THE PSYCHOLOGIST DAN Batson stressed out seminary students one at a time, and their empathy plummeted. My colleagues and I convinced one person at a time that they could grow their empathy, and in response, they did. Tony McAleer counsels hate group members one at a time, and Raymond Mar studies how fiction helps people understand each other, one reader at a time.
Many of the “nudges” we’ve encountered build empathy in tightly controlled environments, such as laboratories or counseling sessions. But we don’t live in a vacuum; we’re part of a larger world, governed by social norms—the beliefs, attitudes, and customs shared by our communities and institutions. Norms affect us in all sorts of ways. People find foods tastier, faces more attractive, and songs catchier when others like them. We litter and vote more often after learning that others have. The extent to which a scandal outrages us, a political candidate invigorates us, or climate change frightens us depends on how people around us feel.
We copy what other people do and think, or at least what we think they think. One problem here is that we’re often wrong. This is because extreme voices tend to dominate and can be mistaken for majority opinions. Psychologists once interviewed freshmen at Princeton weeks after they got to college, and then again the following spring. They asked two questions: How much do you enjoy binge drinking, and how much does the average Princeton freshman enjoy it? In the fall, students felt lukewarm about it but believed the average freshman was more enthusiastic. This has to be a mistake: Students’ own opinions, by definition, make up the actual average. But freshmen likely regale their peers with stories about ice luges, not Thursday night study sessions. Loud, unusual opinions crowded out the quieter majority, and students conjured up an imaginary, hard-partying “average” student. By spring, freshmen reported that they enjoyed binge drinking more than they had before. They had invented a norm, then given in to it.
Many of our strongest cultural currents run against empathy. We learn that success requires competition, sometimes even cruelty. As Gordon Gekko put it in Wall Street, “Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” This jibes with Darwin’s concern about kindness: People who stop to help others won’t have the time to innovate, and will inevitably finish last. As we’ve seen, this is a myth—empathic individuals are more likely to succeed in a number of ways. But popular norms have yet to catch up with this insight.
In our polarized era, norms weigh even more heavily against care. As with campus drinking, extreme voices on cable news and social media dominate airspace. They are more partisan than most of us, but they attract so much attention that it’s easy to confuse them for majority opinion. Pundits counsel that the other side is an existential threat. Compromising with—or even listening to—outsiders is a form of treason. People conform to this imaginary norm, and it becomes harder to hold on to their own empathy.
A hate group member might be inspired by Tony but soon be surrounded by people who encourage him to rejoin the race war. An ex-prisoner might find hope in a Hemingway story, then go to a job interview where he is reduced to the crime he committed. Prevailing beliefs act on us like gravity; we can escape them momentarily, but more often than not we get pulled back in.
Other norms, though, encourage empathy, and some of these are gaining steam. Many moral revolutions begin when extreme voices demand that we acknowledge one another’s experiences. Foot-binding in China and slavery in the United States persisted for centuries, until people came together to abolish them. At the turn of the twenty-first century, few proponents of gay rights dreamed that same-sex marriage would be nationally recognized in the United States. Fifteen years later, it was. And in the fall of 2017, the New York Times and the New Yorker reported on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and assault, spawning new awareness—especially among men—of the fear and pain women endure. Within months, actors had lost contracts, professors were barred from campuses, and Alabama elected its first Democratic senator in twenty-five years, all because people decided they would no longer tolerate abuse.
Conformity gets a bad rap, but in these cases, it led to social change. In laboratory studies, it can spur people to act kindly, for instance, giving to charity or standing up against bigotry. We catch one another’s empathy, as well. In a series of experiments run by my own lab, participants read stories about the struggles of homeless individuals. We then showed them how others had responded after reading each story. In fact, these responses were created by us. Half of our participants learned they lived in a caring world, in which their peers empathized a great deal. Half learned that they lived in a callous world, where their peers barely cared at all. Individuals followed suit—reporting greater empathy if their peers had done the same. They then acted upon this feeling: Given the opportunity to donate to a local homeless shelter, people who believed their peers felt great empathy gave more than those who thought their peers were unaffected.
In that study, my lab created empathic and unempathic norms out of whole cloth, and our participants conformed to them. But outside of the lab, we don’t need to make anything up. All around us, people act cruelly while others act kindly; people live happily while others are miserable. By focusing on the positive, we can use the force of conformity to pull people toward healthy or kind actions.
The researchers who documented alcohol norms on campus recently did just that. In a newer study, they engaged freshmen in group discussions—revealing that their peers did not actually love binge drinking as much as they suspected. Simply pointing out this norm to them reduced students’ alcohol use in the year that followed.
The same goes for empathy-positive group attitudes. Civil institutions, HR guidelines, and codes of conduct are all norms in contract form: an agreement to respect one another’s experiences and to exclude people who refuse to do so. Empathy is personal, but it’s also collective. Organizations that emphasize kindness flourish, even when it comes to the bottom line. In 2012, Google found that its most successful teams were unusually “people oriented”: composed of individuals who tuned into one another’s feelings and supported each other. The design and consulting firm IDEO encourages employees to set aside time to help colleagues, and considers generosity during hiring and promotion.
