Empowering empathy to increase kindness

Brian H. Smith, PhD is an expert in youth development and has served as a member of Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Committee for Children.

We all know empathy is important, but too often empathy fails to promote kindness. Read on for how we can empower empathy to increase the kindness in the world.

Escaping empathic distress

It’s easy to share in someone’s happiness or excitement. It can be much more difficult to feel strong empathy with someone who’s suffering. Empathic distress is when feeling someone else’s suffering makes you suffer. When we feel bad the natural reaction is to do something to feel better. When what’s making us feel bad is empathy for someone else’s suffering, one way to feel better is to comfort and help them. We all want to be that strong and caring.

But there are other ways to escape the distress of feeling another’s pain. Say you witness someone being bullied and it makes you feel bad. You could stick up for them or comfort them, but you could also take on the attitude, which is more common than we’d like to think, that they somehow brought it on themselves. You could just ignore what’s happening and walk away, or you could even join with the people doing the tormenting.

Empathic distress can cause people to focus on escaping the discomfort of empathy instead of doing something to make a suffering person feel better.

One thing that helps stop empathic distress from derailing your intentions to be kind is simply noticing what you do when you see someone suffering. Does your reaction follow your values? Is it how you’d like to react? Or are you unconsciously escaping the feelings in a way that works for you but doesn’t help them? Mindfulness practices are becoming more common and can help with this. But simply paying attention and noticing how you react to others is what counts.

There are also two emotion-specific skills that help people react positively to the uncomfortable feelings of empathic distress. The first is emotion awareness. Being consciously aware of how you’re feeling helps you avoid getting pushed around by emotions without knowing it. Being aware of what you’re feeling opens the door for you to use another powerful skill: emotion tolerance. Newer research shows that trying to make uncomfortable emotions ‘go away’ usually doesn’t work and often causes additional problems. The better approach is to recognize the emotion, accept that it’s happening, and still consciously choose to act on your values.

One of the best paths to increasing emotion awareness and tolerance is Social and Emotional Learning. The good news is that schools today are increasingly embracing this approach of teaching students how to be more aware of and able to cope with their feelings in ways that are positive and prosocial rather than letting their feelings push them to do things that harm others or themselves.

Expanding the circle of empathy

One of the problems with both research and popular ideas about empathy is that we too often think of empathy as a fixed trait- you either have it or you don’t. The reality is what matters is not how much empathy people have but who they have empathy for.

Far too often people’s empathy gets caught in this ‘In Group versus Out Group’ trap. It’s easier to feel empathy for your friends, your family, people like you, perhaps people of your nationality, race, religion, or people who share your beliefs and values. It’s much harder to extend the circle of empathy to people who seem like ‘the other’ or ‘not one of us’.

A simple example from research is that when people were shown pictures of hurricane victims they rated the suffering of people of their own race higher than others – which then had a big effect on who they said they wanted to help provide relief to.

An example perhaps we can all relate to is middle school- the age when bullying is at its peak. When teens hit adolescence their brains and hormones push them to focus intensely on peers and their social world. This often creates a powerful desire to fit in. One way middle schoolers (and even adults) figure out who’s in is by defining who’s out – and when that’s done in cruel ways it becomes bullying.

The solution is to expand our circle of empathy. Keep in mind that the more different someone is from you the more conscious effort you may have to make to understand what they’re experiencing. Empathy can be something you have but it can also be something you DO.

We often think about empathy promoting kindness. What if that’s partly backwards? What if kindness is actually one of the best ways to promote empathy- especially towards people who are less like us? What I’m talking about here is not ‘acts of kindness’ so much as valuing kindness, kindness as a norm, even kindness as a commitment. If we truly believe that kindness towards everyone is important that can empower us to expand our circle of empathy.

When kindness is a norm, a strong value we hold, it can help guide how we approach the rest of the world. The more we automatically bring kindness to how we think about everyone, not just those close to or most like us, the more likely we’ll be to make the effort to understand people’s experiences – even when it makes us feel sad or challenges the comfort of our identity.

Brian H. Smith, PhD is an expert in youth development and has served as a member of Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Committee for Children.

Empathy and Kindness

Is empathy the key to more kindness? I’m a member of Born This Way Foundation’s Research Advisory Board and part of my work is understanding what science says about how to increase kindness. The bottom line? Empathy matters, but it is not the answer by itself. Sometimes empathy promotes kindness, sometimes it doesn’t, and too often empathy simply breaks down and fails to make a difference.

Kindness doesn’t require overcoming our natural instincts to be selfish and mean- kindness is an essential part of human nature. And empathy can help us be kind by tuning us in to other people, what they’re experiencing and what they need.

Take bullying. It’s tempting think more empathy is the solution to bullying, but it’s not that simple. It seems strange, but what science shows is that having more empathy doesn’t necessarily make people less likely to bully others or more likely to step in when bullying happens. Why not?

First, let’s unpack empathy. Basically, empathy means knowing how someone else feels. There’s two ways that takes place. Let’s say you see someone crying right after someone’s been mean to them. Just seeing them can make you feel sad too – and your sadness tells you that’s how they’re feeling. That’s Affective empathy. But you can also see them crying, see what happened and understand how they’re feeling without feeling the same way yourself. That’s ‘Perspective Taking’ or Cognitive empathy.

There actually is some difference between how affective empathy and perspective taking impact bullying, though not a lot. Research says affective empathy helps reduce bullying, but only a little and not always. Perspective taking on the other hand? If anything, the evidence tends to go the other way.

Why would people who bully others be better at understanding people? It’s because most people bully because they get something out of it. Sure, some people just enjoy being mean. But more often the goal of bullying is to look cool and gain social power and popularity. Which may be why bullying is most common in middle school, just as kids enter adolescence and their lives become hyper-focused on peers.

The sad reality is that too often bullying works by boosting people’s social status even if bullying doesn’t automatically get you more popularity. You actually need the social insight to pick the right victim (someone without powerful friends, someone other people don’t feel too sympathetic for etc.), and you need to bully in a way so people think you’re cool rather than a jerk.

So it’s a mixed bag – good perspective taking skills can help you understand someone else’s pain, but people also need it to get what they want through bullying.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the science around kindness and empathy. Here’s a basic question: are people naturally good or bad, kind or mean? For a long time, the most common view in our culture was that people are basically selfish and to be caring and kind they needed to somehow overcome their natural instincts.

But Darwin actually said that sympathy was our strongest instinct, not self-interest, and new science proves he was right. Research across neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and other fields has shown that kindness and compassion are what really come naturally to people.

Why have humans successfully outcompeted every other species? Because we’re good at making weapons? No! It’s because we are the most socially sophisticated species. Our massive brains evolved to help us get along and live successfully in complicated social groups, not for waging war. Prosocial behavior, caring and even empathy are some of the most natural parts of being human, starting from when we’re babies.

Ok, so if people are naturally prone to being caring and kind, why doesn’t empathy always work? Why is there so much meanness and cruelty? Part of the answer is that there can be a lot of barriers that get in the way of people feeling empathy, and understanding how others feel is sometimes just not enough to get people to be kind.

In my next post I’m going to break down the most common causes of empathic failure and look at what can be done to solve them. I’m also going to talk about how to not only boost kindness through supporting empathy but focus on the importance of directly promoting kindness and compassion- something done so beautifully by Lady Gaga and Born This Way Foundation.