Jamil Zaki

The empathetic state of the union

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 our second conversation with Jamil. Be sure to also see our conversation on combatting the decline of empathy.

What do you feel is a good summary of where we’re at now, a sort of empathic state of the union?

Jamil: Empathy is an ancient instinct that’s potentially really useful and tuned to a social world where people are familiar to each other, interdependent, and aligned. But now, we live in a context that’s really not that much like that, where we are anonymous, tribal, and isolated. It’s not great soil for empathy. And in fact, I would argue that if you wanted to build a system to break human empathy, you couldn’t do that much better. And there’s some indication that empathy has broken.

We’d love to hear your POV on tech and empathy as it can be a tricky one, one that is critical and needs honest conversation.

Jamil: Well, we’re increasingly technologically mediated. We might not interact with people who we know as much as we used to IRL, but we sort of have the chance to talk with all of them all the time on massive social media networks. And that could be amazing. I think that technology offers humanity the greatest empathic opportunity we’ve ever had to connect with anybody anywhere at any time on their own terms, and respond with compassion and understand it. I don’t think that many people would argue that’s what we’ve done with it so far, and that’s for a bunch of reasons.

I think that technology offers humanity the greatest empathic opportunity we’ve ever had to connect with anybody anywhere at any time on their own terms, and respond with compassion and understand it.

I think one reason that that social media has left the empathic promises that it could have made unmet, is because it takes away certain features of social life that typically are triggers for empathy, like seeing people’s faces and hearing their voices. Online, we’re often sort of avatars plus strings of text. And then the other problem is that social media enhances or reinforces antisocial behavior. For example, we’ve found that when people express outrage on Twitter, they’re more likely to be rewarded by likes and retweets. And that, in turn, predicts subsequent outrage in their later tweets.

So it’s as though basically, by yelling at the other side, we get reinforced or rewarded, typically by people who already agree with us. And that then makes us feel like we’re good group members and gets us to do more. So it’s not great, and neither of those things are great for empathy.

What could improve empathy in these contexts?

Jamil: You try to point social media and its interactions away from very short, text-based sort of communication to something that includes more back and forth, and more and more cues to people’s humanity. Another thing would be to change the reinforcement structure away from just whatever is gravity to maybe, whatever is humanity-positive. For example, there was a company called Coco that was a network where people could basically talk anonymously about problems that they were having and then people could anonymously respond and offer support. And the only reinforcement was the thank you coming from the original poster. So this is a network that exemplifies some of the things that larger networks could try.

Can you keep walking that closer to home for us? When we think about caring for each other and fostering empathy within the work environment, what should we keep in mind?

Jamil: In intergroup contexts, for example, at work, we have very little chance or interest sometimes in knowing about someone’s idiosyncrasies, and we see them in a very simplistic way as a group member. Many of us only know each other in one context, and sometimes feel as though we’re not licensed to talk about what’s going on with us in the rest of our lives.

In 2012, Google looked at a bunch of different teams and tried to predict what would track the success of those teams. And they found that one of the strongest predictors was psychological safety, or the idea that people feel okay being vulnerable. And that’s definitely not always true in team contexts. When I work with companies and other organizations, we do a lot around psychological safety, and there are many ways to make it structural. We tend to count on individual leaders to really be listening and to be really open and connected with their teams, but we don’t train them to do that very often, and we don’t have incentive structures that help make that a part of their work.

I like the end of Inconvenient Truth, where it offers “what you can do about it”? Any way to turn the empathic tide? What can we do to push back on the movement toward isolation, recuperate our empathy and reclaim our common humanity?