Any organization, private or public, large or small, loose or formal, can move in this direction. We are not merely individuals fighting to empathize in a world of cruelty. We are also communities, families, companies, teams, towns, and nations that can build kindness into our culture, turning it into people’s first option. We don’t just respond to norms; we create them.
THE ONLY GIRL in a family of seven kids, Sue Rahr has never been afraid to tussle. In one of her first patrols with the King County Sheriff’s Office near Seattle, she was called to deal with a drunk man harassing customers outside a minimart. “I told him, ‘Look, we’ve got a choice. Either you can go to jail, or you can just go to detox, sleep it off, and everybody’s happy.’ ” She was midsentence when he sucker-punched her. “I immediately reacted not with what I learned at the [police] academy, but what I learned with my brothers….I grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to the ground, and as he’s on his way down I kicked him in the nuts.”
They wrestled for about a minute before Rahr managed to cuff him, scraping her knuckles on the asphalt in the process. “I never felt the pain because I was so exhilarated by the fight. My supervisor screamed onto the scene, and later said, ‘You were standing there with the biggest smile on your face, just dripping blood.’ ” That night, she told her husband, “Now I understand why boys like to fight; it’s fun!”
Rahr also used other skills she’d picked up around her brothers in her policing. “Growing up with them, I had to learn to maneuver, outsmart, and influence.” In King County, new cops spend their first three months with a field-training officer (FTO) who ensures they can fulfill their duties, including combat. Sue was the only officer who made it through that time without ever needing to use force (this was before her minimart encounter). Her FTO left that part of her assessment blank.
Rahr now heads police training for the entire state of Washington. Over a half dozen years, she’s built a new system with new expectations for cops, hoping to bring empathy back to a profession that some feel has lost its way.
Modern policing is a surprisingly young line of work. Two centuries ago, patchwork forces settled disputes and punished crimes, even in London. By the 1820s, it became apparent that London required more organized law enforcement, but many of its citizens disagreed. They envisioned military forces stomping through their streets, ready to strip away their liberties. The task of easing their fears fell to Sir Robert Peel, Britain’s home secretary. Peel was a brilliant scholar and a canny politician—he’d later serve two terms as Britain’s prime minister. He realized that a police force could succeed only if it had citizens’ cooperation and inspired their trust.
In 1829, Peel introduced the Metropolitan Police Act, calling for a force of several hundred constables (they were, and still are, called “bobbies” in his honor). Bobbies lived restricted lives. They worked seven days a week, couldn’t vote, and had to ask approval to marry or even have a meal with citizens. They were required to wear their uniform—navy-blue tails and top hats—even when off duty, to assure citizens they were not being spied on. Along with the act, Peel laid out a vision of policing that today reads like an idealistic fantasy. “The power of the police,” he wrote, “is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behaviour.” He demanded that officers “use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.” Most famously, he wrote, “The police are the public and the public are the police.”
As policing made its way across the Atlantic, Peel’s ideas came with it. American police officers typically lived in the communities they patrolled. They arrested thieves, but also operated soup kitchens and helped immigrants find work. They were rewarded based not on the number of arrests they made, but on their ability to ensure an orderly beat. In the twentieth century, cops became less neighborly and more professional, but they still upheld cooperation as a core part of their job. Officers around the country pledged their commitment to “community policing”: a vague but warm notion that found them playing pickup basketball games and attending bake sales.
In recent decades, these ideals have eroded, in part in response to escalating violence. As the drug trade grew, criminals amassed weapons and were in some cases better armed than the police. In 1965, a routine traffic stop in Los Angeles exploded into a six-day riot; thirty-four people died and more than a thousand were injured. The following year, Charles Whitman lugged eight guns and seven hundred rounds of ammunition to the top of a University of Texas clock tower. Over the next hour and a half, he shot forty-four people, killing thirteen.
To many, it felt like America’s streets were becoming war zones. By the 1970s, about two officers were gunned down in the line of duty each week. At the same time, the police created their own battalions: special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units. SWAT teams were intended only for extreme situations, such as armed bank robberies, but their use soared: In 1980, SWAT teams were deployed about three thousand times; by 1995 this number had risen to thirty thousand, though the crime rate remained steady. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law that year’s National Defense Authorization Act. It included the 1033 program, under which police departments could request surplus equipment from the Department of Defense. By 2014, over $4 billion worth of hardware had streamed through the program. American policing entered the age of armored vehicles, matte black body armor, and assault rifles.
Along with military equipment, a new philosophy took root among American cops. The “warrior mentality” encouraged police officers to view themselves as combatants embedded in dangerous communities. This ideology spread quickly and appealed to many. It valorized cops’ bravery and honored the risks they take. It allowed them to band together like soldiers against a common enemy. But it also turned every non-officer into a threat. Cops across the country were conditioned to expect danger around every corner. In 2014, course materials from a New Mexico police training facility were obtained by the press. They instructed cadets that during every routine traffic stop they should “always assume that the violator and all the occupants of the vehicle are armed.”
