emotion regulation is out to the side with arrows pointing in all directions. That is because emotion regulation tempers all the other components. It is the calmness or balance that we achieve when entering the world of emotions. Rather than getting swept up with emotions, as with emotional contagion, we still feel emotions, maybe even very strongly, but we don’t get swept away by our emotions. We are able to take control and adapt our feelings appropriately to whatever is happening around us. For example, if someone says something to make us angry, we may want to hit that person, but with effort we do not. The reason emotion regulation is so important is that when we stay in control of our feelings, we are more likely to be empathic.²⁶

Getting all these components to engage with balance is not easy. Doing so and taking it beyond our individual world is even harder. When we do that, we engage in social empathy. To be empathic on a broader scale, we need to include two more components, gaining contextual knowledge and moving our perspective-taking skills to a broader level.

Social empathy is broader than interpersonal empathy. We live in a complicated social world. The numerous events and people we come into contact with daily present a lot of information to process, which it turns out can impact our experience of empathy.27 Social empathy has us look at context so we can fully understand the lived experiences of groups different from our own. And context includes the historical events that shaped the group and contributed to its members’ identities today. It is especially important to recognize the challenges and obstacles that other groups have faced. When we talk about “walking in another’s shoes” from a social empathy perspective, that means trying to fully comprehend what came before that may have influenced the way groups behave today. For example, in the United States, we need to ask what impact the experience of slavery may have had on the way African Americans are treated or see our society today. This is not easy. It may require looking at historical events we would rather not review because of the discomfort it may bring. We may also feel that the past is long ago, and events that happened to people who lived decades or centuries ago is not part of today’s world. It requires both the desire and the interest to learn about people who are different. The resistance to do this can be great, due in part to our evolutionary tribal fear of others, which we will talk about more in depth in chapter 3.

If we can master contextual understanding, we can use our interpersonal empathy perspective-taking skills (and self-other awareness) to walk in the shoes of another. But social empathy perspective-taking is broader; it is taking in a macro or large-scale view of situations. We consider the impact of external factors. One way to do this is by putting ourselves in the situations of others who are different, whether by race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, class background, or other characteristics.

Although this is hard, it has a lot of positive potential. Research shows us that broader perspective-taking increases social connections and decreases group stereotyping.²⁸ When we apply perspective-taking to larger social groups, we can build positive social engagement. For example, the U.S. Army, in order to better prepare personnel to serve in other countries, introduced “social perspective-taking” by military trainers.²⁹ This training was designed to help soldiers understand the host nation’s perspective without their own personal biases. While we might argue whether this has been effective, it is a huge jump in military preparation from centuries of military conflicts in which personnel took little heed of the cultures in which they were immersed to today acknowledging cultural differences and that we are entering another country’s culture.

With the full understanding of all the components of interpersonal and social empathy, we can return to the welfare example. How much do we really know about what it is like to grow up poor and rely on public assistance to meet all our survival needs? In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed sweeping welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which famously claimed to “end welfare as we know it.” The changes placed many limits on existing welfare programs. At the time, I had done a lot of research on poverty and had interviewed many people who lived financially on the edge and relied on government assistance to feed and shelter themselves and their families. I was taken aback by the direction of the new legislation. The people I had come to know worked hard to make it through each day and were not living a life of luxury. I remember one woman I worked with who spent a lot of time tracking the price of a pound of rice at all the surrounding grocery stores and then calculating how much the bus fare to each store would cost and whether it was worth it to travel for lower prices with the bus fare figured in. And she did this for every item she bought for her family by finding discarded copies of newspaper ads. This was years before personal computers! I was impressed. Even in my poorest student days, I never worked that hard to make my money stretch. I did not have to—I had a safety net, my family. This mother barely finished high school. She had no safety net. She had two young children. In fact, two-thirds of the recipients of welfare were children, most under the age of seven. The end of welfare as we knew it was the end of a program that was, for the most part, serving young children.

I looked at the lived experiences of the people on welfare as I analyzed the reform legislation. In 2006, ten years later, there was a lot of publicity about the “success” of the reform. The goal of ending welfare as we knew it was “proven” by the decrease in numbers—from 12.3 million recipients in 1996 to 5.1 million in 2005. But deeper analysis I did proved disturbing—before welfare reform, 80 percent of poor families who were eligible received aid; by 2006, only 48 percent did.30 There were still poor families. We did nothing to change that, we just found a way to get them off welfare. But where did they go? A lot did find employment, but most had low-income jobs. The number of children who were poor did not change, and these children fared the worst. Welfare used to serve two-thirds of poor children, but now we only cover one-fifth, and the rest must fend for themselves. How could we develop a new policy that so completely ignored the needs of young children? Where was the empathic insight that might have informed policy makers?

