WHEN I FIRST presented the title of this chapter as a possible book title, I got polite responses that suggested I was being naïve and oversimplifying how to address real-world problems. The concern was that I made it sound like empathy is the answer to all social ills, which seemed too easy and superficial. Before I make my case that social empathy spread widely can indeed make the world a better place, let me clarify a few things. I think empathy is not easy, and to be empathic we have to work at it every day, even those of us with high levels of both interpersonal and social empathy. Although some components of empathy may come naturally to us, developing the full array of empathy and maintaining it on a daily basis is a very advanced ability. Throughout history, human beings have made progress in becoming more empathic. In the United States we have taken hundreds of years to develop enough social empathy to do away with slavery, forbid public lynchings, outlaw crimes based on hatred of certain groups, and develop greater tolerance of people who are different from original dominant groups. Despite such progress, we still have numerous public laws and rules that do not reflect empathic understanding; we still have intolerance of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and physical differences; we still lack empathic insight into the lives of people who are different from ourselves; and we have never made a public reckoning or apology for the cruel displacement of ancestral Native Americans nor for the brutal enslavement of ancestral African Americans. Developing empathy is a process for both individuals and society. Being fully empathic requires success at interpersonal empathy, followed by cognitive training to gain social empathy.
Interpersonal Empathy and Social Empathy Are Linked
Fully engaging in all aspects of empathy requires first enhancing awareness of our surroundings and other people, followed by our willingness to develop a deeper understanding of what it all means. The initial part of that work is to develop one’s interpersonal empathy skills. The second part is to build on those skills to become socially empathic. This takes work. It helps to understand how the two forms of empathy fit together.
Let’s do a quick review of what we know about empathy. Human beings survive best when they can read other people and other people can read them. Because of our evolutionary imperative to survive, our empathic feelings are strongest for those others who will help us survive and reproduce our species. In early human history, this meant those who were part of our tribe, those who would band with us to improve our chances for survival and reproduction. That meant those who were closest to us because there were no means to travel great distances. And those closest to us were those who most likely looked like us. This tendency, which was very useful in early human history, is likely deeply embedded as a result of passing this ability on genetically and through social learning. However, moving forward in human history, relying only on those who physically resembled us and were part of our small tribe constrained human development.
To expand beyond geographic areas in pursuit of resources, sometimes to enhance survival and sometimes to enhance power, required expansion of contact with different groups, cultures, and ideas. Our tribal instinct, which fosters a bias toward greater interpersonal empathy for those who are like us, limits the expansion of societies. Being wary and fearful of people who are different from us may have been helpful for early survival, but today it creates an “us versus them” mentality that is neither helpful nor healthy for a democratic society. There are extremist groups who want to create separate societies by race, but what does that really mean? For example, does such an all-white group plan to not have commerce with people of different races or ethnicities? Do they plan to not buy products made outside of the United States? What about products that are made by people of different races here in this country? Do they choose to live in all-white enclaves? And if they do, do they plan to do all the work involved in keeping up their community, such as farming to feed themselves, sewing their own clothes, and building their own roads? Or by separatism do they mean they are free to live in their all-white enclave but live off the work of others who are of different races and ethnicities? We already had that system; it’s called slavery.
The reality of today is that we are a global, multicultural world. We eat food that is grown all over the world, picked and processed by people of different races and ethnicities; we wear clothing made by people from many different countries with fabrics made in other countries; we drive cars that are assembled in one country from parts made in another. We are not a homogenous tribe that keeps to itself. We are members of the largest tribe in the world—the tribe of humanity. (The only way to live as separate tribes is to turn back history like some small groups like the Amish do; in our free society, groups can do that under the mantle of freedom of religion but do so by shunning modernity.) The task of social empathy is to overcome our biases based on small tribalism to embrace the diversity of our large tribalism of the human species. Why? Because that large tribalism allows us to recognize our connection to others, to see that we are part of a larger community. That broader perspective paves the path to economic and social growth.