No one encapsulates warrior philosophy better than Dave Grossman, the nation’s most prolific police trainer. Grossman delivers “The Bulletproof Warrior”—a frenetic, six-hour-long seminar—upward of two hundred times a year to new police officers, veteran cops, and groups of “armed citizens.” He paces across stages around the country, describing America as a violent fever dream. “The number of dead cops has exploded like nothing we’ve ever seen,” he pronounces, as though every audience member has a target on their back. In fact, the opposite is true: a police officer serving in the 1970s would be more than twice as likely to be killed in the line of duty than one serving in the past decade.
According to Grossman, the only way for cops to survive in this frightening world is to become frightening themselves, by always being prepared to use deadly force. He calms audiences’ apprehension about legal blowback. (“Don’t be afraid of being sued,” Grossman tells them. “Everybody gets sued. It’s just a chance for overtime.”) He tells them that the night after their first kill, they’ll have the best sex of their lives. And he warns them that if they are not ready to kill a murderer, his victims’ blood will be on their hands. Grossman wants police officers to turn killing into a reflex. Much of their training is already geared to doing just that: Three-quarters of police officers never fire their weapon in an entire career, but they nonetheless spend hundreds of hours firing at paper targets in the academy.
The warrior mentality places cops in a psychological powder keg. They come to believe that their only option is to dominate citizens rather than listen to them. Seth Stoughton, a professor of law and former police officer, describes this bind: “If I’m worried about never making it home again, I don’t really give a damn if I offend someone. Whatever emotional toll my actions take on them, it will feel less important than my survival.” Fear and anxiety also make violence more likely. Psychologists have demonstrated this through an unfun video game called the “weapons identification task.” Players watch as scenes flash across a screen: a schoolyard, a street corner, a park. In the middle of each, a man—either black or white—holds either a phone or a gun. If the man is armed, players press a key to “shoot” him; if he is unarmed, they press another to not shoot. Players are quicker to shoot black targets holding a gun and more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed black targets. Under stress, they grow even more trigger-happy and more racially biased.
Warrior policing shreds Peel’s principles. It also makes it harder for individual cops to go against the grain. A young, idealistic officer might want to help citizens, but in a warrior culture, that attitude would be mocked as dangerously naïve. Trainers will warn their new colleague that he’s surrounded by criminals, whether he wants to believe it or not. Odds are that eventually he’ll mold himself to fit the culture around him.
Police officers are safer than they have been in decades, but coming into contact with them is more dangerous. In the United States in 2017, almost five civilians were killed by police officers per day, more than twice as many as in the year 2000. Thanks to ubiquitous recording, this violence is more visible than ever. Over and over again, the nation sees another black or brown face for the first and last time as an unarmed citizen dies at police hands. This has led to a two-decade low point for public confidence in law enforcement, and for race relations more broadly.
Most cops just want to do their jobs and return home to their families; so do most of the citizens they pull over. But the distance between officers and the communities they’ve sworn to protect has never seemed greater.
RAHR WORKED IN the King County Sheriff’s Office for thirty-three years. She served in every unit, from sex crimes to gang violence, but spent her formative time in internal investigations. She encountered dozens of police misconduct cases, and after a while she found it hard to believe that every culprit was a rotten human being. Many of them had inherited their instincts from a broken culture. “I thought, rather than focus on bad apples, let’s think about the barrel.” In 2012, she took over as executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission (CJTC). Every law enforcement officer in the state comes through CJTC; by now, more than three thousand have trained under Rahr.
CJTC’s woodsy headquarters in Burien, Washington, recalls a college campus, at least if you can ignore the students marching in formation. The walls are covered with pictures of every CJTC recruit class. Members of class 1a, from 1938, look like Humphrey Bogart understudies from Casablanca. Rahr looks a little uncomfortable in her class 114 picture, from 1979. The week after I visit, CJTC will graduate class 735. Police officers spend nineteen weeks at CJTC; corrections officers, four. The training is relentless. As we stroll the grounds, a supervisor tells me about a recruit whose wife is being induced on Sunday. “I assume he’ll take Monday off.”
Much of CJTC’s curriculum is standard issue. Recruits spend 120 hours on defensive tactics, practicing baton techniques on muscular mannequins and sparring partners. In the shooting range, officers slowly pace sideways while firing at posters of stereotypical-looking criminals. Altogether, CJTC recruits fire about a million rounds a year. After each drill a white-mustached training officer retrieves spent shells using a specialized, caged cart like you might see scooping up golf balls at a driving range.
That’s where the similarities between CJTC and typical police training end. Above the academy’s entrance, a sign reads IN THESE HALLS, TRAINING THE GUARDIANS OF DEMOCRACY. This is meant to remind recruits of Rahr’s most important mandate: that they reject the warrior mentality and instead see themselves as caretakers of their community, working with citizens to keep everyone safe.