Empathy is typically viewed as a trait that’s coded into our genes and hardwired into our brains. I call this the Roddenberry hypothesis, named for Gene Roddenberry, who enshrined this idea into the characters of the greatest television show of all time, Star Trek The Next Generation. On one side, we’ve got a ship’s counselor, Deanna Troi, known throughout the quadrant for her high levels of empathy. She instinctively catches other people’s feelings, even over vast distances, and as a result of catching people’s emotions instinctively understands what they’re feeling. On the other side, we’ve got the ship’s Lieutenant Commander Data, an Android who doesn’t feel emotions himself, and as a result is blind to the emotions of others. The hypothesis, as I see it, is that these two characters define a continuum, and that each one of us is somewhere in between them with a level of empathy that will change. We were born there, and we will die there.

That’s good news if you’re empathic already, because it means that you stand to benefit from the empathy of the people around you. But it’s not great news if you struggle with empathy, because it suggests that no matter what you do or how hard you try, you can never get better at connecting with people. It’s even worse news collectively for us, because if the patterns of our lives that made empathy easier are going away, there’s nothing that we can do to push back against those trends. We’re doomed to become less empathic as empathy becomes harder for all of us because of social structures. So this is a fatalistic view. Thankfully, it’s also wrong.

Well, that’s a relief. Hmm. Can you give us another hopeful view of empathy?

For the last 10 years or so, I and lots of my colleagues have found evidence that contradicts the standard wisdom that empathy is a trait. It turns out that empathy is a skill. I do not mean that there’s no genetic component to empathy, there is, but our starting point doesn’t have to be our endpoint. Our experiences change the way that we empathize. Some experiences can atrophy our empathy, and other experiences can cause it to grow.

It turns out that empathy is a skill. I don’t mean that there’s no genetic component to empathy, but our starting point doesn’t have to be our endpoint.

And crucially, that means that we can make choices about which experiences we want to cultivate. So for instance, trying to work on the types of habits that we think can make us more effective empathizes. You make those choices all the time. We cross the street to avoid a homeless person or we pay attention to what they’re going through. When someone says something that angers or alienates us, will we tune them out, or will we try to be curious about where they’re coming from?

When we make choices to engage over and over again, we can build a stronger and broader type of empathy, and that’s what a lot of my work these days is about. What I try to do is to build empathy gyms for other people, to put them in contexts where they have the option to work on connecting better with others.

That’s our kind of gym. What have you learned from this work?

Jamil: So there’re a few insights that I’ve gotten from this work. The first is that if you want to cross boundaries between “us and them”, you can begin by moving to “you and I”. Oftentimes tribalism is characterized by an intense lack of curiosity, a sense that it’s okay to reduce people to just a representative of their group, as opposed to an individual. This, of course, is harder to do up close, because people are way too complicated to be reduced to one aspect of their identity. And there are lots of ways to cue people into being curious or connected with one person’s experience. And that, in turn, can build their empathy for the group from which that person comes.

How do you facilitate this kind of meaningful experience?

Jamil: So in my lab we’ve tried this a bunch of different ways. One is that we use virtual reality to help people connect with individuals from a group that they might not otherwise connect with: homeless people in the Bay Area. So in this simulation, which lasts about 15 minutes, participants saw from the first-person point of view what it might look like to become homeless.

In one scene, they’ve been evicted from their apartment and are trying to sell furniture to stay in it. In another scene, they’re living in their car, which is then impounded. And then in a third scene, they’ve taken to a local bus line for shelter. These scenes were based on interviews that we conducted with homeless individuals in the area. It was a short simulation, and yet it had long-lasting effects. Even a month after taking part in this simulation, participants were less likely to dehumanize homeless individuals and more likely to support policies in favor of affordable housing as compared to control participants.

Although hatred can bury empathy, it doesn’t kill it. We can get back to connection with other people, and one way to do that is to get to know them.

That’s one way to connect with an individual from a group that’s different from your own. Reading novels about characters who are different than you builds empathy as well, not just for fictional people, but for real people who belong to those groups. But the most old-fashioned way [to build empathy] is to get to know a person as an individual. It’s not that complicated. It’s called contact theory in psychology, which is the idea that when we befriend someone from another group, it becomes really difficult to stereotype members of that group and much easier to empathize with them. Although hatred can bury empathy, it doesn’t kill it. We can get back to connection with other people, and one way to do that is to get to know them.