The research on empathy that I have been involved in over the years has helped me to better understand the connection between interpersonal and social empathy. My research team analyzed responses given on the Social Empathy Index by hundreds of students.1 We hypothesized that people would fall across a spectrum of low to high interpersonal empathy and low to high social empathy. Furthermore, we suspected that the levels of interpersonal and social empathy would be linked, and that it would be unlikely to have high social empathy without a high level of interpersonal empathy. Our findings supported this relationship. The majority of participants had equal levels, that is, those who were low in interpersonal empathy were also low in social empathy, the same as with those who scored medium and high. A small amount, less than 5 percent, scored high in social empathy but low in interpersonal, and an even smaller number, less than 2 percent, scored high in interpersonal empathy but low in social empathy. The abilities seem to go hand in hand. Almost half the group scored in the medium levels of both interpersonal and social empathy, with one-third reporting low levels and only one out of six scoring high in both. In recent research done with a broader population of people across several states in the United States, my colleagues and I discovered similar findings. The majority of people have the same levels of interpersonal and social empathy, with a smaller number at the high end than in the middle or low ends, and very few scored high in social empathy without also being high in interpersonal empathy.2
It is not surprising that interpersonal empathy is linked to social empathy. What makes the link? Attention to context. With interpersonal empathy, we not only mirror and read the behaviors of others but also do it while taking in the context because we are sophisticated cognitive beings. For example, in a brain imaging study people viewed video images of the action of a hand holding a teacup.3 Although the action never changed, the settings did—one had no background, the second had a beautifully set table suggesting that a tea party was about to take place, and the third had a messy table with the same tea party items, portraying the end of a party. The task of grasping the tea cup was the same in all the videos, but the contexts differed. Brain activity for the grasping action was the same, but the cognitive processing differed across the three contexts and even differed from seeing just the context without the hand holding the teacup. We have the ability to mirror the grasping while at the same time changing our neural processing depending on the context. Consider another example. Again using brain imaging, researchers tested the neural activity of participants viewing pictures of hands being injected by a needle.4 One group was given no explanation, while the other group was told that they were viewing a biopsy needle being injected into an anesthetized hand so there was no feeling of pain. Both groups had brain activity that showed automatic response to pain (they mirrored the action), but the group with the explanation of what was going on had additional brain activity in the areas of the brain that involve self-other awareness and perspective-taking. The research shows us that we may have an immediate mirroring reaction to what we see, but we take in the context and make meaning of it through our cognitive or thinking abilities. We often do that unconsciously when we interact with another person. Broadening our thinking to include a more developed, and hence conscious, analysis of the context can expand our understanding of others. The social empathy component of contextual understanding is key for us to make meaning out of our empathic feelings in a broader way.
The other component of social empathy, macro perspective-taking (which includes a sense of self-other awareness), builds on our individual ability of stepping into the shoes of another by applying it to other groups. That means not just looking at individuals but also thinking about what it might be like to be part of a different race, culture, gender, or any other group defined by characteristics different from your own. How does macro perspective-taking differ from interpersonal empathy perspective-taking? The difference is that we consider what being part of a different group means across all walks of life. For example, in the summer of 2016 there was a video of a young boy being rescued from a bombed building in Aleppo, Syria. The video of the rescue and the photo of the five-year-old boy, bloodied, covered in dust, and sitting in an ambulance, went viral and was viewed by millions.5 It definitely sparked strong feelings, as we would expect of other human beings watching the shocking imagery. The first feelings of mirrored pain and fright were our shared affective response. This may have prompted thoughts about what could be done for this little boy, reflecting self-other awareness and perspective-taking. We had engaged in interpersonal empathy. For some, the next step was thinking about what it means to be a child living in a war-torn city, followed by attempts to understand what the political and social reasons for such violence were. It involves stepping into the society and understanding the different groups, who they are, their history, and what they want. This is contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking. The interpersonal empathy level is important; it connects us to another human being, even from thousands of miles away. The social empathy level leads us to understand what motivates groups to behave the way they do and what it means to be a part of that group, not just in that moment, but throughout history. Using social empathy as our viewing lens can move us to understand complicated social and political situations.