On every desk in every CJTC classroom, another motto is written on a folded, laminated card: LEED: LISTEN AND EXPLAIN WITH EQUITY AND DIGNITY. For decades, the psychologist Tom Tyler has demonstrated that powerful people—doctors with patients, police encountering citizens—garner respect when they are transparent, impartial, and attentive, even while delivering punishment. “I’ve had lots of people thank me for arresting them,” Rahr says, “or at least for being decent with them while I did it.” LEED is her encapsulation of Tyler’s ideas; she calls it “a Happy Meal version of a research smorgasbord.”
Guardianship is a poetic but fuzzy idea. On the ground in Burien, Rahr and her staff make it concrete, in three ways. The first is by example. Prior to Rahr’s arrival, CJTC operated like a boot camp. Drill sergeants broke down recruits and built them back up. The first time Rahr walked the halls, recruits snapped to attention as she passed. She found it startling, and useless. “We don’t need cops to salute,” she thought. “We need cops to talk.” Rahr stripped away the military style in favor of a more open atmosphere. “If the organization itself, as a culture, isn’t procedurally just to [recruits], then they’re more likely to go out into the field frustrated, thinking, ‘Well, this is all bullshit.’ ”
The second is classroom instruction, or as teacher Joe Winters affectionately calls it, “death by PowerPoint.” Recruits take classes on emotional intelligence, “heart math,” racial bias, and mental illness. They discuss how to tell whether someone who’s publicly naked is suffering from a manic episode or on a methamphetamine binge, and they practice talking people down from suicide and delusions. Lecturers remind recruits that when people commit crimes, they’re often in deep distress. “You’re seeing them in many cases on the worst day of their life,” Rahr explains. “They’re going to be acting like jerks, but that’s because of their situation.”
The third arm of guardian training takes place in “Mock City,” a gymnasium converted into fake stores and apartments, with most furniture replaced by foam boxes. It feels like a low-rent movie set, complete with actors who play criminals and victims. Here, recruits strap on wooden guns and practice managing volatile situations until they get it right.
The day I visit, Mock City is full of recruits who had failed their last session. If they fail again, they won’t graduate with the rest of their class. We head to a simulation in which a father (Joe Winters plays the part) is standing near a building. Two recruits arrive, and he tells them about his son, who is suffering a psychotic episode inside. “I’m afraid he’ll hurt himself, or me,” Winters says. The recruits burst in and find a young man sitting atop a bed in a room full of toppled foam boxes, holding a baseball bat and talking to voices in his head. The acting is not top-notch. “Stop talking to me!” he yells between bouts of mumbling and rocking, trying valiantly to capture the made-for-TV-movie version of schizophrenia. The recruits interview him, convince him to relinquish the bat, and apologetically cuff him.
Outside, Winters—no longer pretending to be the young actor’s father—asks what the plan is. “Take him to the hospital,” one recruit responds.
“On what grounds?” Winters counters. The recruit mentions the bat and broken property, but Winters isn’t buying it. “It’s not illegal to have a bat, or to break your own stuff. What did I say to you before you went in?”
The recruit freezes. He’s terrified, because he can’t remember the fear Winters described when playing the boy’s father. Without that, he has no legal cause for apprehending the son. As one trainer puts it, “Crimes need a victim, and lots of times victimhood depends on a person feeling threatened.”
It’s startling to see a future police officer this upset about failing to pick up on someone else’s feelings. But at CJTC, tuning into emotions is a core part of police training, and not only for the purpose of establishing grounds for arrest. This reflects Rahr’s viewpoint: “In law enforcement,” she explains, “empathy is still viewed as a weakness, or catering to political correctness, but really it’s critical to officer safety. Police officers deal with people in crisis, and having your trauma acknowledged lowers the tension. Listening is a de-escalation strategy.”
CJTC’S TRAINING HAS some important flaws. Trainers seldom consult with psychologists, and sometimes it shows. Recruits learn about their Myers-Briggs personality types, though that test is scarcely backed by research evidence. During a mental illness workshop, a trainer spent much of his time describing “excited delirium.” This drug-induced state renders people aggressive, insensitive to pain, and unnaturally strong—in other words, Hulk-like. I had never heard of this condition, and later learned that it is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but is often—and controversially—cited by cops to justify the use of force.
Nor does CJTC do much to educate recruits about race. They discuss bias in the classroom, but even Rahr describes that session as “a little antiseptic.” Race-based drills at Mock City have proven logistically difficult, she says, because of the lack of diversity in their pool of actors, but that is a thin rationale. Rahr once organized a discussion between recruits and a black community activist, which quickly devolved into a shouting match. Perhaps that means this is exactly the conversation more recruits need to be having.
Nonetheless, CJTC bakes empathy into police culture. In its ecosystem, professional success is tied to cooperation with citizens—a photonegative of Dave Grossman’s approach and a return to Peel’s principles. A warrior cop can’t do her job if she’s not ready to gun citizens down. A CJTC recruit can’t become a cop until she’s ready to hear them out.