I went back and looked at the political players in Congress who passed the 1996 welfare reform.31 While adult welfare recipients at the time were 90 percent female, the members of Congress who passed the legislation were 85 percent male. These women on welfare averaged thirty-one years old, almost all of them only had a high school education, and none of them were millionaires. The members of Congress were on average fifty-five years old, 93 percent of them had more than a high school education, and 30 percent of them were millionaires. Two-thirds of welfare recipients were people of color, while almost 90 percent of the members of Congress were white. Finally, the majority of recipients overall were younger than eight years old. Who took their perspective? This research was a social empathy “aha” moment for me. The politicians who were making these legislative changes lived lives vastly different from those who were the recipients of these changes. I was struck by how little contextual understanding was involved. Where was the help for young children that these families so desperately needed? Instead, now the adults on the program had to be away from home for more hours a week trying to find jobs. Who would take care of their young children? In fact, while the bill was debated in the House of Representatives prior to the final vote, only eight legislators (out of the 435) even mentioned children.³² Instead, the adults receiving welfare were seen as freeloaders. Frank Riggs, a member of Congress from California, remarked that the bill “addresses a fundamental issue in American society, and that is the resentment of working individuals toward able-bodied individuals who refuse to get off the dole.” John Kasich from Ohio commented that now the system “is going to ask the able-bodied to get out and begin to work themselves” because, as Tom DeLay of Texas stated, “welfare should not be a way of life…welfare has not worked.” Who were these able-bodied folks on the dole? Two-thirds of all welfare recipients were young children who of course could not work. The other third were their parents, most of whom were single mothers who lacked education. Where were child care, health insurance, and educational opportunities for mothers? The only thing these legislators were interested in was getting people off welfare. Thus, for the first time in the sixty-year history of the program, legislators put a time limit on receiving benefits.³³

It should not be surprising, then, that almost 80 percent of the men in the House of Representatives voted for it, while only 54 percent of the women did. I had research that showed the value of contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking, or at least the lack of it. This study on welfare reform was the impetus for me to study empathy on a broader, societal level. I could not get the memory of the families I had personally come to know to square with the changes being made in welfare legislation. I was searching for a way to explain how policy makers could be so out of touch with the lives of people for whom they were making policies. I began to delve into studying empathy more broadly. Now, more than ten years later, I think I have a better understanding of one of the factors that contributed to the passage of the legislation: there was a lack of social empathy. This book is the full explanation of what social empathy means, what happens when we lack social empathy, and what good can be done when we use social empathy.

Similarly, “personal distress” is a term that has been used in the empathy literature to describe feeling another’s pain or discomfort. In some earlier work on empathy, personal distress was considered a key attribute of empathy. However, personal distress is when we feel someone’s pain but then focus on the uncomfortable or distressing feelings that it creates in ourselves.34 Suppose that a colleague at work comes over to your desk to talk to you about how depressed he is about the death of his mother. You have a deadline to meet, which is stressing you out, and you are uncomfortable about the topic because your own mother is getting older and you don’t want to think about her dying. This experience does not make you feel empathic; instead it feels upsetting and disruptive. The result is that you experience personal distress. In fact, when we are in personal distress, we are more likely to try and avoid contact so we don’t have to deal with the discomfort or anxiety of feeling pity. Avoiding other people’s feelings and being self-focused are not empathy.

The idea of personal distress as a key aspect of empathy was so strong that one of the most well-known instruments to measure empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) created in 1980,³⁵ includes personal distress as part of empathy. However, over the years, many researchers have chosen to drop the part of the instrument that measures personal distress. We now know through cognitive neuroscience research that capacities for self-other awareness and emotion regulation are needed for empathy. These abilities help us to not get overwhelmed with personal distress or feelings of pity.³⁶