Viewing the world with social empathy is a tall order and takes a lot of time and energy, more than we have for every social issue. I am not suggesting that we drop everything and learn about all cultures and groups. What I am advocating is that when we face situations that we want to understand, we need to take the time to be socially empathic by engaging in contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking. A picture may put a face to the war in Syria, prompting news coverage as well as more details about who was fighting and why. The more we contextualize our knowledge and engage in macro perspective-taking, the deeper our understanding.
Increasing empathy may not guarantee action, but as discussed in chapter 2, it is related to prosocial behavior and can be the impetus for taking action such as being altruistic or cooperative. So too with social empathy. With the example of the young boy in Syria, thinking more broadly through social empathy can move us to advocate for bringing more Syrian refugees into this country, sending international aid, helping in the efforts to free Syrian citizens being held as hostages, or pressuring the Syrian government to end hostilities. In addition to motivating us to take broader action, being socially empathic has the benefit of helping us to feel part of the larger society, which is empowering.6 We feel that we can have an impact on the world outside us, that we matter and make a difference. Taking in the larger context not only informs us about what others do and why but also joins us with those others in meaningful ways.
Social Empathy Is a Way of Thinking
While interpersonal empathy is built on the unconscious mirroring of actions that are then processed in an individual’s brain, social empathy is a mindset, a way of seeing the world and framing your thinking. Yes, it involves certain abilities and training and is built on interpersonal empathy, but more than anything it is choosing how we want to view the world. It requires that we step into the shoes of many others, especially people who do not look like us, do not live near us, and may not speak the same language. I use the metaphor of a camera: looking at the world through a close-up lens is interpersonal empathy, while looking at the world through a wide-angle lens is social empathy.
What does it matter if we are interpersonally empathic but do not progress to be socially empathic? In chapter 1 I introduced the interpersonal empathy component of perspective-taking with the example of trying to understand what life might be like living in poverty as a parent with young children receiving public assistance. That is an individual perspective. It is important and helpful in gaining greater awareness into the lives of people who are different. But it does not transfer over to understanding how that person got to where he or she is. This requires a broader empathic view. This requires social empathy. This means considering the social empathy component of placing ourselves as members of other groups, ones that may be outgroups, and doing so while learning about their history and lived experiences. It may require learning new ways to look at social issues, which may mean practicing creating new neural pathways. What does taking a social empathy perspective look like?
The Path to Empathy
There is no one way to get there. It is not a straight line. It is a journey. But the good news is that the more empathic you become, the more others around you will be empathic. Mirroring is powerful. If we behave in positive ways, we can enjoy the return of that positive behavior. Of course, it is not a guarantee that all other people have the ability to mirror and be empathic, so you may not be rewarded with reciprocated empathy all the time. But my experience is that it works a lot more than it doesn’t, so practicing empathy regularly pays off.
It’s Never Too Late: We Can Learn Empathy
A person can learn to be empathic at any age. Many books and articles provide exercises that can help us to learn how to become more empathic. With seven components of interpersonal and social empathy, there are seven distinct areas of empathy to work on and improve. It would take numerous additional chapters to cover all the ways to teach empathy. Although I have no intention of doing that, in the epilogue I highlight a couple of ways we can teach social empathy, some on the small scale of a classroom and some on the large scale of a community or nation-state. Learning empathy is a life-long process.
Empathy, like learning a foreign language or learning to read, is much easier to learn when you are young. As children, our brains are malleable and can more easily adjust to changes in the way we gather input. This flexibility is called “neuroplasticity,” the ability of our brains to change as a result of different experiences we have and to adjust to new ways of thinking.7 This is the course of human development. The brain grows and develops its neural pathways as children take in new experiences. Although we do not know the exact mechanisms for changing the brain, we can see the results.