Washington State is home to more than three hundred sheriff’s offices and police departments. Each has its own culture, and Rahr acknowledges that many are the opposite of hers. She imagines many of her recruits move to their new departments and meet field training officers who tell them to “get past that touchy-feely bullshit and do real policing.” But early research suggests that CJTC’s approach makes a difference even after cadets leave Burien. Its graduates report greater empathy than other cops, but they also show more care in their policing.
In a recent study, psychologists selected three hundred Seattle officers who worked in high-risk areas and ran them through LEED training. In the subsequent months, these officers used force 30 percent less often than their peers. CJTC’s approach to dealing with mental illness has also gained traction. In the past three years, Washington cops have shifted their tactics around mentally ill individuals: arresting fewer and hospitalizing more.
In the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama convened the Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Rahr was part of the task force, and her philosophy was adopted in its final report: “Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian—rather than a warrior—mindset,” it reads.
Guardianship values have slowly spread across the country. In 2017, LAPD chief Charlie Beck released a new policy demanding that his officers should “always be guided by compassion and empathy in all of their interactions” with homeless people. CJTC-style training has caught hold in Las Vegas; Stockton, California; and Cincinnati. Decatur, Georgia’s police recruitment video opens with its chief declaring, “We’re a very empathic department. We try our very hardest to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.”
Norms are changing, but it’s impossible to tell how much of a dent this will make in American policing writ large. For each volley of praise Rahr and CJTC receive, they lose support from skeptical peers. Twenty percent of CJTC’s senior staff turned over after Rahr introduced the guardian philosophy. In 2016, she spoke at the FBI National Academy’s annual conference; many regular attendees boycotted. Ozzie Knezovich, Spokane County’s sheriff, has been troubled by the officers he sees coming out of Rahr’s CJTC. “My field training officers tell me, ‘It’s scary, Sheriff. [CJTC recruits] will not engage, and it’s going to get one of them killed.’ ”
Knezovich was trained in Wyoming, at a college-style academy without military airs. “I was never taught to be a warrior,” he tells me. Knezovich thinks Rahr merely rebranded standard police ideals in prettier language and then took credit for them. Worse, he thinks that by raising the specter of warrior policing she has deepened the divide between police and communities. “The biggest challenge a chief has today is to convince law enforcement officers that the community cares about them, and then to convince the community that law enforcement cares about them.” When Rahr paints most American policing as a street war, “that decimates the public trust.”
Knezovich is passionate, but it is odd to lay the fear of cops at Rahr’s feet. Communities of color, especially, need no one’s help to see the police as a militaristic, volatile force. That needs to change one interaction at a time, but it requires a change in the culture. Consider Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a thirty-five-year-old father of two who is battling mental illness. In early 2015, Zambrano-Montes started throwing rocks at passing cars in Pasco, a small city in southeast Washington. When three police officers arrived, he threw rocks at them as well but was otherwise unarmed. In a video of the event, he runs across the street, fleeing from the officers. He is still running when they fire, killing him.
The video, like so many, seems like all the evidence one would need to prosecute the officers. Unlike most states, however, Washington required that an indictment prove an officer not only behaved violently but did so with “malice.” Barring telepathy, this rule makes it nearly impossible to convict police officers for excessive use of force. During my visit to CJTC, the officers in Zambrano-Montes’s shooting were cleared of all charges. Rahr supported the decision, adding that “the officers involved, as individuals, are really good guys.” She reminded me that most officers who kill do so inadvertently. “We generally don’t prosecute people for making an honest mistake….Prosecution is such an extreme response to bad judgment.”
Here Rahr is uncharacteristically disconnected from the public’s perspective. As a society, we do prosecute people for involuntary manslaughter and criminal neglect. And the term “honest mistake” is better suited to a mixed-up order at a restaurant than the killing of a civilian. But Rahr’s views on this are in line with those of almost every officer I meet at CJTC. They want me to know that most cops are nothing like the violent racists you see on YouTube or Periscope. They want me to know about the risks they take to protect even people who would like to see them dead. They have a point. Police and citizens come into contact hundreds of thousands of times a year, and the vast majority of these encounters end peacefully. Videos of police violence overshadow the goodwill of more than a million public servants.
But in another sense, it doesn’t matter what percentage of encounters go right, when the ones that go wrong look like executions. Rahr concedes that “the optics are terrible.” Other officers also mention optics but quickly add that those perceptions are wrong: based on biased reporting that throws cops under the bus.
This highlights a major tension at the heart of CJTC’s mission. Rahr and her team encourage kindness among cadets who, as officers, will face few consequences if they act cruelly. Peel’s principles hold that the police and citizens should join together in a single community. Training officers to befriend, listen, and operate fairly is an obvious step in that direction. But what does empathy mean without accountability? When an officer can kill you with legal impunity, having them ask how you feel is cold comfort.
