Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others

We need others to help us survive, and our ability to “read” people enhances the likelihood that our survival will be successful. The survival of a species like ours requires two important skills related to empathy. First, we must be able to pick up the cue of fear from others. Second, we must recognize that our offspring have needs that we must take care of, and we must follow through with that care. But feeling and responding to fear and reading another person’s needs do not necessarily make us empathic. Those are important tools, but they do require further training and abilities to fully develop into empathy. In addition, having our basic survival needs met thanks to the efforts of a caregiver does not necessarily mean we have experienced receiving someone else’s empathy. Empathy goes beyond the mirroring of others or the recognition of basic needs, although both are very important as building blocks for empathy.

After years of research, I believe that empathy is a very advanced ability. As human beings, empathy gives us more than our survival; it also supports our growth and prosperity. Empathy takes us beyond adapting for survival to thriving, which can lead us to a fully lived life. Thriving, the opportunity to prosper and flourish, is what pushes human beings to accomplish great things. Being skilled in interpersonal and social empathy means that a person is more likely to successfully navigate social situations, and in the process feel a sense of well-being. This is a tall order. Developing the full array of empathy is not easy. Even with all the components of empathy developed, at times we face situations in which it is difficult to call on those skills. I am not saying that empathy is the perfect answer to a better life, but it certainly helps us to live in a more cooperative, safe, and fulfilling way. And research tells us that the lack of empathy is an obstacle to adapting and thriving. We need empathy to achieve the highest sense of ourselves as individuals. When we enhance empathy across groups, we create communities that are cohesive, caring, and successful. That may seem too simplistic, but in this chapter I will walk us through the ways that empathy enhances our personal lives, our communities, and ultimately our global connections.

Feeling like you are part of something larger than yourself, part of a family, tribe, team, religious group, or community, is a reflection of our deeply engrained sense of how best to survive. It starts with the earliest sense of making a connection with another person. The theory most referred to when we talk about people connecting with each other, typically learned at an early age, is attachment theory.1 Attachment theory posits that being able to connect emotionally from a young age leads to healthy development. It helps an infant, and later a child, feel secure in his or her surroundings. Building a bond with someone who cares for us helps us to make sense of the world around us. We can go out and explore knowing that if it gets too scary, we have a secure base to return to, literally and emotionally. What makes attachment so important to empathy? When we are secure in our sense of connection to others, it is easier to consider the feelings of others, while when we are insecure, we have little emotional room to think about and take in the feelings of others.² In fact, this connection between attachment and empathy starts early in life, as early as birth.³ Built on mirroring and response to needs, empathy is reflected in the way caretakers interact with babies. When infants cry and then are held or fed, babies begin to experience a connection with those around them. This connection shows them that they are heard and that their needs will be met, and a sense of security develops. It is also a modeling of empathic response—you have a feeling and someone consistent in your life reads that feeling correctly. Of course, as any parent can tell you, correctly understanding exactly what a baby wants can be very difficult at times. But the effort to stay with it and assure the infant that a protective response is there builds the sense of attachment.

How do we know that attachment is key to thriving from a very early age? In the kind of social experiment that no one would ever conduct because it is unethical and horrible to consider, we would see if babies who were not responded to emotionally would not thrive and develop empathy. Unfortunately, such a social experiment did occur, although it was not done intentionally. In 1989, the people of Romania revolted and overthrew the government of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. His regime had, among other things, warehoused children who were considered orphans in institutions that took care of the children’s physical needs but, due to staffing shortages and a philosophy of care that was focused almost entirely on basic physical care, neglected to provide emotional support and the kinds of caretaker/child interactions that foster attachment. For example, the style of care included feeding done on a uniform schedule, not according to the babies’ needs, with bottles propped up in place without the touch of a human being. Children were clean, but there were no organized social or emotional interactions. A team of experts in child development chronicled the experiences of the children raised in these orphanages and followed their development for almost twenty years as some were moved into foster care and others remained institutionalized.⁴ It is the kind of research that probes the depths of human development in conditions that provide for physical care but are devoid of the emotional interactions that build attachment and emotional security. Among the findings was that the neural development of these children, especially the ones who remained in institutionalized care, was significantly less than seen in noninstitutionalized children. Their brain matter was actually smaller, and they experienced delays in cognitive development and socialization. Their ability to attach was also disrupted, likely as a result of emotional neglect and poor brain development.

For the children in the Romanian orphanages, the emotional connections to caretakers and the physiological development of their brains were greatly diminished. Socialization for attachment and the neural development of the brain are critical for the development of the components necessary for empathy. Children need to experience mirroring in order to tap into their affective responses, develop understanding of the self, learn to take the perspective of others, and develop emotion regulation. Recent research on children and their relationships to their parents found that those children who were secure in their early attachment demonstrated greater empathy.5 This research went further and looked at how well they got along with their peers. Children who were both insecure in their attachment and unempathic interacted poorly with their peers. That is not surprising. But here is what was most interesting: for those children who were unempathic but securely attached, their behaviors with peers were more positive. This is fascinating research because it suggests that it is attachment security that helps children interact in positive ways, even if they have not yet developed strong empathy. While much more research needs to be done, it may be that the positive socialization of secure attachment comes first or may not depend on empathic abilities, at least in early childhood. However, we are fairly sure that empathy is aided by secure attachment and may even need that security to fully develop as children age.