Scientists with expertise in neuroplasticity have conducted numerous experiments to test how adaptable our brains are to change. One revealing experiment had all participants learn a five-finger routine played on a keyboard with their right hand.8 They were then divided into two groups. The first group went on to practice the routine physically, while the other group was tasked with practicing mentally. Brain mapping techniques to view and measure brain activity showed increased cortical output for the trained right hand for both groups, and it increased over time. What was surprising was that after learning the task, not just the actual physical practice but also the mental imaging of the routine increased the brain’s activity in the area of the brain where the activity was mastered. This research demonstrated that the brain can be changed by physically experiencing an action as well as by mentally imagining that action. This dual process of learning reminds me of the numerous examples I have seen over the years watching the Olympics. Many of the athletes have talked about taking time to mentally visualize themselves doing their routines. I am sure this is done in part to sharpen their focus before performing, but brain research tells us that this mental imaging of doing a task has a strong impact on increasing one’s ability to physically perform the task.
This team of researchers, led by Alvaro Pascual-Leone of the Center for Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation at Harvard Medical School in Boston, has done a great deal of research on neuroplasticity. One interesting area of research focused on sensory deprivation, specifically the loss of sight and hearing, and how the brain compensates for the loss of these inputs over time. The research is conducted at a very sophisticated level of neural analysis. As you know, I am not a neuroscientist, so I apologize if I am oversimplifying this very detailed work. Based on my reading of the research, the human brain is capable of reorganizing neurocircuits. For example, with blindness, a person’s sense of where sound is coming from is enhanced, as is verbal memory. In someone who loses hearing, peripheral vision becomes enhanced. The brain seems to compensate for the loss of one input by enhancing others, using those regions of the brain to do different tasks.9
The researchers found another interesting characteristic of our brains. Other parts of the brain are recruited to help with the reorganization. The brain uses the area reserved for the lost sense as well as other areas of the brain. The rerouting can be unique to the individual, so the brain patterns might look different for each person. But what is shared is the ability of rerouting. This is good news for learning to be empathic. Our brain is malleable, so we can learn new skills even when we are older or have some neural damage. We have the cognitive abilities to process input to improve our self-other awareness, perspective-taking, emotion regulation, and contextual understanding. These empathic skills use multiple parts of the brain, some overlapping and some different. Even if some parts are not as capable as others, we now know we can tap the brain’s ability to reroute our cognitive processes to still learn new skills. It takes practice, but the plasticity of the brain allows for the creation of new neural pathways.
Poverty Tests Our Social Empathy
So what does taking a social empathy perspective look like? I spent twenty years of my career studying the social, economic, and political costs of poverty in the United States. It was trying to explain to students what it means to be poor in the United States that contributed to my thinking about social empathy. I was stumped by those students who seemed very concerned about the well-being of people but who were very hard lined about poverty. They felt welfare was an unearned and undeserved handout and were against it. Over the years I found that teaching about the context of poverty and trying to get students to imagine all the conditions that go along with it helped to generate a better understanding of what it means to be poor in America. This was what set me on the path to conceptualize and articulate social empathy. Thus, as I close this last chapter, I would like to share the analysis of poverty, following up on what I introduced in chapter 1.
As you may recall, studying the changes that were made in 1996 to “end welfare as we know it” was a strong impetus for my research on social empathy. In chapter 1 I discussed the first ten years of the program and how it had gone from a program that covered more than two-thirds of poor families to covering less than half. Being poor had not changed; what had changed was whether the government would help out. That was the first ten years. How about the second ten years? The Department of Health and Human Services reported to Congress on the program in 2016 in its Eleventh Report.10 In 2017 the Congressional Research Service compiled data on TANF (the cash assistance program that was at the heart of ending welfare as we know it) into a report for members of Congress.11 A look at the data from both these sources told me that I was right: this policy was not about helping people who were poor; it was about getting them off welfare. Before the 1996 legislation was passed, 82 percent of eligible families were in the program. This dropped to 28 percent in 2012. For children, the drop was from 85 percent to 36 percent. What happened? There were more than fifteen million children in poverty in 1995, and that number was the same in 2012. Yet TANF coverage had dropped precipitously. Why were so many eligible poor people not covered by the program, many more than in 1996? If we were changing “welfare as we know it” to help poor people move from government assistance to working and providing their own support, then the numbers in poverty should have been lower with the decrease in TANF coverage and the portion of eligible people covered by the program should have at least stayed the same.