Part of the problem is that even police officers who empathize with citizens often empathize more with one another. In a 2017 poll, 60 percent of the public thought that officer-involved shootings represented a broad problem with police culture. More than two-thirds of officers disagreed, calling them isolated incidents. When things go wrong, cops often circle the wagons.
Emile Bruneau, who works to build empathy in the face of conflict, has examined this sort of “empathy bias.” He recently asked Americans, Hungarians, and Greeks how they felt about their own group compared to outsiders they’ve historically disliked (Arabs, Muslim refugees, and Germans, respectively). He also asked about their willingness to cooperate across group lines. Highly empathic individuals didn’t necessarily support peaceful policies, especially if they cared more for their own group than outsiders.
This work has a surprising implication: Sometimes compromise is best served not by building empathy for outsiders, but by reducing empathy for insiders. This is a tall order for any group, but especially for cops. Doubting one’s friends is painful, and it is dangerous when you depend on them in high-risk situations. But in order for police officers to repair their relationships with wary communities, they may need to treat their colleagues with more skepticism, acknowledging wrongdoing even when it involves people they admire. Enforcing that norm could move us toward what Rahr describes as her ideal world, one in which “everyone who sees a police officer would have the initial reaction: ‘I’m safer.’ ”
A FEW MINUTES after he arrived in jail, Jason Okonofua was told to strip naked. When he got down to his underwear, he hesitated. He was sixteen years old. An hour before, he had been in his tenth-grade AP calculus class. This didn’t seem right. “I said take off your clothes!” the guard shouted.
Jason was in juvenile detention for only a few hours, but fifteen years later he remembers it vividly. “It implanted something inside me….‘You’re nothing, you have no rights whatsoever.’ ” For years he had done everything right: Jason was a straight-A student and a middle linebacker on the football team. He was poor and black, but he was working to make his own luck. Jail dissolved his confidence in minutes. “It was a feeling like no, none of that even matters; you still don’t have control over your life.”
Jason’s father and mother were born in Nigeria and Knoxville, respectively. “How they ended up together,” he tells me, “I have no idea.” They divorced when he was five, and the split hit his two older brothers hard. The oldest was nine at the time of the divorce and had been fast-tracked to a gifted and talented program. A decade later he graduated high school with a GPA of 0.57.
Jason did his best to avoid trouble, but he admired his brothers and wanted to be loyal to his family. Sometimes that meant backing them up in brawls or hanging out in the wrong circles. “Those few times could have changed my entire life if the police happened to show up at a certain time, or if I didn’t run when the police did show up.” One of them joined a gang, and both older brothers were expelled from schools all over Memphis. Jason was uprooted alongside them. Each school they landed in was poorer, blacker, and more prison-like than the last. By tenth grade Jason had attended seven, and was used to walking through metal detectors to get to class.
He had watched his brothers follow a clear path. “The first time they got in trouble fed into the next time,” Jason remembers, “and slowly but surely they stopped caring about getting in trouble.” School staff had often heard about the Okonofuas by the time they arrived, and their expectations laid track for the brothers to fail. “Teachers…would think ‘Oh, you’re a bad kid; as soon as you do something wrong we’re kicking you out. We don’t want you here.’ ” Jason aspired to do better, but in many teachers’ eyes, belonging to his family limited who he was allowed to be.
In the fall of his sophomore year, Jason was sitting at lunch when a senior handed him a flyer for a party. It read, “BYOBB: Bring Your Own Beer and Bitches.” Before Jason even knew what it was, a vice principal rounded up anyone holding a flyer and brought them to her office, where she handed out one-day suspensions. Jason looked around and thought, “I’m not one of these kids.” When his turn came he refused the suspension, adding that he needed to get back to studying. “Oh, okay, you’re going to be insubordinate?” the vice principal replied. “That will be a three-day suspension then.” Jason refused again. She called the school police officer and had him arrested for disturbing the peace.
The officer took Jason to a back room in the principal’s office, cuffed him, and began his report. They were alone. Like most people at the school, he knew Jason’s brothers. He looked at Jason and said, “I thought you were the good one.”
IN 2011, ABOUT three and a half million children were suspended from school, at more than double the rate recorded in 1975. “Exclusionary discipline,” which includes suspension and expulsion, skyrocketed in 1994 with the Gun-Free Schools Act, which mandated that any student caught with a firearm at school be suspended for one year. Over the years, “zero tolerance” policies spread beyond guns to knives, drugs, and threatening behaviors. Then the definition of “threatening” got fuzzy. Kids were suspended or expelled for chewing Pop-Tarts into the shape of guns, or taking “drugs” such as birth control.
Zero tolerance policies are education’s version of warrior policing: norms that are meant to promote order but create animus instead. In schools, these policies are meant to deter students from dangerous and illegal behavior, but there’s little evidence they do; in fact, after being suspended, students are more likely to act out, drop out, and be arrested. Even students who are not suspended suffer when their peers are—their standardized test scores drop, they trust teachers and principals less, and they grow apathetic and anxious. By excluding students, schools create more of the chaos they are trying to prevent. Policy makers rolled back zero tolerance policies in 2014, but in response to an epidemic of school shootings, the Trump administration has recommended bringing them back in full force, though there’s no evidence that suspensions curb violence.