This suggests that the relationship between empathy and attachment goes both ways. Having attachment abilities allows us to be empathic, while receiving empathy allows us to learn how to be attached. Secure attachment encourages and supports empathy, and it is the efforts of a caretaker to respond to our needs that models empathy, all of which promotes security. For the most part, the process of building empathy starts with the adult being able to recognize the child’s needs. Without some level of caretaker empathy, it is very difficult to develop strong attachment and pass on the learning of empathy.

Sometimes people do good things for other people when the actions do not directly benefit them. We refer to this as altruism.6 A great deal of research has been conducted on this behavior because it seems counterintuitive that we might put ourselves at risk for the sake of others given our human desire for personal safety and security. One theory about this tendency is kin selection, which holds that the best means for your genetic long-term survival is to be sure that your offspring and closest kin survive. The strong desire to pass on the genetic line may be built into us as the result of those with strong kin selection survival drive keeping their descendants alive to go on and reproduce and thus maintain the species over time.⁷ Because empathy is the skill that helps us to read the needs of those who we might risk our lives to protect, it plays a role in kin selection. Kin selection helps to explain why parents would put their lives on the line for their children.

In addition to genetic continuation of the species, there are more biological dimensions to empathy. The world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal regards empathy as the emotional connection that makes altruism possible,8 and it is rooted in our biological evolution.⁹ We know that from a biological perspective we have evolved as a species that wants to connect with others. Empathy provides a way to create deep and lasting bonds, fulfilling our underlying need to belong and creating connections. That empathic connection is what motivates us to engage in the costly individual sacrifices of altruistic behavior. In other words, if over time we get closer and closer to another person (typically in early life that would be with our adult caregivers) and form an attachment that is enhanced by reading each other’s needs and feelings, we are more deeply concerned with their survival as well as our own. This deep concern will prompt us to do things to protect and care for those who we are close to, as they will do for us.

Although empathy and altruism are connected, a word of caution: that relationship is stronger for those we know rather than those who are strangers, likely as a result or in some way related to kin selection and the tribal background of human beings. This distance we feel from strangers is often referred to as “otherness” or the degree to which we do not see ourselves reflected in the other person.¹⁰ There are numerous reasons we don’t see ourselves in others, and we will fully explore those reasons in chapter 3. But for now, think about the distance between different races, ethnic groups, and religions. Those are examples of otherness in our world today. When we do not see a similarity or shared humanity with others, we are less likely to be connected through empathy. Lacking this connection, we are also less likely to behave in prosocial ways. So altruism is definitely related to empathy, and barriers to empathy contribute to barriers to altruism.

Kin selection suggests something happening at a deep unconscious level. It may have originally been learned in the sense that only those who practiced it passed on their genetic material, building the inclination into each successive generation. But we also learn how to read others, which enhances our chances for survival. When knowledge of how to behave is taught, we regard this as social learning. Social science has long debated how much of who we are is a result of our inherited genetic makeup and how much is a product of what we have learned while growing up. As with other human behaviors, this is a difficult distinction to make in terms of empathy. Are we born with the ability to be empathic or do we learn it? The likely answer is yes to both. We are born with the mechanisms to mirror others and we physically develop brain matter and neural pathways needed for cognitive processing. Learning to use our cognitive processing, the thinking parts of our brain, gives us the mental capacity to think outside ourselves, which is needed for empathy.

Over thousands of years, human beings inherited the genetics best suited to survival and learned from each other what to eat, how to be safe, and how to work together. Thus, we have a dual inheritance, some of it biological and some of it learned behavior.11 Empathy reflects that duality. The challenge is for us to pay attention to the physiological triggers to empathy and then to process in our minds what those triggers mean. For example, imagine hearing a loud sound in another room, being startled and fearful at first, and then quickly remembering having placed a heavy box on a shelf, which likely fell. This example is a simple view of this process.

We have a stronger ability to put these skills together when it comes to kin, those we know and especially those who we know well. Today kin may extend beyond physiological relationships, including blended families, gay unions, and adoptions—families created by choice. The strength of these kin bonds can be very powerful and nurture deep empathy. Empathy is less likely to happen with people we view as strangers. It is more difficult to connect the physiological reactions we have to others with a well thought out understanding of what our reactions mean and what the actions of others mean when those others are distant or foreign to us, as is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. Making the connection of kin selection to the entire human species has been and continues to be a struggle. Those connections rely more on social learning, so we have to be much more deliberate about being empathic with those who we do not know well or do not know at all compared to those who we do know. Thus, biology is the foundation, but social learning is what brings empathy to a wider swath of people.