You might be asking if these numbers are from advocacy groups or “political agitators.” I purposely chose to use resources from the government designed to inform members of Congress. The Congressional Research Service is nonpartisan; it exists solely to provide information to members of Congress from both parties. The data I used were collected and put into reports expressly for members of Congress making policy decisions. The data show that the “end of welfare as we know it” has been to remove the one and only program that provides cash assistance to poor families from the lives of millions of poor children. Why? Answering this question requires looking at what policy makers say and do. In chapter 1 I cited some of the rhetoric of 1996. Ostensibly, the reason was to promote self-sufficiency, getting people out of poverty by their own efforts. More recent comments help to explain the current state of TANF and public assistance. The sentiment expressed is that we don’t want to give “free stuff,” the term used by Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush when they were running for president in 2012 and 2016,12 or transfer money from the “makers to the takers,” as House Majority Leader Paul Ryan said about welfare when he was a vice presidential candidate in 2012.13 (In fairness, in the years since he has apologized for using those terms, but has not led any legislative efforts to change TANF to cover more of those who are eligible.) The purpose had changed. It wasn’t about helping people become self-sufficient; instead it was about not giving people aid because it was viewed as “free stuff.” (You may be saying that this sentiment was there twenty years ago, which is likely true. But it was not stated openly. The fact that the openly stated reason had changed shows a change in the context.) This is important social empathy contextual information. Those in power were expressing ideas that shed light on why, after twenty years of policy change, people were still poor and worse off in terms of coverage, yet government assistance continued to be cut.
I do understand the reluctance to provide cash assistance. Once people receive the money, we cannot control how they spend it. This irritates people because they feel they work hard and have earned the right to spend their money how they want. Giving government money to people not working feels like a slap in the face. From a mirroring perspective, if I work and you don’t, we are different and my connection to you is very weak or even hostile. You do not look at all like me.
I have had many students over the years share this view with me. I remember one young woman in particular. She came up to me after class and told me she was angry at a friend of hers because she got pregnant, had a baby, and now was staying home with the baby collecting government assistance. My student, on the other hand, was working several part-time jobs and going to college, in her view being productive and not living off the government. We chatted some about this unfairness. I asked her: What if I could guarantee she got the same amount of money as her friend but there would be one condition? She laughed and said absolutely she would take the money, so what was the condition? The condition was that she had to have a baby, just like her friend, and she had to care for that baby, just like her friend. She had to accept the life of her friend as her own. I was putting my student in the shoes of her friend. She laughed and said if she had a baby she could not go to school, and if she did not go to school and get a degree she could not get a good job. My point exactly. It is one thing to compare what I have to others, but empathy does not let me pick and choose which parts of my life to compare with the lives of others. That is the important step of self-other awareness and perspective-taking.
What is all this free stuff anyway? The cash assistance provided by the government averages about $375 a month for a family of one adult and two young children, which comes to $4,500 a year. That can only happen for a total of five years over a person’s lifetime. On the other hand, the official measure of poverty for that family of three is $20,780.14 We officially think a family of three is poor if their income falls below $20,780. But we think that giving them cash, $1,500 a year for each person, is too much. Let’s add in food support. The average family of three who is eligible for food support gets about $375 a month through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).15 This is not cash but rather credit to be used to purchase food items. It cannot be used for paper goods, cleaning supplies, diapers, alcohol, cigarettes, or other items that people purchase at grocery stores. It cannot even be used for prepared food from a deli counter, just basic food items. Some poor families, about one out of four, get housing support too. All told, if you add in all that free stuff, there are still 17 percent of children living in poverty.16 The best we do by giving government assistance drops the poverty rate 4 to 5 percentage points. In terms of real children, that changes the number of children in poverty from fifteen million to twelve million. Even after all the welfare programs give them free stuff, we leave millions of children to grow up poor.
