Jamil Zaki

Combatting a decline in empathy with a war for kindness

At Empathy Lab, connection is our jam. We’re all about exploring the invisible threads of human relating and understanding how and why humans rely on, cooperate with, and attach to each other. Empathy, we know, is a key to human flourishing. It is “the psychological equivalent to a natural resource” as our friend Jamil Zaki says. An award-winning researcher, professor of psychology, and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, Jamil’s work in the empathy space focuses on human connection: how we connect, how connection helps us flourish, and how we can learn to connect better.

Shortly after the release of his latest book, The War for Kindness Building Empathy in a Fractured World, we invited Jamil to discuss empathy in the 21st century and the hope we have for restoring society. This is the first part of our conversation. Be sure to also see our conversation with Jamil on the empathic state of the union.

Jamil, you shared a story with us about a young man, Tony. He found acceptance and community in Canada’s white power movement, a network rooted in hate. What can we learn from him?

Jamil: The vast majority of people from broken homes don’t become hate group members, but I would argue that if Tony was psychologically sick, the illness he had is not as uncommon as we might wish it to be. A lot of us have noticed that as our culture feels more fractured and frayed, that it’s sort of seeping into us as individuals.

A lot of us have noticed that as our culture feels more fractured and frayed, that it’s sort of seeping into us as individuals.

We’re becoming angrier. We’re outraged, maybe less tolerant, maybe even more hateful with people who are different from us. As a psychologist who studied empathy for my entire career, I think that Tony’s story is emblematic of why it’s become harder for us to connect with other people, especially people who are different from us. And I think his escape from this life offers some insights about how the rest of us can learn to try and empathize better.

You shared that Tony found a way out of this experience, can you tell us more about what happened after he left? Where’s Tony at now?

Jamil: More recently, Tony, along with a bunch of other ex-hate group members formed the organization Life After Hate, whose mission is to extract other people from the dark place that they once inhabited. Thousands of hate group members and their families have contacted Tony and his colleagues. And their job is to sort of teach these people that although hatred can bury empathy, it doesn’t kill it, and that we can get back to connection with other people. And one way to do that is to get to know them.

Your entire career has been devoted to research on empathy. Thank you. What’s your take on how and why we became empathic creatures?

Jamil: Just 30,000 years ago, sapiens shared the earth with five other species, yet we had one thing that set us apart: each other. Way more than any other species, we cooperated, worked together, helped each other and cared for one another. And that made all the difference, because even though we might have been unremarkable as individuals, as a collective, we were breathtaking, like a super organism that could do things that no other animal could dream of. Things like hunt a woolly mammoth, build suspension bridges, or even take over the world.

Even though we might have been unremarkable as individuals, as a collective, we were breathtaking, like a super organism that could do things that no other animal could dream of.

Psychologists and evolutionary theorists now recognize that a big piece of this puzzle is the weird and wonderful fact that even though people are physically separate from each other, psychologically, we overlap. And that feeling of overlapping can be so intense that sometimes when you see someone else go through something, it kind of feels like you’re going through it instead.

You’ve seen those videos of people walking a tightrope over the Grand Canyon or standing on the edge of the Empire State building. Just seeing another human at such heights makes my stomach quiver with nerves. What’s going on there?

Jamil: Hundreds of years ago, the philosopher Adam Smith, described what you might be feeling. He called this the fellow feeling, and he thought it was really important to our moral lives. In fact, he called it the North Star of our moral compass. He would say that if seeing someone in pain feels like being in pain, you have every reason not to hurt them. And if seeing someone happy feels like being happy, you have every reason to help them.

If seeing someone in pain feels like being in pain, you have every reason not to hurt them. If seeing someone happy feels like being happy, you have every reason to help them.

In other words, the fellow feeling turns the golden rule into an instinct. We’ve translated this idea of the fellow feeling into the modern concept of empathy.

Lots of folks have their own working definition or understanding of empathy. What best describes it for you?

Jamil: Empathy is an umbrella term that describes multiple ways that we respond to other people’s emotions. So imagine, for instance, that you’re having lunch with a friend, and he receives a phone call. You don’t know who is on the other line, or what they’re saying, but you know, it’s not good because your friend starts to cry. As you see him break down, a bunch of things might happen in you. You might feel bad yourself, sort of vicariously sharing his emotion, which we would call emotional empathy. He might try to figure out or understand what he’s feeling and why, which we would call cognitive empathy. And if you’re a good friend, you probably care about what he’s going through and wish for him to feel better, which we call empathic concern, or compassion. These pieces of empathy together allow us as individuals to connect with each other.