From our earliest years in preschool, we are not only encouraged to get along with others but also measured on that ability. I remember my early report cards from school. My teachers graded me on my “ability to play well with others.” The emphasis on this skill as we grow up is to reinforce cooperation through social learning. Cooperation means that we work together; we interact in ways that are beneficial to all who are involved. Empathy can help that process. We can understand the situations of others so we can connect better and minimize misunderstandings; this can help us to cooperate.

When I read through the research on empathy and cooperation I found that with empathy we are more likely to overlook negative unintended behaviors of others; that is, we cut people slack when we have empathy toward them.12 This reminded me of an experience I had in college that made a lasting impression on me. When I was studying social work, we were often put in groups with the goal of simulating situations we would face in the workplace that would require collaboration. I liked my classmates a lot, so I enjoyed working in groups. But one thing I disliked was the prospect of getting everyone to contribute. In one class, our final project was a very involved group presentation that required a lot of work. Our group got along well, but we had one member who was older, had children, and worked outside of school. He did not attend all our planning and work sessions, and as this was before the internet and video conferencing, he was simply absent. I could feel myself getting upset that we were doing all this work and he was going to benefit without doing as much. This was a huge project, worth an entire semester’s grade. But I was reluctant to say anything. Who wants to be the tattletale or seem bossy? And making an issue of our workload would create a distraction from the task we were focused on. I am glad I didn’t say anything. We found out later that he had a very sick child and also was the sole support of his family and needed to work. The information helped me to understand his situation, which was very different from the rest of us who were young, single, and did not need to work full time. We figured out ways to get his work that did not require his presence at our meetings. It gave me a chance to walk in his shoes in a way that made it possible to overlook his difficulty in working with us according to our schedule. We did our presentation and got a good grade, and he did what he could and was grateful to have had classmates who were supportive. I learned from this group project to be sure to hear other people’s stories before interpreting their actions or, as in this case, lack of actions. This does not mean that everyone in groups with me gets a free pass, this just stands as a reminder that people have different abilities and circumstances and we can work better together if we have greater empathic insight into others.

When we ask if something we do is moral, we are asking if it is right or wrong.13 There are numerous ways we can learn about morality: from our parents, from religious leaders, or even from the law. If something is outlawed by society, we are likely to see it as wrong. Of course, not everyone subscribes to the same interpretation of what is right and what is wrong. In our modern society, we have major behaviors that we agree are wrong, such as killing another person. But even killing is not clearly wrong, as in cases of self-defense or when a nation goes to war with another nation, justifying the killing of others as enemies. Morality is subjective; it depends on situations and circumstances. The enemies of today may be the allies of tomorrow, so the rules of conduct can change over time. Psychologist Martin L. Hoffman has written a great deal on empathy and its impact on our moral development.¹⁴ He considers morality in large part to be consideration for others. Human beings would not have survived as a species if people only cared about themselves. Our survival is secured through our interactions with others, and morality is the code we create to monitor these social interactions. Our moral code is informed by empathy.

In his book, Hoffman makes an incredibly insightful point when he writes about how we can teach morality to children through empathy. If we ask children how their actions will affect other people now and in the future, we teach them to engage empathically and imagine whether what we do feels right or wrong. That is probably something we are all familiar with, both as adults teaching children about right and wrong and as children who were taught. He goes on to suggest that we go further and teach children to do “multiple empathizing” for the other person, which I find really valuable. Multiple empathizing has us make a switch in our minds and place someone we care about deeply in the other person’s situation, then imagine how that person we are close to might feel. For example, imagine you are walking down the street and see a homeless person who is pushing a cart full of her belongings. What if that person were your mother, sister, or best friend? The feelings we have can be very different and powerful when we engage in multiple empathizing. If you start doing this with issues you hear in the news, it can start a process of thinking differently. When I have discussions about immigration, I think of my grandfathers, one who came to this country as a young man, the other as a boy with his parents in what family lore suggests was not a legal entry. Would I want my grandfathers, who came to this country as immigrants, to have been deported, leaving behind their wives and children, my grandmothers, mother, and father? It connects me in a personal way to the stories of today’s immigrants. The process of multiple empathizing helps to remove our tendency to not engage as deeply with people who are strangers or distant from us.