Black and brown children are three times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. Some cases reflect students’ real misbehavior, and some reflect teachers’ racism. In other cases, the problem lies with a culture that sets traps for students and teachers alike.
New teachers often describe themselves as “idealists”; within this group, over 40 percent specifically hope to create opportunities for underprivileged and minority students. Many of them become disheartened by the difficulty inherent in controlling unruly students; they are forced to become disciplinarians, and this is a complex role. Troublesome students are often troubled—by stress at home, bullying, or low self-esteem. Teachers with the time, interest, and energy can use disciplinary action as an opportunity to check in with students about what went wrong, listen to their perspective, and offer support. Assuming a given student will be there all year, helping them is probably the best way to help the rest of the class as well.
Zero tolerance culture reverses this norm. A teacher’s job no longer rests on understanding difficult students. Instead, they must protect classrooms from dangerous elements. This encourages them to identify “bad kids” early and react to them forcefully, expunging threats to the system like an antibody hunting down a virus. Like warrior policing, zero tolerance turns people who could have worked together into adversaries.
These pressures mix with common racial stereotypes to form a toxic cocktail. White students are suspended more often for concrete infractions such as possession of cigarettes, but black and brown students are suspended more often for vague transgressions—such as “disrespect”—which depend on teachers’ judgment. When Jason refused his suspension, his vice principal did not see a reasonable challenge. She saw a disturbance of the peace.
Kids learn from these norms, and become who we expect them to be. Minority students often suspect that teachers are prejudiced against them. Unfair discipline confirms this and makes school feel like a courtroom. When students feel disrespected, they misbehave more; teachers in turn feel more threatened and escalate their discipline. Each learns to fear and provoke the other in a cycle that spins like water around a drain and eventually flushes thousands of students out of school altogether, often into the arms of law enforcement. Jason fought against this throughout his childhood, but he was swimming upstream.
The day after his visit to juvenile hall, Jason and his mother went to court, where his fate was put in the hands of a judge. The school had pressed charges, which would have marked the beginning of Jason’s criminal record. But as the judge leafed through Jason’s file, he paused. “Are these all honors classes?” he asked. They were. “And you’re getting As in all of them?” Jason was. The judge paused again, and then said, “Get out of here and tell your school to never send you back.” Jason’s record was expunged; legally speaking, his arrest never happened.
That summer, the Memphis school system arranged for a group of high-achieving students of color to spend their summer at elite prep schools, and Jason was sent to St. George’s in Rhode Island. He so excelled there that by the time he returned to Tennessee, the prep school had offered him the chance to come back for the academic year on a full scholarship. He spent his last two years of high school at St. George’s. It was a different world. He was used to schools with security cameras in the hallways, but this one had a private beach, in-house college advisers, and a teacher for every eight students. His roommate’s mother—the doyenne of an aristocratic Providence family—brought cookies every week.
What most startled Jason was not how different his circumstances were, but how differently he was viewed at St. George’s. “In the Memphis school…standing up for myself led to me getting arrested,” he tells me, while “those same things at the prep school were encouraged.” When Jason challenged teachers, they suggested that he join the mock trial and the debate team. Jason flourished at St. George’s, and then as an undergraduate at Northwestern and a PhD student in Stanford’s psychology program. He’s now a professor at UC Berkeley.
His research examines the type of unfair discipline he once encountered. In one study, Jason asked teachers to read about an imaginary student who misbehaves in class. When teachers believed the child was white, they were more willing to strategize about ways to help him. When they believed he was black, they were more likely to say they’d suspend him.
Jason didn’t just want to study racial disparities in education; he wanted to combat them. As a graduate student, he joined a core of researchers at Stanford who were working on this problem. They had found that minority students tend to feel unwelcome at school, especially in predominantly affluent, white settings like Stanford. They pioneered an intervention in which new freshmen spent time reflecting on why they do belong at Stanford. Remarkably, this simple exercise cut the racial gap in students’ GPA in half over the subsequent year.
Jason wanted to use this work to improve the experiences of minority students in high schools. In doing so, he joined a massive educational trend: focusing on students’ feelings. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs teach children how to regulate themselves and care for one another. SEL takes many forms: Students might practice mindfulness, start each day by naming their emotions, or talk about the way their actions affect other kids. Dozens of schools have adopted a full “kindness curriculum” developed at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds.
A recent review of more than two hundred studies—including about a quarter of a million students—demonstrates that SEL programs make a difference. After participating in them, students better understand one another’s feelings and control their own moods. Other benefits are more tangible. SEL programs decrease bullying, depression, and disciplinary troubles, and raise GPAs.