I get all sorts of deductions on my tax return so I don’t have to pay as much in taxes, which means real money in my pocket, but that is not free stuff. So what is the difference? A big part of the difference is about us versus them: those who work versus those who don’t, those who have higher education versus those who don’t, those raising children with a partner versus those raising children alone, those who are middle to upper class and those who are low income to poor, and those who are white versus those who are people of color. These are the differences that are in play when we debate welfare. As I pointed out in chapter 1, those who make the policy decisions do not and have never lived as do most of the recipients of TANF. There is no walking in their shoes.
Looking at the policy changes made to welfare from the perspective of empathy suggests that the issue might have triggered personal concerns but not societal concerns. Those involved in this policy may have had good levels of interpersonal empathy, but I suspect they did not have the mindset of social empathy. They viewed poor people as individuals responsible for their own situations, not as part of our larger shared group of people living in the Unites States of America.
Social Empathy Can Broaden Our Focus
Maybe I have not convinced you that we provide minimal assistance to poor people. Suppose that you are right that we should not give people free stuff. Does it really make sense to cut back on all the programs that give people free stuff like food through SNAP, health care through Medicaid, or education through Pell Grants? Actually, there are a number of self-serving reasons for those of us who do not use these programs to want these programs to continue. If we expand our view of the context and imagine the experiences of other groups, we can see those of us who are poor as well as those of us who are not all in the same picture. First there is the economic connection. My sister works at a county hospital in which three-quarters of its patients are on Medicaid or Medicare. Her job as a nurse is paid for by the money collected by the hospital from the government payments made for the medical treatment given to all those patients. Her family is grateful for her paycheck. I work at a state university. My salary in part comes from direct state support and federal support through all the loans and grants my students use to pay their tuition, and I am very grateful for my paycheck. When a person with SNAP benefits uses them, that person is spending money in the community at a grocery store that employs people locally. These examples support the rationale behind government transfers.
When the government pays for things with resources that get spent right away, there is an economic stimulus effect. I know that most people associate this line of thinking with liberals and Democrats, but that is not always true. Republican president George W. Bush, once in 2001 and again in 2008, pushed for tax rebates, money sent directly to American households with the goal of having them spend the money to stimulate the economy. I remember getting my $300 check. It was not life altering, but I did feel like it was easy to spend because it was unexpected. It may seem silly to expect a check of $300 dollars to make a big difference. In 2008, the program transferred $158 billion across 128 million households.17 It might not have been huge for each family, but that much money pumped into the economy, most of which was spent quickly and locally, was significant at the time. It was significant because it was money that was used and passed through many sets of hands. However, one-time government transfers such as the Bush tax rebate do not make a big difference in the long term. That is where programs that transfer money on a regular basis like SNAP benefit all of us.
The SNAP program transfers $70 billion a year that can only be spent on food items.18 The people who qualify for the program are in economic need, so they spend their allotments right away. This has the effect of the government pumping billions of dollars into local grocery stores, which pay the salaries of workers, who then spend their paychecks on rent, cars, clothing, and other consumer products. When the grocery store sells what it stocks on the shelves, it orders more groceries from producers, who then need more supplies to bake bread or grow tomatoes to sell in the grocery aisles. This is called the “multiplier effect,” an economic term that describes the phenomenon that for every dollar spent there is more than a dollar in wealth created, which increases the more times that dollar changes hands.
I have seen the mathematical computations that support this concept, all of which are complicated, and I lack the skills to fully explain. In table 8.1 I have put together a very simplified version of this math. Suppose the government gives $1,000 to a person to spend on his or her daily living. Some of that money gets “lost” in the way of taxes or savings, but most of it gets spent. In my simple example, $200 gets lost, but the rest is spent. After the initial spending, there is $800 left to spend by others who were paid from the original $1,000 transfer. Then there is $600, on down to zero. If you total up the column of money available to be spent (the first column on the left), it equals $3,000, which shows a multiplier of three: the initial $1,000 passed hands and was spent by others, creating an economic effect of three times the original amount. This is the multiplier effect.
