![]() What does this have to do with empathy? “Empathy has to start at home,” points out Dr. Zaki’s students, he says, often struggle to do this exercise. You’ll probably find a significant difference in how you’d treat your friend - most likely with patience, generosity and forgivness - versus how you’d react to yourself - perhaps with blame, harshness and self-criticism. Doing this can highlight the chasm between the kindness we give to the people in our lives and the kindness (or lack of) that we show ourselves. Then imagine a friend coming to you with that same problem and how you’d respond to them. Here, he lays out five exercises to help build your empathy: Exercise #1: Strengthen your internal resourcesįor this exercise, think about something you’re struggling with and how it makes you feel. “I think of building empathy as a way to take care of our social health.” Through his introductory seminar at Stanford on empathy (and from where the below exercises are from) and in his book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, he helps people train to become more empathic. Zaki believes that we all have a responsibility to cultivate empathy in “the same way that we try to take care of our bodies or of our mental health,” he explains. He says, too, that “empathy can run counter to justice and can sometimes give us tunnel vision, in wanting to help some people over others.” The empathy you have for a good friend may convince you that they should be allowed to jump the line for a COVID vaccine ahead of someone who actually needs it more. If you find yourself unable to empathize with a person or people who actively seek to destroy or disparage the group you’re in, for example, it’s not a failure. Zaki is quick to point out that we do not owe anyone our empathy. Of course, empathy is not always possible nor is it always the wisest response. And if you’re a good friend, you probably care about what they’re going through and wish for them to feel better, and we’d call that empathic concern or compassion.” You also might try to figure out what they’re feeling and why, and that’s what we’d call cognitive empathy. “Taking on their feelings - which we’d call emotional empathy - is that vicarious sharing of what someone else is going through. “As you see your friend break down, you might start to feel lousy yourself,” Dr. You don’t know who they’re talking to, but at some point, your friend starts to cry. To unpack these types, imagine that you’re having lunch with a friend when they get a phone call. Zaki distinguishes between three types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern or compassion. “People who experience empathy also tend to be less stressed and depressed, more satisfied with their lives, happier in their relationships, and more successful at work,” he says.ĭr. “It helps us see past differences and allows us to see others who are of a different race or a generation or ideology from our own, without the lens of stereotyping, prejudice, or bias.”īut he also believes it’s not just others that benefit from empathy - so does the person feeling it. Why is empathy so important? Some of the reasons are more obvious: “It inspires us to help family members, friends, and strangers,” says Dr. “Research psychologists understand empathy as an umbrella terms for multiple ways that we respond to other people’s emotions.” “Empathy is a simple word for a complex idea,” he explains. In a TEDxMarin talk, he says that human empathy is actually a skill that can be developed rather than a fixed trait. Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki PhD, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory there, studies these very questions. But what exactly is empathy? And crucially, can we have more? This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community browse through all the posts here.Įmpathy - or understanding the thoughts and feelings of the people around us - is one of the most important and most trying parts of being social creatures.
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