The Empathy Deficit
When we were in elementary school, we were told to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. When I got to high school, I forgot all of that. I remember I would tease and bully a few of my classmates from time to time, in ways that were extremely hurtful. I wasn’t looking to hurt them (rather, I was compensating for a few of my own insecurities). In fact, as I reflect on those experiences with regret, I feel that if I truly understood how my classmates felt because of my comments and actions, I would not have acted like that in the first place. I thought I was just teasing for fun and I had a complete disregard for empathy which hurt the people around me. From this experience and many others, I have come to believe that empathy is one of the most important skills that we can cultivate to achieve our long-term happiness.
Empathy Defined
But before we dive deep into the impact of empathy, I think we need to really understand what it means. Nowadays, I hear the word “empathy” thrown around in completely inaccurate ways. It’s often used in place of the words “nice,” “caring,” or “supportive.” That’s not empathy. Empathy originates from the German word Einfühlung, or “feeling into”. It means to truly feel what the other person or side is feeling. Complete empathy, a concept that practically could never be achieved, would be the ability to completely understand every single facet of that person’s thinking and feelings, including all of the factors influencing their conscious and subconscious mind. In what is one of my favorite graduation speeches ever, Harvard Business School Professor Deepak Malhotra describes empathy by saying “What does matter is how much you are willing to understand people who are on the other side. How much you are willing to say this person passionately, fundamentally, adamantly disagrees with me on some major issues. And it doesn’t have to mean that they are crazy, evil, or out to get me. [It is] that they see the world in a fundamentally different way.”
In the Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama speaks about empathy as a sense of genuine compassion. A type of compassion and connection that, according to the Dalai Lama, is “based on the rationale that all human beings have an innate desire to be happy and overcome suffering, just like myself. And, just like myself, they have the natural right to fulfill this fundamental aspiration. On the basis of the recognition of this equality and commonality, you develop a sense of affinity and closeness with others. With this as a foundation, you can feel compassion regardless of whether you view the other person as a friend or an enemy. It is based on the other’s fundamental rights rather than your own mental projection”. He uses another powerful example where he describes that if you had this sense of genuine compassion for a fish, when you see the “fish writhing with a hook in its mouth, you might spontaneously experience a feeling of not being able to bear its pain. That feeling isn’t based on a special connection with that particular animal, a feeling of ‘Oh, that animal is my friend.’ In that case you’re basing your compassion simply on the fact that that being also has feeling, can experience pain, and has a right not to experience such pain.” [1]
Empathy is the ability to actually understand how something or someone else truly feels. Importantly, it has nothing to do with being kind (though, as you’ll read later, there are clear links), it’s about really understanding the other side. In fact, having a sense of empathy can also be extremely bad. For instance, people who are emotionally manipulative and have malicious intentions can use others’ feelings to their advantage.
Empathy is about really understanding, seeing, and believing another’s perspective.
The Importance of Empathy
Ironically, one of the reasons for why empathy is important comes from the effects of a lack of it. In my opinion, one of the biggest reasons why millions of people do not have access to basic needs such as water, electricity, shelter, food, and more must, in part, come down to a lack of empathy [2]. If we could actually feel what they feel, then I really do believe things would be different. Often times it bothers me that we tout all of this technological innovation such as cars that can go from 0 to 60 mph a tenth of a second faster or phones that are 1 millimeter thinner but it coexists with the fact that a huge proportion of our world cannot live a basic life. If we could actually empathize with those people, wouldn’t we all stop what we’re doing and instead spend most of our time working to help provide these people with basic resources to live? And there’s a vicious cycle here. People who can actually understand and empathize with those situations almost never get the opportunity to have the resources to do anything about it. That’s not to say that people who have opportunities do not do anything to help. It’s meant to say that I really believe that if we could be more empathetic as a society, the world would objectively be a better place.
Further, having a strong sense of empathy is crucial for the long-term health of our relationships and, ultimately, our happiness in my opinion. In the short term, you can solve conflicts by being nice or conceding to the other side because you care about their feelings; however, I think this is a band-aid. If the conflict arises from some fundamental difference, then I think it’s critical to empathize with the other side [3]. There needs to be a sense of each side feeling like they are actually heard so that the resolution is found through some sort of action after a mutual understanding of feelings, otherwise it will lead to resentment and unhappiness.
Though I made it a point that empathy is not the same as caring for others, there is a strong link between understanding another’s needs and altruism, known by psychologists as the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Daniel Batson, the psychologist who coined the term, and his collaborators have run over 30 experiments proving that link between empathy and altruism [4]. By putting ourselves in others’ shoes, it is only natural for us to become more caring towards others.
