The Empathy Wall

are you and they are they. If you could scan the contours of your life, all the places where people intersect, whether you know them or not, who or what would be outside of your empathetic borders and why? This is the stuff of life? And I'm your host Julie Douglas. In this episode, we look at how to grow empathy

through simple acts like reading fiction. You get involved with the story and suddenly you're living this other life, um from this other person's point of view, the main point of view, character's life is happening sort of inside your head. And we turned to a psychologist to help us understand the tricky business of empathy. You say, you put yourself in someone else's shoes, feel what they're feeling, but it's sometimes that's almost impossible. But first we'll ponder the place

where empathy begins in kids. Some people will not change, but if we give us a better education, I think people who have a wided range of thinking an empathy will be the majority. That's Aisha, a retired neurologist originally from Turkey who has lived in the United States for the past forty years. We met her at the Women's March in Washington, d C. The sign she held said nasty Muslim woman. I am getting overwhelming reaction to this sign,

which made me cry. People come and hug me. I shall echoed a common concern about the uptake and acts of anger and aggression towards immigrants and schools. From day one, we have to teach our kids about empathy, about debate, about arguing in a positive way, discussing, learning that there are many different approaches looks. The PS twenty two Chorus is an elementary school chorus from Public School twenty two in Graniteville, Staten Island. Here they sing alternate routes, nothing more.

It's also the school song for Oakhurst Elementary Indicator, Georgia. Yeah Yeah, In fact, the line we are how we treat each other and nothing more. Underscores one of the key design principles empathy and caring, something Oakhurst Elementary School counselor Laura Demming is acutely aware of given recent politics. I think there are two things that made me the

most sad about the results of the election. Number one was just the message that that women, Muslim Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans um not just the message that they may have gotten, but but the sort of the carte blanche for people to treat them as unequal. And then, for me, even more powerful than that was the message that kids

could be getting. This video of seventh guader's chanting build a Wall of catapulted Royal Oaks Middle School into the national spotlight the day after Donald Trump won the election. Kids can be as cruel or as kind as we encourage them to be. They have an appetite for both, so it's up to us to cultivate kindness in them. The kids are really eat up any lessons or games

or opportunities to um to understand empathy. I used to think that, well, you really can't teach children what empathy is until they're seven or eight or so because they're so ecocentric. You know, young young kids are really just all about taking care of their own needs. But I don't feel that way so much anymore. Um. I think that all people, unless they've had like a really rough couple of first years, we are we are programmed to connect.

Our neurons and synapses all get strengthened and fired up and excited by connecting with other people. If the youngest of kids aren't quite ready to perspective take, then the concept of empathy is simply broken down as I care for others. Oakurst Elementary also has a school wide agreement which is be kind and be respectful. And this sort of messaging is deeply important because without at school, the place where kids spend the majority of their time, can

become a place of misery. You know, kids not being ready to learn because they're worrying about is it going to be safe for me in my classroom today? Is that person is going to mistreat me again? Who can I turn to? What what should I do? And I really when I talked to classes classrooms about bullying, I try to emphasize the power of the bystander, and we talk about how can you safely turn from a bystander to an upstander. How can you either, um, you know,

speak directly to the person who's being a bully. If you feel like that's safe, um, ask an adult and you know, go get an adult to help. Or most powerful of all, and this is where empathy comes in, just being a friend to the person who's being targeted. Demming has her own first hand experience with the power

of empathy. She was a shy kid whose father was in the Air Force, with the family frequently moving and Deming attending several schools early on and sixth grade, I moved to a new school again, and every girl in my class followed the lead of this one popular girl, and in retrospect, must have had some pretty serious problems herself. But they she decided she didn't want anyone else to be my friend, and they all followed along. And it

was miserable, miserable year. And there was one girl who decided she was not going to follow along, and she was going to befriend me and literally in this may sound overly dramatic, but I feel like she kind of saved my life, or she saved me from many more years of misery. That was a huge act of kindness and and I think showed a lot of empathy because she could have just as easily gone along and really

had an easier time herself. Um, but she decided to be brave and caring and reach out to me, And it was that was an epiphany, that was a it's very significant thing. These kinds of epiphanies can usher in bold, lifelong changes. But empathy works on other subconscious levels, especially

when it comes to not exercising it. For instance, the two thousand and one study The Girl who Cried Pain shows that doctors tend to treat complaints of pain from men with medication and complaints of pain and women with sedatives. You could say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of hormones and psychology. You could say that women are expected to endure pain given the conditions of childbirth and menstruation.