Their biggest weakness: SEL programs work less well in older kids. By the time they’re teenagers, students are almost entirely immune to them. This could happen for any number of reasons: Teens face the chaos of puberty and increasing academic pressures as they prepare for college. They also become more attuned to their social world. Adolescents conform to each other more than any other age group, and if other students don’t care—or, worse, think kindness is for dorks—working on it becomes social suicide.
Consider Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). In DARE sessions, cops come to classrooms and show students pictures or even samples of drugs. The officer warns them that their peers will think drug use is cool and pressure them to join in. The punch line: Doing the right thing means not joining the in crowd. This is a fine message on its face, but it often backfires. It highlights dangerous norms and asks students to fight against them—but as we’ve seen, norms tend to win. Despite costing tens of millions of dollars, DARE does not appear to have reduced drug abuse among children, and some evidence suggests it’s made things worse.
A smarter strategy would be to work with norms, not against them. Betsy Levy Paluck recently used this approach in fifty-six New Jersey middle schools. Paluck deputized groups of kids to identify their campuses’ worst social problems, such as bullying and rumor spreading. They then created campaigns, slogans, and posters encouraging kindness, and papered their schools with them. Where other anti-bullying programs have failed, this approach took off. Disciplinary problems plunged, and students reported that their peers cared more about one another. Instead of fighting against conformity, Paluck used it to build healthier environments.
My graduate student Erika Weisz and I are taking a similar approach to building empathy in teenagers. Erika and her team have worked with about a thousand seventh graders around the Bay Area. They first ask students to write about why they think empathy is important and useful. Next, students read one another’s messages, learning that their peers value caring as much as they do. They also read empathy-positive messages written by Stanford students—a group that kids in the Bay Area tend to admire—as part of Erika’s earlier study of empathic mindsets. Finally, we asked them to imagine talking to a student from another school and bragging about how empathic their class was.
Among angsty adolescents, it’s easy for bullies, social climbers, and mean girls to dominate conversations. Like hard-drinking college freshmen or cable news anchors, these extreme voices can crowd out the majority. Erika’s approach is to help students notice that the majority of their peers do care, giving them the opportunity to conform to an empathic norm. Though our data are still preliminary, her efforts seem to be working: after learning about their peers’ empathy, students told us they were more motivated to empathize as well. That motivation, in turn, predicted how kindly they acted toward their classmates.
In building his intervention, Jason also focused on classroom norms. But instead of putting the onus on students, he decided to focus on teachers. From his days in Memphis, he knew how much teachers matter, especially when students struggle. If he could encourage teachers to empathize with students during tough moments, he thought, perhaps their relationships would go down a better path.
He set up shop at five Bay Area middle schools, training math teachers at each one to deliver “empathic discipline.” Teachers first read about the reasons that even good kids act out—such as insecurity and puberty. They then reflected on discipline as an opportunity not just to punish students, but to help them grow. Jason provided stories from students who described the difference receiving empathic discipline had made for them. One note read:
One day I got detention, and instead of just sitting there, my teacher talked with me about what happened. He really listened to me….It felt good to know I had someone I could trust in school.
Jason then asked teachers to write about their strategies for disciplining kids. Teachers responded by extolling the virtues of kindness. One wrote, “[I] greet every student at the door with a smile every day no matter what has occurred the day before.” Another, “I NEVER hold grudges. I try to remember that [students] are all the son or daughter of someone who loves them….They are the light of someone’s life!”
These attitudes were reflected in the classroom. After teachers learned about empathic discipline, their students reported feeling more respected. This was especially true of students who had previously been suspended. Rather than making them feel like outcasts, empathic teachers created an environment in which they could thrive. And thrive they did. Students whose math teachers received Jason’s training were suspended about half as often as those in other classes. This difference was again strongest for adolescents most likely to struggle: boys, African Americans and Latinos, and kids who had been suspended in the past.
Jason’s work is preliminary but powerful—in part because its effects can’t be boiled down to teachers’ empathy alone. “[The intervention] was only with math teachers,” Jason explains, “but students were less likely to get suspended by any teacher, in the hallway, on the playground, on the bus ride home.” Other teachers didn’t know which students had received empathic discipline and which ones hadn’t. Instead, it seemed that students whose teachers empathized with them behaved better not only in that class but elsewhere as well.
Schools around the world encourage students to adopt a growth mindset—believing in their capacity to change for the better. But Jason’s work shows us that sometimes—especially for struggling students—self-perception is not enough. “Mindsets are in a person, and that’s important,” he reflects, “but we should also think about where those mindsets come from.” People choose how to interpret their environment, but we also create environments together. These circumstances shape what we expect of one another and of ourselves.
Those of us in power have a responsibility not only to be kind but also to create ecosystems in which kindness is expected and rewarded. Schools, police departments, families, companies, and even governments that take this approach make empathy easier for the people within them.
Jason is doing his part, and more. His teacher training has exploded; it is now being used in school districts in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia. Someday soon it may reach Tennessee and the vice principal who once sent Jason to jail. Perhaps it can help her think differently about the next child who crosses her path.