I think empathy plays an important role in our own spiritual balance and desires as well. The Dalai Lama suggests that a great sense of empathy is an integral part of the spiritual path of Buddhism that leads to nirvana. Further, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like many other fellow philosophers during the Enlightenment Era, believes that following one’s inner light is the path to pursue true happiness. Part of this inner light comes from the belief that nature gave us the instinct to feel the pain of fellow men [5]. As such, we must love our neighbor and do unto others what we want for ourselves. It seems to me that empathy really does lead to happier relationships and happier lives.
The Dangers of Empathy
While I personally believe empathy is important and a crucial part of leading a better life, there are also many practical downsides to becoming more empathetic. In some ways, empathy implies that we reserve judgment before we can understand someone’s perspective. But that taken to an extreme means that we do not hold any judgment at all and accept others for behaving the way they do. That feels impractical. I’d argue that some independent judgment is required to make progress, to have an identity, and to make sure you aren’t taken advantage of by ill-intentioned people. Take the following hypothetical example: you have a friend who is being disloyal to their significant other (who doesn’t know about it). It might be that your friend does not feel invested in the relationship anymore and so it feels justified to them. In this case, if you had complete empathy, you feel what your friend is feeling. You may realize that it is okay for them to be doing what they are doing because they are no longer invested in the relationship and you know there’s a strong sense of detachment there. I’d argue that that resolution doesn’t feel right. In this situation, for me, I would feel like it’s against my moral compass and part of my obligation to tell my friend that I don’t think it’s okay. Even if my friend decides to ignore my opinion, at least it provokes a conversation and some sort of progress while allowing me to maintain my own moral identity. With complete empathy, this is missing.
In a practical world, having a greater sense of empathy means that you may also be more vulnerable to being taken advantage of. In 2005, psychologists Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov ran a study with three sets of participants. To one set of participants, they asked how much money would you give to develop a drug to save one child. To another set, they asked how much they would give to save eight children. The answers between both of these sets were about the same. For the third set of participants, Kogut and Ritov showed them one child’s picture and told them his name and age. All of a sudden, the contributions were much higher than both of the other groups, which the psychologists deemed to be a socially irrational outcome because the same contributions could have been used in a different way to save many more children. Once we know the child on a more personal level, we are ready to commit more resources to saving him, even if it is not the rational decision to make [6]. The fact that empathy can lead to irrationality means that others, like the media or government officials, can appeal to our empathetic nature in order to achieve goals that may not actually be net positive for society.
Another downside is the burden that comes from having empathy. It means that we can really feel what others feel. In a way, it means that we have to manage not just the weight of our own worries and sorrows but the worries of those around us too. And this can become extremely stressful and burdensome, especially if we are truly empathizing with them. In response to this dilemma, I agree with the Dalai Lama when he argues that handling the weight of others is not the same as the weight of yourself. He suggests that this external weight of others is being brought upon yourself voluntarily and deliberate for a higher purpose. As such, while it is still a weight, it is a lighter weight than the weight of your own burdens [7].
Becoming More Empathetic
While there are some potential downsides to an increased sense of empathy, I have come to believe that it is still crucial to our happiness and progress as a society. Many of the downsides only exist in an ideal world of complete and harmonious empathy and I feel like we are extremely far away from that. The natural question that arises from this conclusion is “How do I become more empathetic?”
(Slight spoiler alert for the movie American Sniper in this next paragraph.)
First off, I think it’s important to realize that we have lots of potential to improve when it comes to being empathetic. Let’s use the plot of American Sniper as an example. Throughout the movie, you see Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) killing innocent Iraqis. While we are watching the movie, we don’t give it much thought; after all we are on team USA and Chris Kyle is a national hero. At the end of the movie, we see that Chris is killed and we immediately feel sad. Within those two hours, the movie was able to highlight our inept ability to express empathy. We felt so sad when Chris died because he was the protagonist and we understood who he was. But we couldn’t feel the same for the countless more innocent Iraqis who died because of Chris. Of course, the movie made it such that we would feel that way but that’s how empathy in the real world is. Most of the time, you will be able to relate to one side more than the other. It is what makes empathy so difficult and why we can get much better at it.
Practically speaking, I think it’s important to realize that we cannot reach a point where we can be empathetic to everyone in the world. That said, I think we can reach some sort of resolution here. I feel we should aim to develop a true sense of empathy for the people whom we love first [8]. Once we are able to do that, rather than aiming to empathize with strangers’ perspectives themselves, we should try to empathize with the fact that strangers’ lives have the same value as the lives of the people who we love; they also mean a great deal to someone else, they also have a career that they care about, they also have best friends and a loving family. I think acknowledging this fact is a reasonable goal for all of us to become more empathetic and it will allow us to yield a lot of the good that comes from empathy.