As I was writing this section on morality and empathy, I was confronted by a glaring case of a breakdown in morality and empathy that was being covered in the news.15 In February 2017, a group of fraternity members at Penn State University were charged with involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault for ignoring or actively deciding not to call for medical assistance when one of their pledges was pressured into drinking copious amounts of alcohol, then falling down stairs and hitting his head. For the next twelve hours he went back and forth between unconsciousness and consciousness without anyone calling for medical assistance. The leaders of the fraternity were cited as discouraging anyone from taking action to get the young man any help, likely to protect their fraternity—the young pledge was nineteen years old, under the age of legal drinking. By the time 911 was called, he had been lying on the floor for hours and was cold and unresponsive. Worst of all, there were security video cameras recording much of the behaviors, providing glaring evidence of how many members of the fraternity did not call for help. How could twenty young men, all enrolled at a major university in the United States, collectively fail to engage in empathic reasoning to take care of their young pledge? There were likely many competing emotions that blocked the multiple empathizing that Hoffman describes. On an individual basis, I am sure most or even all of these young men have emotional attachments to others, people they care deeply about. What if that young pledge had been someone’s real brother in that fraternity house? Or what if one of those twenty young men who were involved had taken a moment and imagined that the young man could be his brother, best friend, or father? What if someone had engaged in multiple empathizing? Would that have moved him to call for help? In chapter 3, we will explore in detail the many reasons that empathy fails, including the sense that the other person is not one of us. Maybe the distance between being a full-fledged member of the fraternity and a pledge who is trying to be accepted is a big enough gap to limit empathic connections. We will likely never know what each young man was thinking or going through during those twelve hours, but we can see that both morality and empathy were not called on until it was too late. This example is not just tragic but also shows how precarious engaging in empathy can be. And when we don’t engage in empathy, we are more likely to ignore morality or doing what is right.

On the other hand, Google “stories of helping others because it is the right thing to do” and you will find countless examples of empathy leading people to do good by others, stories that don’t necessarily make the nightly news.¹⁶ Many of these stories are about young people who simply feel for others and want to help. Consider the young boy who saw a news story about homeless people living on the streets and asked his parents if they could start collecting blankets for those people, or another young boy who heard about a mother and daughter who died in a fire because they did not have a smoke alarm and used his savings to buy smoke alarms to be installed by the fire department in neighborhood homes that needed them, or the young girl who chose not to get presents for her birthday and instead asked that her birthday money be used to buy supplies for an animal rescue shelter. All these cases show how empathy can be an important part of how we teach morality to children.

Knowing exactly why someone behaves the way he or she does is incredibly complex and probably involves a combination of reasons. Some of those reasons may be triggered by empathy, and some not. Even those helping behaviors that are preceded by empathy may look different depending on the situation or the personality of the recipient. Thus, while not all good behaviors are motivated by empathy, the chances of good behavior happening are greatly improved because of empathy.

We know that empathy can move us to do good things to help other people. We call it prosocial behavior because the recipient of the good deed ends up better off as a result of that effort. (A word of caution here: remember the difference between empathy and sympathy or pity—being the object of someone’s sympathy may result in receiving help, but the relationship may be so patronizing that the recipient does not feel at all valued in a meaningful way.) The good news is that more and more research suggests that in addition to the recipient, the empathic person also benefits.

While it may not be surprising that doing good things for other people makes us feel happy, what is surprising is that it may be a deeply imbedded connection that starts early in life. Toddlers involved in experiments in which they had choices about sharing treats were happiest when giving to others, even happier than when they received the treats for themselves.18 The researchers argue that although we cannot completely rule out social learning as the reason for a preference for sharing at such a young age, it is likely that being prosocial feels good from a deeper place than something we learn as we grow older. The very young age of the children in the experiments suggests that they were sharing because it felt good, better than getting the treat themselves. It seems that by the time we are young adults, the connection between happiness and empathy and altruism may be well established.¹⁹ But this raises some questions. We do not know for sure the direction of that relationship. Does empathy lead to doing good things, which makes us happy? Or are happy people by nature more empathic and likely to act on their feelings to follow through with doing good things? We need to do more research to know exactly which comes first. Based on what I have studied, I would argue that doing good things promotes happiness more than the opposite. A person can be very self-absorbed and be happy to ignore the needs of others. However, an empathic person who feels the needs of others has to make a conscious decision whether or not to respond. Over time we learn from previous experience what it feels like to help others. Those who link doing good with feeling happy will be more likely to do so the next time empathy kicks in. Sometimes an empathic response is difficult and may not feel as rewarding, but we do it anyway. Thus, I would argue that helping others can make us feel good, although it is not a guarantee. I also take it a step further and feel strongly that social empathy, using our empathic abilities on a broader societal level, can make us all feel better.

Over the past several years, a group of highly respected independent researchers has compiled an annual happiness report covering thousands of respondents from 150 countries. Comparisons among the countries are made based on measurements of the respondents’ assessments of their current lives, including health, economic well-being, and social support.20 We would think that the high level of economic well-being in the United States, compared to many other countries, would place us rather high on the happiness scale. However, that is actually not the case. In spite of overall growth in income and national wealth as measured by gross domestic product, happiness in the United States has fallen over the past ten years. The items that contributed to this fall were decreases in social support, a lower feeling of personal freedom, and stronger perceptions of government and business corruption. These are social ills. One of the authors of this study, Jeffrey D. Sachs, draws the conclusion that to improve the level of happiness in the United States, we need to focus on strengthening social capital. This means improving social relations and social support. Sachs specifically calls for building better relations between those who are native born and those who are immigrants, shrinking the income and economic gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, restoring faith in government and elected officials through campaign finance reform, and improving the social safety net through greater access to and quality of health care and education. Dr. Sachs makes the connection between social change and individual well-being; that is, addressing larger social problems will improve our personal levels of happiness.