But you could also say that the physicians are short circuiting their empathy in favor of convenient stereotypes, which brings us to the problem of perspective taking, cutting through the subconscious layers that make up our ideas about people. If you're completely opposite of someone else in circumstances, gender, geographic location. How do you bridge the distance? How do you connect? You pick up a book, give any other form of culture of the art where you are able to stand

in somebody else's choose so completely. A bibliotherapist is someone who uses specific text to help heal. Susan Elderkin is a writer am bibliotherapist who co wrote a novel Cure in a to Z of literary Remedies. Many of these remedies were drawn from her work with the School of Life,

which seeks to instruct through philosophy and art. The School of Life was set up in two thousands and eight by the British philosopher Alan Botton, and the idea behind it was that, unlike regular universities, which teach you academic subjects and prepare you for a life of work, I guess um, the School of of Life was about learning how to live a happy and productive life. Bibliotherapy isn't

a new fangled approach to therapy. The term was coined in nineteen six by Unitarian minister and essays Daniel McCord Crowthers, and the idea itself has been around since the Greeks. The word itself obviously comes from the Greek for healing and the Greek for books, and the concept very much does go back, I think to the ancient Greek says.

I've wrote about a library and ancient dvs where the inscription over the door was healing plays for the souls, So I think the Greeks had that mission, that books were there to help our souls, help us spiritually. Bibliotherapy was even used after the Second World War. Some veterans returning with shell shock were given Jane Austen to read, which makes a lot of sense to me. There's a calmness and um an order about Jane Austen's pro style,

which I find very calming to read. The thing about reading is that it does something to you on a subconscious level. When it comes to empathy. Psychologists Raymond mar Rights researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a fictional narrative. Suddenly you see through the eyes of someone who is thousands of miles away from you geographically and socio economically.

You get to its taste the things they're tasting, and see the things they're seeing and hear the things they're hearing, and have the emotional response and be there for their emotional response. So it is an extraordinary way to live vicariously and to experience what it's like being another human being, could be of a different gender, could be somebody who lives in the country you can never get to, or we'll never get to somebody who lived two years ago,

you know, I mean, that's it. It allows you to travel in time and in place, uh and in gender in a way that normal life can never enable us to do. In the preface of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James writes, the house of fiction has, in short, not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned. Rather, every one of which has been pierced or is still pierceable in its vast front by the need of the individual vision and by

the pressure of the individual will. These apertures of dissimilar shape and size hang so all together over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best mirror, holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft. They are not hinged doors opening straight upon life.

But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass which warms again and again for observation, a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it, an impression distinct from every other. What Henry James describes requires not just concentration but intense scrutiny.

And I recall my English professor once saying that the number of people James observed outside of his window during his entire nineteenth century life is but a fraction of the people we passed by on a day to day basis. The catch, then, is who do we pay attention to and why empathy requires attention. We have to focus on other people, you know, what's going on with them. So when that attention is divided between online interactions and realized situations,

empathy naturally suffers. My name is Christine Rosacrantz. My research is in the Communication department at Stanford and it focuses on media psychology, specifically human computer interaction or h CI. So we've probably all been to a lunch where most of the people at the table are on their phones, surfing social media, not paying attention to the other people at the table, And this used to be rude, but

now it's kind of commonplace. And one of the reasons being is we don't think it's that harmful, but it is because we used to get a lot of emotional information about how people's lives were just from talking with them over lunch or having these social outings. But now if we're instead focusing on how many legs we've got on our social media site, ironically, empathy is suffering both

online and in person. So this fragmentation is something that we see, especially with these high level media multitaskers, um they're always thinking about something else. With smartphones and computers, the number of windows we can peer out of our endless, except that these windows typically act as mirrors, further separating ourselves from the people in front of us. People are going to be using these technologies, how can they do it in a responsible way and how can they afford