“Sympathy” is another term that often is used when people mean empathy. When we feel bad for a person, we are sympathetic, but without any of the other components that create empathy. Only feeling bad for someone else because of the situation the person is in lets us stay removed from actually sharing their feelings. Without self-other awareness and perspective-taking, we stay apart from the other person. We might be moved to help, but the distance can also make us come across as condescending or patronizing rather than achieving and communicating true understanding. For example, I have no doubt that the former First Lady Barbara Bush was a wonderful, loving woman who could be very compassionate. But after Hurricane Katrina, when people were evacuated from New Orleans and temporarily put up in the Astrodome in Houston, she visited as part of an effort to raise money to help the victims. While there, she commented that “so many of the people here were underprivileged anyway, this is working very well for them.”37 I am sure she did not say that with any malice; she simply had no idea that although people were poor, they still had places they called home that were destroyed and they had lost whatever life possessions they had. She was there to raise money, showing that she was willing to help people in need, but she was not at all relating to their situation or lives. Without any real personal connection to those who live in poverty, how can we possibly understand what their lives are like?

A more recent example of this lack of connection to the lived experiences of others was on display in a tweet posted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan in 2018. Speaker Ryan, who has often talked about his concern for those who are financially less fortunate and struggle to make ends meet, retweeted a post to show how great the recent tax reform plan was for Americans.³⁸ He retweeted a post by a high school secretary in which she had noted her surprise that she would be getting an extra $1.50 a week from the big tax cut plan. Ryan took it as evidence of the tax cut plan’s success. But the backlash on public media was swift and severe. He was chastised for being out of touch because an extra $78 a year was so very little, especially compared to the tax breaks and extra money that would come to high-income earners and the wealthy. Ryan must have heard his detractors because he deleted the tweet within a couple of hours and said nothing. His post on Twitter demonstrated a lack of empathic insight, particularly a lack of contextual understanding. This example also reflects the dynamic of power impeding empathy, and that is discussed in more detail in chapter 4.

We can be compassionate but still not be empathic. Compassion evokes charitable feelings about the plight of others, but it too is concerned only with distressing situations. We do not have compassion for people who are happy and doing well. Compassion is focused on people’s pain or distress. Some of the components of empathy, such as self-other awareness, perspective-taking, and even emotion regulation, might come into play, but there is not a shared experiencing of another person’s emotions or life situation.39 We tend to have compassion for those less fortunate, often because we are in a better situation. I am not saying empathy is better than compassion or sympathy, just that these are different emotions and should not be confused as meaning the same thing. Two prominent empathy researchers from the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich, Switzerland, Tania Singer and Claus Lamm, state it well: “The crucial distinction between the term empathy and those like sympathy, empathic concern, and compassion is that empathy denotes that the observer’s emotions reflect affective sharing (‘feeling with’ the other person) while compassion, sympathy, empathic concern denotes the observer’s emotions are inherently other oriented (‘feeling for’ the other person).”⁴⁰

The title of Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy is certainly provocative, and in it he argues that empathy is too emotional and leads us to make bad decisions.41 His position is that we should not rely on empathic feelings; instead we need to be rational but compassionate. Bloom bases his arguments on the view that empathy is “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does”⁴²and that this emotional sharing is subject to bias, unfairness, and overly emotional reactions. Instead of empathy, he advocates compassionate rationality: “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.”⁴³ I don’t disagree with Bloom’s goal of recognizing our biases and the need for us to control our emotions to make sound and compassionate decisions. I disagree with Bloom in that I think the full scope of empathy does just that. Thanks to the work of neuroscience, we know that empathy is complex and includes multiple skills, which I describe as components. Missing from Bloom’s characterization of empathy is self-other awareness, which helps us to not assume we know what another person is feeling; emotion regulation, which helps us to be calm and level headed and not get swept up in the other person’s emotions or situation; contextual understanding, which broadens our view of what the other person is experiencing; and macro perspective-taking, which has us imagine what it is like to live the lives of members of other groups different from our own, pushing us to take into account all the historical and social experiences that shaped that group. Bloom wants us to use our head, not our hearts. That is exactly what empathy does—we take physiological inputs that happen to us unconsciously and process the meaning of those sensations using our brain. That is empathy.

Empathy is a tool; it provides us information. What we do with that information is up to us. It can open a door to take action. A great deal of research shows that empathy-induced action is often positive (which is discussed in detail in chapter 2). But taking action is learned as a result of empathy as a next step. Empathy itself is the process, it’s what we do with it that is the conscious decision making that we learn over a lifetime. But if we do not recognize the full process of empathy, the physiological triggers, the split-second processing that goes on in our minds, the pitfalls to interpreting our empathic feelings, the need to take in context, then we will fall into the space of irrational emotionalism that Bloom describes.