While these recommendations may not be surprising, we can create a greater commitment to these efforts through social empathy. Social empathy requires greater attention to our surroundings and how groups have fared over the course of history, urging us to apply our empathic insights to better understand differences among groups. It encourages us to develop multiple empathizing skills. Our insights can help trigger empathic impulses to engage in prosocial behaviors on larger social problems. Viewing public concerns through a lens of social empathy means examining which groups are most affected by a lack of social support, putting ourselves in their places, and using that insight to make changes.

When we lack social empathy, we have less insight and understanding of those who are culturally and ethnically different from us. This distance means that we are prone to provide lower levels of social support and prosocial behaviors. A fascinating study on “unplanned helping behavior” was conducted in 2001 and again in 2011 in both the United States and Canada.21 The study observed people being helpful to strangers without any recognition or reciprocity. The research followed the dissemination of “lost letters” that were strategically placed in select neighborhoods to compare the likelihood of someone picking up the letters and making the effort to mail them. All the letters were the same and were stamped and placed in obvious public places. The goal of the research was to see whether the rate of return had changed from 2001 and 2011 and if any changes differed between the United States and Canada. The findings were very interesting. Only in the United States was there a decline in the rate of returning the letters. When all the differing variables were more closely examined, the most significant change in unplanned helping behavior since 2001 that differed between the two countries was in neighborhoods in which the proportion of noncitizens had increased over the ten-year period. There seemed to be a different perspective on immigrants in Canada compared to the United States. The level of unplanned helping declined between 2001 and 2011 more significantly in the United States than in Canada within communities with more noncitizens. So although both countries had neighborhoods that saw an increase in immigrants living there, only in the United States did those neighborhoods also see a decline in unplanned helping. One possible explanation offered by the researcher was that the impact of the September 11 attacks may have had a deeper effect on people in the United States than it did in Canada. That impact may have been to increase wariness and distrust toward immigrant groups. The study author concluded that both negative political rhetoric and harsh policies toward immigrants in the United States may have contributed to lower levels of trust within diverse neighborhoods that in turn led to a pulling back from community involvement and participating in unplanned helping efforts. Such anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies did not occur to that degree in Canada.

The differences in social support between Canada and the United States might be explained in part through examining what we know about ethnic diversity and its impact on social connections in neighborhoods. An analysis of over ninety studies on this topic revealed some interesting differences between the United States and Canada, as well as with other Western countries.22 This will likely not surprise anyone who has been following the news over the past couple of years, but public perception of diversity in the United States has been much more negative than in Canada. One theory the researchers who reviewed these ninety studies offers to explain this difference is that the history of the United States is unique compared to Canada and other Western countries.²³ Although we are a country of immigrants, as is true for Canada, possibly our legacy of slavery and legislated segregation for hundreds of years contributes to the difference. The codified public policy of slavery and efforts to separate races may make racial diversity much more difficult to bridge in the United States.

When we examine the historical context of diversity in this country, we see problems with building the social relations and social support that are needed to combat the drop in happiness in the United States. The forced relocation to this country of Africans to serve as slaves, the national divide on slavery that contributed to the Civil War, and generations of descendants of slaves who were barred from access to education and opportunities have all contributed to racialized experiences growing up in the United States. Add to that history the forced upheaval and relocation of thousands of indigenous people, also through public policies, and we have a racial divide that is very deep.

In fact, although many immigrant groups have not received warm welcomes by those who were already settled here, the distance among races is far deeper than among the descendants of early European colonists and the waves of immigrants who came to the United States from countries such as Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The historical context of the racial divide in this country cannot be ignored when looking at multiculturalism and diversity today. What a review of the ninety studies on diversity suggests is that we have a lot of diversity in the United States, but that diversity is still very segregated, and as a result, groups do not interact in significant ways. This gives us a veneer of diversity but not the deeper connections that can build empathy between groups.

Returning to what we know from the annual happiness report, the factors that most influence how people rated their happiness center on building a trusting, supportive, honest, and generous social foundation more than on increasing income or improving life expectancy. Building empathy can be a powerful tool to build social connections that include trust, support, and generosity. Now more than ever we need to address the deep day-to-day separation between groups and create a stronger sense of social support, which will contribute to higher levels of happiness. Empathy can help do that. Interpersonal empathy can tap into our individual sense of feeling good, and social empathy can help build social connections, all of which in turn increase levels of happiness.

Jeremy Rifkin in his book The Empathic Civilization provides a comprehensive historical tracking of the spread of people joining together to live in organized governed communities and how empathy played a key role.24 He wrote the book to document that we have shared characteristics across nations, and if we can tap into our empathy we can build connections and raise empathic consciousness throughout the world. He points to changes over time that have contributed to greater empathic consciousness. The book is very comprehensive and detailed, so it is difficult to reduce the central idea of how empathy has grown throughout the world to one key principle. But several of Rifkin’s ideas help to explain the evolution of our empathic civilization.