empathy three these interactions? So it might just be that empathy is evolving. We might not be able necessarily to have face to face interactions that would be rich enough to afford empathy, but maybe these social media networks are going to develop their levels of richness where they can engender empathy and compassion for these especially for people who

aren't already in your social circle. But before we can try to solve the empathetic distance that technology places between us, Rosacrans urges us to figure out what empathy means to us in the first place, how do we engage with it, and how does compassion fit in. So I've been studying components of both compassion empathy for about the last ten years, and I think of compassion especially in terms of society simply meaning groups of people being kind to each other

despite their differences. In more specific terms, this often relies on recognizing that someone else's suffering and then wanting to help them in some way. And empathy is usually thought of as either um feeling what someone else is feeling, and we call this aspective or emotional empathy, or understanding someone else's thoughts and their particular situation, which is called

cognitive empathy. So compassion is often thought of as a kind of tool for action when inspired by empathy, but that all depends on what kind of empathy were exercising. If effective or emotional, it can be biased, meaning we feel empathy for those who we connect with or we just have similarities with, and this doesn't always lead to rational acts or thoughts, but cognitive empathy can give us

more clarity, perhaps even more integrity. Paul Bloom just put out a book called Against Empathy that I would recommend everyone read, and it argues that logic might be a more effective way of ensuring truly moral actions and judgments, whereas empathy can sometimes be used for negative outcomes. Seems counterintuitive, right, Seems like if you're more emotionally compelled to take someone's perspective,

you'd be in the empathetic striking zone. And this may be because we're drawing on old ideas of perspective taking.

So in older laboratory studies that they did in psychology specifically, they were able to use a specific individual that was sort of this idealized person and they would say, here, you empathize with Katie, and they would put people in the high empathy group or you know, people in the don't empathize with Katie group, And they found people in the high empathy group would give more money to Katie.

And it seems like it's a very natural thing but if we try to force this on people in outside the laboratory conditions, we can end up kind of skewing our view of reality. So, for example, on social media, if the highlight of the day is um, you know, black Lives Matter, we might see that people support Black Lives Matter, but then they end up hating other groups who they see as being against that group. So then

you put people in two categories. It's like Black Lives Matter supportive versus police supporters, and that's sort of a it's it ends up being a really emotional distinction that people are making as opposed to relying on rationale and reading statistics and coming up with their conclusions leased on that. This is one of the reasons why social media is so polarizing, and in this way, the road to hell

is paved with good intentions. Taking things personally, while it sounds so colloquial, is actually one of the most detrimental things that we can do in these online spaces. And the problem with the online spaces is it's it's highly personal. It's hyper personal. So we go through and then everything is all about us, and it's it's a combination of us society expectations that are drawn from that and the computer itself and the the way that the system is designed.

We want to be They want us to be focused solely on these you know, bright light and stuff that are coming through um. Kind of like the same mechanisms that you would use in a video game to get someone to keep playing. Those things are in there, and we get little rewards, so we get little serotonin boosts when we get alike, and that keeps us coming back from more and dopamine boosts. So it's it's kind of

it's it's like anti compassion anti compassionate Buddhism training. When you're going online and using a device, it's so easy for us to see social media these avatars of ourselves as extensions of us and our devices like extra limbs. The problem is an outsized image of ourselves that can arise a kind of narcissism that blots out anything that doesn't prop us up. We're not getting the social cues from other people that normally stop us from being overly narcissistic.

So we can imagine if we were face to face with someone else, how if we were talking about ourselves too much, they might roll their eyes or leave the room. But online that's not even a possibility. People might un follow you, but you would probably never know. This doesn't mean that you have narcissistic personality disorder. It could just be that you're a high level multimedium multitasker, which is fine unless you become so entrenched in your digital life

that you barely leave it. There's a book out called Otaku which is about this group of shut ins in Japan and they're, you know, gamers online and they like to read comic books, but they're basically just living through that medium and they very rarely go outside, so it's actually causing a decrease in their birth rate and over time. You can imagine this would be a huge problem in Japan,