We love your description of empathy as a natural resource, the psychological equivalent of one. Please share more about that, and the ripple effect of empathy.

Jamil: Decades of evidence now demonstrate lots of ways that empathy benefits all sorts of people, including the folks who feel it. Individuals who are more empathic tend to be happier and less depressed, they have an easier time forming and maintaining important relationships. In professional contexts, they tend to be picked out as leaders, and when they’re in leadership roles tend to do a better job managing teams that are successful and coherent.

Empathy’s benefits bubble outward to the people around us. Patients of empathic doctors are happier with their care, more likely to listen to physician’s orders, and in some cases, even quicker to heal than those of less empathic physicians. Spouses of empathic partners have happier marriages, and employees of empathic managers are less likely to call in sick with stress related illnesses.

So empathy results in better overall happiness, but we know many of the people we empathize with are not in happy places. How is empathy different from taking on another person’s feelings?

Jamil: The answer to that comes in the difference between these different pieces of empathy. If you think of empathy as only sharing other people’s emotions, that can be deleterious to one’s health. But if you think of empathy as the ability to share people’s emotions, understand what they feel, and also feel the motivation to care for them, it tracks to greater well-being, partially because empathy leads to building close relationships.

If you think of empathy as the ability to share people’s emotions, understand what they feel, and also feel the motivation to care for them, it tracks to greater well-being.

That sounds like compassion, which is rooted in social action. How does empathy work as a force in communities?

Jamil: Empathic individuals have an outsized tendency to donate to charity and volunteer. Even inducing empathy in someone for a moment makes it more likely that they’ll step in and help someone in an experimental setting. And empathy also tracks a lack of things like stereotyping and prejudice towards people who look or think differently from us. And it positively tracks interest in environmental sustainability.

If empathy is contagious in this way, why don’t we see more of it, or why do we sometimes struggle to act with empathy?

Jamil: I would argue that it’s become harder to empathize, like in my lifetime, in the near past. When empathy evolved, people existed in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers. If you ran into someone else 60,000 years ago, probably a bunch of things were true. You were familiar to each other, maybe even related to each other. You were visible to each other, you could see pain and pleasure on each other’s face and hear it in each other’s voice. And we were accountable to each other in very small social settings. You would know people’s track record of acting kindly and cruelly.

These ingredients of social interaction made it easy for us to care about one another. And these ingredients are increasingly disappearing from modern life. Because our existence is nothing like it was back then. We’re more atomized than we were before. In 1950, one-third of humanity was urban, and by 2050, there’ll be two thirds. What that means is that your run of the mill human being just a few decades ago probably woke up in a small town where everybody knew everybody. But now increasingly into the future, we wake up in megalopolises surrounded by millions of other people.

Wait, how does being around more people make us less empathic?

Jamil: Being surrounded by people doesn’t mean that we know them. The rise in urban living has been accompanied by a huge rise in solitary living, especially among young people. In the US, 18–34 year olds are 10 times more likely to live alone than they were just 100 years ago. So in a real way, I would argue humanity is alone in a crowd, we see more people than ever before, but we know fewer of them. And even the rituals that used to bring us into regular contact, everything from bowling leagues to grocery shopping, have given way to solitary pursuits, often carried out online.

I would argue humanity is alone in a crowd, we see more people than ever before, but we know fewer of them.

So we get tons and tons of interactions with other people, but they’re transactional, and they’re often anonymous, not great soil for empathy. This I think feeds into another feature of modern life, which is that we’ve become increasingly tribal. Tribalism, of course, is our natural tendency to split the world up into us and them and to favor “uses” and to derogate, suspect, and otherwise dislike “thems”, whoever they might be. Tribalism is not new, of course. It characterizes all sorts of intergroup interactions, from sports fandom to ethnic and international conflict.

How does this rise in tribalism or tribal identity affect our capacity to empathize?

Jamil: Empathy doesn’t just disappear, it reverses into experiences like schadenfreude, the sort of enjoyment of other people’s pain. Our political moment in the US and beyond, it’s like a schadenfreude buffet. People sometimes seem less interested in advancing their own position and more interested in trolling and upsetting and harming people they disagree with, and then savoring their pain afterwards, sort of drinking in their tears. That problem has been on the rise lately as we’ve come to not just disagree with people on the other side, but to actively abhor them.