Rifkin points to the shift in how people lived. Tribal life with little contact between tribes shifted over the centuries to more diverse cosmopolitan living and the establishment of nations and cities. Cosmopolitan living means more exposure to diverse people and cultures and increased economic connections between communities. These connections create familiarity and common bonds. With increased familiarity comes a greater likelihood of empathy. The process of developing urban life began two thousand years ago, and it opened the door to broaden empathy. As Rifkin explains,

Of course, this process has not been without setbacks and deviations. The past two thousand years may have witnessed the cross-cultural exchanges that deepen empathy described by Rifkin, but there have also been countless violent and destructive exchanges that demonstrate a lack of empathy.

Psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has done a comprehensive analysis of violence over thousands of years of human history in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.26 He echoes Rifkin’s view of growing empathy hand in hand with civilization. Although this social progress has not occurred at the same levels in all places across the world, in general and certainly in many regions, empathy has developed far beyond what early civilizations experienced, and with it came greater peaceful coexistence. Pinker also reviews how our evolution has gone from living among tribes and clans to forming city-states, communities of numerous tribes and clans that are organized and governed. In city-states, there are different groups living together who interact for economic gain. These interactions have led to a decline in violence. Tribes are limited in what and how much they can produce. If one tribe attacks another, they may have more resources in the short term by defeating and taking from the other tribe, but the other tribe, left with nothing, will plan their retribution and attack. This creates a cycle of violence with nothing gained over time. If instead the tribes trade and cooperate, both will gain. Pinker thoroughly documents violent exchanges that have occurred over long parts of history throughout the world and how that violence slowly dissipated, leading to cooperation and coexistence.

At the risk of oversimplifying thousands of years of human history, I offer a simple example. Imagine two small communities, one of farmers and another of sheep herders. If everyone in the farming community has enough grain to last until the next harvest, any surplus of grain grown by the farmers will sit and potentially rot. For the sheep herders, they may end up with lots of sheep, requiring more land or shepherds than they have, both needed to maintain the growing flock. If they cannot take care of all the sheep, some will wander off or be lost. For the farmers, taking their extra grain and trading it with the shepherds for their surplus sheep gives both groups more than what they had without trading. They benefit by changing their extras into new resources they can use. This system of exchange is what brought people together to live in city-states and lessened violent interactions between groups.

Once human beings started trading and interacting with different groups, they started to need to understand their trading partners and exchange cultures. Getting the best price or exchange for your products is helped by knowing what is important to your trading partner. This is the work of empathy. And for economic interactions to work well, there need to be systems and rules. Consider what is in our wallets. Most of us have plastic cards that allow us to walk into a store and leave with tangible products. How does this work? How does a small embossed piece of plastic allow me to fill a cart with groceries or choose what I want from hundreds of items of clothing? What we take for granted as part of our daily lives is a complicated system that is based on agreements among producers, merchants, banks, and governments that cross national and international boundaries. This system is a hallmark of civilization and intertwines our lives in ways that are beneficial. Such commerce and other aspects of civilization cannot exist with violence. As systems get larger, personal agreements are enlarged through the creation of governments. Laws are passed to reflect the decisions regarding what is and is not just.

Systems of economic commerce further developed through literacy. Developing ways to communicate among people and record the rules of the emerging economic system were furthered by the ability to read and write. With the development of the printing press, communication could expand beyond commerce and include literature, which Pinker regards as a way for people to engage in perspective-taking, which is entering the life of someone else. How much do we learn today from reading about different cultures or seeing a movie portraying life in another part of the world? Reading opens people to all sorts of experiences, allowing us to take the perspective of others, which adds to our empathic training. By engaging in personal perspective-taking, we build interpersonal empathy, and by using perspective-taking to understand different groups and their historical evolution, we build social empathy.

You might be wondering, if we have all this great progress toward civilization, how do we explain times in history when there were horrific events like the Holocaust or, in more recent years, suicide bombings that include flying planes into the World Trade Center to kill thousands of people? This hardly seems to fit the idea of collaboration through civilization. Pinker provides deeper analysis that helps to explain these occurrences. First, civilization has not developed at the same pace everywhere, and second, other intervening events can derail social empathy and civilization. Pinker’s book was published before the rise of the Islamic State known as ISIS or ISIL, yet his analysis describes the events that contribute to a breakdown of civilization and give rise to groups that rule through violence and display a lack of empathy. He warns us that collective misfortune and chaos (such as the impact of war) can open the way for leaders to emerge who promise a perfect world if people follow their ideology and rules. Their ideology is the only way to achieve this perfect world, which means that anyone who does not follow that ideology is in the way, blocking this perfect world, and those people therefore must be stopped or eliminated. When people have little opportunity for jobs or raising families, especially young men, joining such a group becomes an appealing option. Religious fundamentalism, which is the belief that only your religion is right, makes deeply connecting with others who have different beliefs a challenge. The struggle between competing religious beliefs and empathy is discussed in chapter 6.