but it's something that could happen here. We have people who are shut ins and rely on this medium to connect with people, and that, in and of itself, I would say is detrimental to both empathy and compassion and making those people active members of a civil discourse society. And speaking of civil discourse, social media is not really a place that is supportive of having a civil discourse

because you can scream at someone and run away. If someone has a really extreme point of view, we find it easier to just un follow them or or block them instead of engaging in a conversation. That's difficult, so it ends up creating these information silos that are just feeding back into itself. Rosa Crance gives an example with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, of how empathy is

playing out between Republicans and Democrats. Zuckerberg was quoted and I think it was a New York Times op ed saying that the movieson that liberals were so surprised by the election result was that they had little empathy for conservatives. For all the Facebook users clamoring for a dislike button, know that Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been working

on a solution. According to the Social media Magnate, the new feature will not specifically be a dislike button, but instead another wording that will allow users to show empathy towards one another. So you can take this a couple of different ways. Um the fact that you have to work towards having empathy for a group is seen as emotional labor, and some people don't find that the group that you disagree with deserve that amount of work, so that's why they don't want to empathize with that group.

In that way, empathy can be seen as being a divisive issue. You're making me put away my own belief so I can expand my heart out to people I don't even like. Why would I do that? Do you feel like it's hard to find political common ground? It's not just you. A Pew study finds any one percent of voters say they cannot agree with the other side

on basic facts. Now consider that, in addition to the emotional labor needed to perspective take, your social media feed could be limiting your worldview and what you're exposed to. UM it's something that it's one of these unintended consequences

of their system. But basically, the algorithms used in most social media platforms support a homogeneous network be networked with the people who are already like us, with similar beliefs and perspectives, and usually they start us as friends or coworkers. What happens is the things that we um like or comment on tell the social media algorithm what we want

to And it's not only Spacebook, it's also Google. So Google does this thing where when you look up articles and if all you read our the New York Times and um, you know you go online to CNN, that's the type of media you're going to see and they know that. So if I look for certain information, it's gonna get weight in that direction. If someone else who has more conservative looks for the city, if they put the same exact search, termin they'll get different search results.

For all these reasons, empathy turns out to be hard to recognize and negotiate in our digital existence. So could you have a world without empathy? Empathy like when that's a society that's maybe less an empathy than it would be optimal. I think it could exist, and it's sort of this dystopian version of the future. But there's other options to empathy, which is kind of, uh, something that we're sort of rediscovering from certain Enlightenment scholars. One of

those being solidarity. Solidarity is not necessarily something where you need to feel empathy. It's this recognition of a common humanity, and while empathy would help that out, you can sort of use logic and other humanistic values too. Have that as your baseline where we're just going to treat people like people because that's the right thing to do, instead of necessarily being able to put yourself in the shoes

of another person. If you think about it, it's a little like what oak Hurst Elementary tries to do with the youngest of their students, who can't quite perspective take yet. It's that simple idea of I care for others. It's the cognitive logical version of empathy. And it takes me back to Aisha who we met at the Women's March. This is what life is all about, This is what religion is all about, This is what God is all about. Love.

There's nothing else that I can do. You enter a crowded elevator, you walk down the street, or you navigate a busy airport, pass them by a blur of faces, sometimes hundreds in year seconds, you scan the crowd, and the subconscious borders of yourself bleed into the tide of humanity before you. You recognize traces of anxiety, anger, or sadness. You have your own emotions to deal with, you have places to go, But you are they and they are you.

We'd like to thank Susan Elderkin of the School of Life for taking us through a literary journey of empathy. You can find out more about her work at the School of Life dot com. Thank you to Laura Demming at Oakhurst Elementary for doing what you do and sharing your story. And thank you to Christine Rotakranz for helping us better understand the limits and potential for empathy. The Stuff of Life is written and executive produced by me

Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of Production Jerry Roland. This episode also featured music by Dylan Fagan, Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs, and Josh Boardman. You can find more of

Josh's music at battle tapes band dot com. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, you can call into our podcast line at one eight four four hs W Stuff s t U f F. We'll be doing a wrap up, Episo said at the end of the season, and we want to hear your voice in it, so leave us a message. You can find this Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email us at the Stuff of Life at how stuff works dot com. Yeah,