Getting back to the question, I think the best way to cultivate empathy for someone else is through shared experience. When you go through the same experience as someone else then naturally you are able to better understand their perspective, because you just went through it and know how you feel about it. At Prayas, I came to really admire founder-to-founder empathy. People who had gone through the stress and emotional turbulence of starting a company just better understood my emotional state and all the factors in play when making decisions. Often times, I felt many of my closest friends couldn’t quite understand but other founders could. This sort of empathy came naturally from the shared experience and knowledge of how it feels to start a company.
While I think shared experience is the best way to truly become more empathetic, it’s hard and most of the time impractical. In my opinion, a more realistic (though likely not as effective) way of understanding someone else’s perspective starts with learning to trust other people’s judgment. It starts with trusting the fact that people always have some reason for why they make certain decisions or hold certain viewpoints. We have to realize that people aren’t stupid. For instance, it’s easy to quickly judge Lance Armstrong’s decision to take performance enhancing drugs to win all of his Tour De France titles as stupid. But perhaps rather than having that reaction immediately, I should first try to understand his intentions and why he did that. Maybe he felt that he had already faced so much adversity in life and needed some sort of advantage. Maybe everyone else was taking these drugs so he had to in order to stand a chance to win. Maybe he thought he wouldn’t get caught so it was not a big deal. I don’t know what Lance Armstrong felt but it’s unfair to label him as stupid right off the bat — it is important to understand his perspective because he is probably coming from some place of reason in his mind [9]. (Afterwards, if I feel like I have understood him and then judge him as making stupid decisions, that is fair game.) I think it’s important that we start to adopt that sort of mindset where we stop making immediate judgments even if we have a visceral instinct to want to. I really do believe that if we try to reserve judgment and spend more time and effort to understand where people are actually coming from then we can become empathetic even without shared experiences.
Look, empathy is hard. It requires a ton of effort and a change in mindset. It requires us to confront perspectives that we don’t want to. But, in my opinion, empathy is one of the most important skills we can cultivate to live happier lives and make a better world. In 2006 during Xavier University’s commencement, Obama put it better than I ever could when he said “Know that there’s another path you can take. This one’s going to be more difficult. It asks more of you, it asks you to leave here and not just pursue your own individual dreams but to help perfect our collective dream as a nation [and a world]. It asks you to realize there’s more to life than being rich or thin or young or famous or safe or entertained. It asks you to recognize that there are people out there who need you. There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. One of the things I think we should talk more about is our empathy deficit.” With some effort and thought, I really believe we can fix our empathy deficit.
[1] Dalai Lama (2009–10–01). The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living (p. 115). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2] You could argue that helping those in need is not our responsibility, which is a fair point. I would still argue though that if we were truly empathetic with them, then there would be fewer issues, especially when considering the empathy-altruism link.
[3] Sometimes we get into fights from short tempers or emotional responses, these strike me as temporary (unless they come from some deeper conflict). In those instances, it probably makes sense to take the “nice” approach and resolve by calming things down.
[4] Daniel Batson also wrote much about the difference between egoism and altruism. He argues that we help others out of a genuine concern for their welfare rather than our own self-interest.
[5] We see this in several natural examples: dogs cry for each other when dying, rodents feel pain when other rodents they know are hurt, and cuckolded male birds beat their female counterparts when they cheat on them.
[6] If you watch the movie Eye in the Sky currently in theaters, you’ll see this exact scenario play out. The pilot is hesitant about hurting the girl because he has developed an emotional connection to her while he does not feel the same for some of the others who may be affected by the blast.
[7] In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith also makes an interesting related point when he writes “We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality.” He argues that holding someone else’s weight may allow us to see things they may not be able to because from a practical point of view we are using our imagination rather than basing it on real experiences.
[8] I think it’s important to note here that “true” empathy is actually impossible. We cannot ever completely understand what someone else feels because that implies that we must have identical genes and experiences to them. That said, we shouldn’t let the fact that it is impossible stop us from trying to get to that point because through the pursuit is where we will actually become more empathetic.
[9] If you still feel that you are judging him as wrong or stupid immediately, I encourage you to just take a second, reflect, and reread the paragraph. The example is meant to be provocative.
Thanks to Sonali Fabiani, Akiff Premjee, and Aly Kassim-Lakha for reading and editing drafts of this.