Empathy as a part of civilization has evolved in uneven ways. We are shocked and distraught by the beheadings that are videotaped and distributed to news media by terrorist groups as part of their campaign to take control of regions and people. The statement they are making to Westerners is violent, clear, and meant to terrorize us. Their methods are brutal, but unfortunately not new. About fifteen years ago, I was visiting a friend who lived in Pittsburgh. There was a traveling exhibit at one of the museums that she was interested in, and she asked if I would be willing to accompany her. It was a pictorial history of lynching in America. To be honest, I did not know much about the exhibit. I expected it to be disturbing and I understood the horror of lynching from a historical perspective, but I was unprepared for what I saw. To understand what I experienced that day, you can visit the website www.withoutsanctuary.org and see the eighty photographs that were in the exhibit. From 1877 to 1950, over four thousand lynchings across the United States were documented.²⁷

Lynchings were violent acts of torture, many of which were done publicly with hundreds of people, including children, in attendance. The vast majority of lynchings were done by whites in power in order to frighten and consequently control blacks. One of the things that shocked me that day at the exhibit was the discovery that the photos that chronicle these acts of torture (including mutilations, hangings, and burnings of African American men, women, and even children) were taken by professional photographers to be sold as souvenirs. The photos were sold by the thousands over the years. In some of the photos, you can see white adults and children smiling, posing in front of the corpses as if they are at a celebration. I wanted to view this as an anomaly, something that was out of place in our history, but that would be naïve and, frankly, untrue.

The power of a noose to represent the terror is still strong today and used to frighten people, especially African Americans. On the morning of the first day that American University Student Government President Taylor Dumpson took office, May 1, 2017, bananas with racist messages were strung up with nooses across the campus. Ms. Dumpson was the first African American to be elected president of American University’s student government. The message meant by those nooses was clear. It harkened back to the days of lynching. The person or people who did this had to have known what those nooses would mean; a lot of work went into creating and placing them on campus. The imagery was powerful and purposeful. But there has been progress, as Ms. Dumpson had the courage and position to respond and wrote a very strong and inspiring letter to her university community.²⁸

We have additional histories of violence toward groups of people because they were different and not considered human. From the arrival of the earliest European settlers, views of Native Americans were at best tolerant, at worst as savages to be destroyed. The white settlers’ sense of entitlement to the land can be seen in the words of President Andrew Jackson when in 1814 he asked, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms…filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?”29 The use of the term “savages” to refer to Native Americans was so common that President Jackson used it in his official speeches and writings. Jackson went on to use the power of his position to put forward legislation that included the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated thousands of American Indians, taking their lands in the east and forcibly resettling them in areas developed as reservations. Under this law, the entire Cherokee tribe was forced to walk west during the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, resulting in four thousand Cherokees, almost one-fourth of the tribe, dying due to hunger, disease, and winter conditions.³⁰ This forced march is known as the “Trail of Tears” for the sheer devastation it brought.

What makes horrific violent acts such as these doable is by not seeing your own humanity in others. Sometimes we codify the inequality. Ever wonder where we got the “rule” for counting slaves as only three-fifths of a person? That came from the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 2. The same section does not even count Indians as people unless they paid taxes, which the vast majority did not do because they lived on their own lands or later on reservations. This section was repealed after the Civil War, but for more than one hundred years it was the law of the land. Codifying blacks as less than a whole person and marginalizing Native Americans through the highest law of the land, the Constitution sends a very powerful message. Lynchings and forced marches leading to death are not easily done if you see yourself in those being killed. If we see those others as outside our tribe or not part of humanity, then killing them is helpful in ridding the world of impure nonhuman savages who threaten our purity. Even when laws change, changing people’s learned perceptions of others can be more difficult than what it took to change those policies.

Understanding this history is a painful realization. You may be angry at my bringing it up or at my oversimplification of complex historical events. Or you may be asking, why go over events that happened hundreds of years ago and were done by people who are no longer alive? There are important reasons for revisiting our history. First, it helps to explain the context of race in America, and second, that knowledge informs perspective-taking across races. Both of these reasons are foundations for engaging the components of social empathy. I hope you will stay with me through this examination. In chapter 3, we will look closely at the power of “otherness” and how it blocks empathy. This is difficult for us because we are a nation with “otherness” in our own history. But there are ways to recognize these behaviors and learn from them, hence my reason for spelling it out here. I promise that, by the end of the book, I will share ways to build social empathy to mend relationships, bridge historical differences, and create civilizations that are healthy and productive for all.