Let’s get deeper into the science of this decline of empathy. You’ve talked about the differences between more and less empathic people, how do you measure that base level of empathy?

Jamil: All sorts of different ways. The most popular way to measure empathy is to ask people how empathic they are. And you can quibble with that, right? A lot. Because people might tell you what they think you want to hear or what they want to believe about themselves, rather than actually introspecting.

So you can measure it in other ways. I could strap you to some electrodes to you and then strap myself to some electrodes and you could watch as I’m given electric shocks. And the question would be, how much would your palms sweat? That would be a physiological measure of empathy. Or you could watch me talk about an experience in my life where I had said how I felt moment to moment, and you could try to guess how I felt moment to moment. That’d be a behavioral measure where we’d be testing your accuracy for another person. Or I can scan your brain with fMRI or EEG EMG while you watch other people experiencing emotions, and then induce those same emotions in you and see what type of overlap there is.

Although these measures don’t cohere perfectly, they actually bunch together pretty well. So whereas you might be skeptical that if you ask someone how empathic they are, they’ll just say, “super empathic”, and then not actually behave that way, it turns out that people’s self-reports do track things like their ability to understand other people’s emotions and their willingness to step in and do kind things for others, like donate to charity or volunteer or help strangers in experimental settings.

The most common measurement is really simple, and you can try it out yourself. It’s just a series of statements, and you’re asked how well each one describes you from one, “not at all”, to five, “extremely”. So think about how well this statement describes you: “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Rate it one to five. Then, try this one: “I try to look at every one’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.” Again, one to five. So your score on these, plus 26 other questions like it, would give you your empathy index from one to five, or at least how empathic you think you are.

What have you seen happen over time?

Jamil: Since this test was developed in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people have taken it. In 2011, psychologists decided to aggregate the resulting data, and the news is not great, I’m sorry to say. The average American’s score in 1979 was four out of five, not bad. In 2009 it was three out of five. That’s a big drop. To put it in perspective, the average 2009 American was less empathic by self-report than 75% of Americans just 30 years earlier. Maybe that finding is shocking to you. Maybe it’s the opposite of shocking. Maybe you didn’t need to study to tell you this. Maybe it jives with your intuitions. It certainly does with mine.

It’s been a really interesting experience over the last 15 years, studying empathy as a scientist, seeing all the ways that it benefits us, and at the same time as a person seeing it erode, seeing trends like political polarization and an epidemic of stress among young people that seem to be pushing us in the opposite direction. Being a psychologist studying empathy these days feels a little bit like being a climate scientist studying the polar ice caps. We document the benefits of something just as it disappears all around us.

Wow. That’s sobering, as this is close to our hearts in the lab’s work and more importantly as humans living in our world of empathic decline. Are all types of empathy diminishing?

The decline is strongest in cognitive empathy and empathic concern. So people’s willingness to take the perspective of others and their sense that they care about others’ well being and want to help them. If we could turn up any two pieces of empathy, those would be the ones. The decline from 1979 to 1999, was pretty slow, and it really sped up in the 21st century. So that’s more bad news.

You did a study with Carol Dweck, a pioneer whose Mindset work we’ve applied in our thinking as well. What did you learn about the growth mindset as it relates to empathy?

Jamil: Over and over again, we found that people who were convinced empathy was a skill were more likely to work harder [at it]. And there’s a kind of irony to this research, which is that the dominant model of how empathy works right now in our culture is the idea that it’s a trait, but just believing that could be toxic in and of itself because it could disincentivize or demotivate people from trying to work at it. It might become self-fulfilling if people decide, “I guess I can’t ever understand people or connect with them.”

Where do we go from here?

Jamil: Simply understanding that we can build empathy is the first step towards doing it. What I’d love for us to do is to empathize with purpose, especially when it’s hard. I would like to challenge us to point our care at people who don’t have a voice, and point our curiosity at people who might anger us, even when tuning them out would be easier.

Simply understanding that we can build empathy is the first step towards doing it.

If each one of us does this then we can benefit from empathy’s many positive qualities, but if a lot of us can do that at once, maybe something more impactful can happen. Maybe we can start at least a little bit to reclaim our common humanity, and mend some of the tears in our social fabric.