The Multiplier Effect
| Money Available to Spend |
Money “Lost” through Savings, Taxes, Foreign Spending, etc. |
Money Spent, Which Moves to Next Row for Others to Spend |
| $1,000 |
($200) |
$800 |
| $800 |
($200) |
$600 |
| $600 |
($200) |
$400 |
| $400 |
($200) |
$200 |
| $200 |
($200) |
$0 |
The effectiveness of government transfers to stimulate the economy has worked. Maybe you think some of that is okay but that if we do too much of it, people will just sit around and not do anything but collect their check or food stamps. Would you? Would a check for $1,500 per year and food coupons worth on average $1,500 per year keep you home, doing nothing but “living on the dole”? Imagine yourself getting this level of “free stuff” and think about how much it would change your desire to work, earn more money, and be able to buy things. Still not convinced? Maybe the economic argument is not strong enough to convince you that we should take a socially empathic view of public policy.
What about the moral aspect? Remember that empathy is highly correlated with moral behavior. Morality is something we cherish in the United States; at least all of our religions seem to agree on that. Social inequality and deprivation is a moral issue. Do we want to live in a country in which one out of every five children grows up in poverty? And if that child is black or Hispanic, one out of every three grows up in poverty. We know a lot about the problems with growing up in poverty, including the physical deprivation of unhealthy living quarters, poor nutrition, and family stress. How many of us would choose to live in poverty? Very few because we know it is not a healthy or safe way to live. There are millions of families who are near poor, with income below even double the poverty level, about $40,000 per year for a family of three. One-third of white families and 60 percent of black and Hispanic children are in families with this low level of income. Thus, there are not only very poor children but also more children growing up in struggling low-income families. Why do we want to raise generations of children who live in homes stressed by poverty? Is it too expensive to take care of children?
Poverty can be better understood through social empathy. Poverty is measurable and changeable. We have evidence that raising people’s financial means works. Do you know what the most successful government program at fighting poverty is? Social Security. Without the retirement, disability, and survivor benefits of Social Security and health insurance through Medicare, another 22 million people would be in poverty, an increase from 13.5 percent to 20.5 percent.19 You may be thinking that Social Security is different from welfare. People appreciate Social Security and consider it an earned right because they have paid into it in order to get benefits. That is true today, but the amount received through monthly benefits and health care is more than what people have paid in. A couple retiring today who earned average wages over their lifetime, working from age twenty-two until retirement at age sixty-five, would have paid in about $700,000 in taxes but receive over a million dollars in benefits.20 Our support of Social Security is so strong and positive that we accept that it is costly to us as a nation.
We make policy decisions that dictate where we spend our money as a nation. We also make policies about how much money people must contribute to be part of society, that is, how much and what gets taxed. One of the arguments for why we do not provide more resources for people who are poor is because we would have to change our budget either by changing our priorities of what we spend money on or by raising more money through taxes. Although neither is politically easy, it is a choice that we as a nation make.
I was trying to figure out where we could find money to help poor people. In my research on the national budget, I found something called “tax expenditures,” which is an interesting way of saying tax breaks through special exceptions, deductions, and exemptions. I counted over two hundred tax breaks listed by the Congressional Joint Commission on Taxation for a total of $1.2 trillion dollars that normally would be paid in taxes if it were not for all the exceptions.21 Some of these tax breaks are common to us, such as the deduction for mortgage interest we pay on our homes and charitable donations. Others benefit corporations, such as depreciations on business properties. Others are more specific like credit for orphan drug research or timber growing. Those of us who benefit from these exceptions don’t typically think of them as a break. But each one was a policy decision made as a deliberate choice to forego taxes paid to the government. The point I am trying to make is that using social empathy as the lens through which we view the circumstances of other people’s lives and through it imagining what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes, we might consider a particular tax credit not as valuable as raising extra funds to go to the poorest families.