Life can deal us some heavy blows, such as illness, injury, loss of a loved one, or violence. When we are dealing with such traumas, it may be difficult to focus on feeling empathic toward others. But the good news is that it seems as though with life adversity comes greater empathy.³¹ However, timing is important. While we are in the midst of our own struggles, we are less likely to engage empathically, but once we have gotten through them, we are likely to have stronger perspective-taking skills and feelings of empathic concern. There are likely different reasons depending on the person, but we do have a good understanding of why going through tough times and coming out okay can improve a person’s empathic abilities. Being in a difficult situation would call on unconscious survival mechanisms, which include hyper awareness of surroundings and what is going on with others in case they can give you cues on what to do or in case they are threatening and you need to defend yourself. Tuning in becomes life sustaining. Once we get through difficult situations successfully, we will have been rewarded for that extra vigilance and ability to read others. We will have learned how to overcome a tragedy or painful experience using self-other awareness and perspective-taking tools in addition to our heightened attention to affective triggers. These are key components of empathy.

I have a colleague and co-researcher, Cynthia Lietz, whose own work has centered on resilience, the extent to which we can bounce back after facing adversity. Over the years she has joined me in some phases of my research on empathy in part because she sees a strong connection between empathy and resilience. In fact, in research on children, those who understand the feelings of others and take their perspectives show more resilience.32 Cynthia’s research focused on families engaged in prosocial activities who have gone through trauma.³³ She was interested in finding out what drove them to help others after going through such difficult times themselves. Among her findings was that resilient families reported having a high degree of understanding of what others are going through based on their own experiences. To them, this was an important ability that developed from their adversity. Note that Cynthia’s research was on families who reported having healthy family functioning and had made it through the difficult times. We don’t know about those families who were still struggling and did not feel resilient. But for those families who showed resilience, they felt their empathic understanding had improved because of their experiences.

Let me make one last point about adversity and empathy. In chapter 3, we will look at what it means to be an outsider and how that affects empathy. The short version of the relationship between being outside the dominant or majority culture and empathy is that when we are different from the mainstream, we are more conscious of our difference. Although not all minority or outsider statuses involve adversity, they often do. Being in the minority means tuning in to how those in the majority act so we can blend in or at least not stick out. Reading others can become an important skill for outsiders. Thus, forms of adversity in the way of being an outsider or minority can also enhance empathic abilities.

Yes, although it is complicated according to new research. In a study of couples who reported instances of not feeling understood by their partners, people with high levels of empathy felt more stress and disappointment at not being understood. This could be a consequence of being able to feel emotions deeply, or it could suggest an emotional oversensitivity due to being highly empathic. The good news is that in a follow-up one year later, the stressful disappointments did not negatively affect their relationships.34 Another recent study considered whether empathy between parents and their adolescent children is beneficial or might come at a cost within families.³⁵ Being the parent of a teenager can be stressful as the child goes through adolescent development. We would like to think that being empathic parents would be soothing for children and create a strong family connection. The researchers found that indeed parental empathy was helpful for adolescents. The young people with more empathic parents showed better ability at handling their emotions and lower levels of physiological stress. It may be that having parents who are empathic and can respond appropriately to adolescents’ needs creates a less stressful environment at home and may help young people navigate the emotional ride of adolescence. For the parents, higher levels of empathy related to feeling good psychologically but were accompanied by higher levels of physiological stress. Being empathic with children likely does give parents a sense of well-being because they are better connected and can feel the positive emotions that come from being supportive and understanding. However, this empathic connection might be physically demanding for parents. Empathy for their adolescent children can be exhausting. Stepping into the lived reality of others, especially when it is your own child’s life, requires a good deal of your own emotion regulation to master what your empathic insights are discovering.

Both studies suggest that there is an intensity to empathy with those who you are very close to, with romantic partners in the first study and adolescent children in the second. Does this mean there can be too much empathy? I would say that it is not a matter of quantity but rather a matter of the strength we have in the part of empathy that relies on our emotion regulation, our ability to handle the feelings we pick up from others and our reactions to processing those feelings. In fact, understanding the components of empathy can prepare us to know that we are likely to mirror strong affective and emotional feelings with our closest family members. These shared feelings can help us to gain perspective and understanding. But to do so well, we need to be sure we attend to our own emotions and develop the skills to handle the intensity of those emotions.

Psychopathy is defined as antisocial behavior. It is a condition that includes a number of behaviors that come together: a sense of dominance and fearlessness, callousness that is exhibited by self-interest with little to no regard for others, and an impulsiveness that lacks control of emotions.⁴¹ Even if we did not have research showing that those with psychopathic tendencies have little to no empathy, the characteristics that describe psychopathy are opposite to what one needs for empathy. Being fearless means that one disregards fear, which, as I already pointed out, is a key element of attachment and needing others; self-interest with no regard for others blocks the key empathy components of self-other awareness and perspective-taking; and impulsiveness suggests that there is no emotion regulation. While it is difficult to know whether psychopathy is a condition that prevents having empathy or whether not developing empathy contributes to being psychopathic, we do know that where there is psychopathy there is very little if any empathy. Thus, understanding how people do not become empathic is also important to society. In chapter 3 we explore in more depth the reasons why we may see a lack of empathy.