In fact, the tax policy debates in Congress during the fall of 2017 and the actual policy that was passed made that very point—sort of. Congress members advocated for the elimination of some deductions and exemptions to increase government revenue. But that extra revenue was not targeted for poor people or medical care; rather, it was directed to the top earners and corporations (by way of tax breaks for those two groups). The argument made was that extra money in the hands of the top income earners and corporations would encourage them to expand and ultimately create new jobs. That may happen, but it takes time, and it “trickles down.” This term reflects the economic theory behind their rationale. Although referred to as “trickle down theory,” it is more officially called “supply-side economics,” that is, enhancing those at the top who are the suppliers to then pass on the benefits they accrued. If lawmakers wanted to get more jobs and support to those who are in greatest need, they would simply use our current system of getting resources in the hands of those who are most likely to use them and thereby tap the multiplier effect. Instead, they chose the much slower path that might or might not work, given how long it takes and what can happen to the economy in the meantime.
As I tell my students, public policies are choices that are socially constructed. These policies can be changed. History is full of examples like ending slavery; granting all people the right to vote; creating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and legalizing same-sex marriage, just to name a few. Each of these major policy changes reflected awareness and understanding of the lives of people who benefited from these changes. That is social empathy.
Social Empathy Can Lead to Social Movements
Unfortunately, waiting for policy makers to become socially empathic seems to take forever. Instead, social empathy on the part of citizens can mobilize people to advocate on behalf of themselves or other groups to get policy makers to understand the feelings and needs of others. The civil rights movement of the 1960s is a very strong example of this: those in power were not willing to pass laws to ensure voting rights and civil protections until major social upheaval pushed enough of them to pass civil rights policies. The civil rights movement promoted socially empathic insight to see what life was like for those in powerless oppressed communities.
Today we have seen a great deal of attention on unacceptable behavior by those in power through the MeToo movement, which is centered on the belief that women who have been victimized should be heard and believed. The phrase was already in use beginning in 2006, when Tarana Burke, an advocate for young women of color, created it and used it as part of the organization she started, Just BE Inc. I think the words Tarana posted on the group’s website show what empathic insight can do.22 She recalls her experience with a young girl confiding to her about being sexually abused. Tarana’s reaction was to send the young girl to someone else because it was so difficult to hear. As she confides, she could not bring herself to say “me too.” Tarana’s empathic insight of that moment propelled her to commit her life to doing that. When actress Alyssa Milano tweeted the idea of sharing me too stories after the allegations of sexual victimization by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein became public, the response was immediate and widespread. Millions of women shared their stories via Twitter, Facebook, and other means of communication. Men also came forward.
The stories of what happened to so many women are not new, but that we believe them is. It shows not just a respect for their experience but also a feeling of shared emotional experience, that of being victimized. If this expression of empathic insight helps us to understand the experiences of those who work for, or aspire to work for, someone in power, then we expand our understanding from personal stories to shared experiences and become aware of historical context. When those who are powerless are heard and supported, that awareness can also change how those in charge treat those who work for them. It can spread to policy making. When this happens, we see how interpersonal empathy leads to social empathy.
One Last Thing
When I teach, I like to close with the “takeaway” for the day, the point that “if you only remember one thing, this is it.” In closing this book, I would like to share the takeaway, the thoughts that more than anything I hope will stay with you.
We are hard wired to share other people’s feelings and to mirror their experiences. We can choose to ignore these feelings or we can think about what they mean on a personal and societal level. It takes work to do this thinking. It takes skill to keep straight what feelings are yours and what feelings belong to others. It can be exhilarating and exhausting to walk in the shoes of others and to imagine their lives. We need the strong ability of taking care of our own emotions while doing this. We need to think broadly and to consider what others have experienced over time because of the characteristics that define who they are. History and context matter. Understanding all this and being understood is the full array of empathy; it is what makes human beings unique and brings us together as the tribe of humanity. When we engage empathically, we not only become better companions to our friends and families but also connect with people from all walks of life in ways that protect us from fear and misconceptions about those others.
It may be naïve or simplistic of me to ask us to be more socially empathic in order to create a better world. I willingly accept that critique because if even just a few more of us become a little more empathic, it will impact others. Those who are influenced to be more empathic will in turn influence others. That is the history of empathy. Empathy spreads from one person to another, from one group to another, until differences fade and “they” becomes “us.”