How could we scale these sorts of empathic experiences? Or increase empathy beyond a personal level, for our communities?

Jamil: A message from some of my more recent work is that caring and empathy can be contagious. Broadly, we want very badly to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and as a result, we conform all the time in all sorts of different ways. We are a herd species. So we pick up other people’s emotions, actions, beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts. This can be really damaging when it comes to something like drug abuse, depression, or intolerance, but conformity isn’t always bad; the positive side of our behaviors can be just as catchy as the negative side.

We recently used this to examine whether we could build kinder cultures among the most conformist people on earth: middle schoolers. So we worked with about 1,200 7th graders around the Bay Area, and a subset of these students we put in a condition that we call an “empathic norms” condition. First, we showed them a video extolling the virtues of empathy and how it helps people navigate the difficulties in seventh grade. After watching that video, we asked students to write about why they valued empathy, and they left and we collated their responses. The next day when they came back to school, we showed them basically a brochure of their friends and classmates all giving their testimonial as to why they liked empathy. So here, we’re exposing them to a real social norm all around them, and we asked them in return to then stand for their grade, and why people in their grade valued empathy. And students really took to this.

Here’s a sample response to student rights: “People in my grade feel very strongly about empathy, it’s really important to value empathy. I can see that many people in my grade value it a lot. Smiley-face emoji.” So the real question is did this have any effect on their behavior? So we returned to these classes two months later, and we asked them to nominate people in their class who were nice, who do favors for other improvement and seem to be caring. What we found was that students in our “empathic norms” condition compared to those in the two control conditions were more likely to believe that empathy was popular among their peers, and that in turn, predicted their likelihood of engaging in kind behavior, as reported by other kids, not just them telling us that they were being kind, which might be a less trustworthy measure in this population.

How can we apply this mirroring…Does 7th grade translate to the rest of life?

Jamil: So I like that study. I think it also has a message that goes way beyond just school settings. Because oftentimes, even though we want to do what other people around us do and feel what other people around us feel, sometimes it’s hard to know what the majority thinks, feels, or believes. So oftentimes what we do is we turn to whatever the loudest people are saying, or feeling, and that’s a problem because sometimes the loudest voices in our culture are not the kindest. Think about the bullies that these seventh graders might have seen. Or think about extreme pundits on cable news, or whoever your favorite mean, loud person on Twitter is. These people take up so much airspace that it’s easy to confuse them for the majority, and believe that in order to fit in, we should all fall in line.

Since writing my book, I’ve received hundreds of emails from people who are hungry for a more empathic culture, but who strongly believe that they’re in a tiny minority surrounded by cruelty and people who love cruelty and enjoy it and are happy that things are this way. It’s ironic that none of these people can read each other’s emails because I think sometimes it feels as though there might be a kinder majority under the surface.

What else can we do to form more visibility and awareness for empathy?

Jamil: All around us right now, there are people acting cruelly in the world, and there are people acting with enormous compassion, and the things that we pay attention to turn into the gravitational forces that govern our minds. And the things that we get other people to pay attention to turn into the gravitational forces that affect them. And so the choices that we make, for instance, about what type of media we consume, matter to us. And then the choices that we make about what we highlight in our culture also matter.

Help make empathy loud.

Help make empathy loud. This, I think, is a real responsibility that leaders should understand themselves to have, whether you’re a leader in a family, or a town or a team, or a company. Bring empathy to the surface by rewarding and recognizing people for acts of kindness, because doing so doesn’t just incentivize those people, it makes their actions more likely to become visible in the culture, to inspire others, and to help people understand that the social norms around them are kinder than they might think otherwise.

While we could have kept Jamil for hours, we didn’t want to hog his time or intelligence. Here’s a summary of Jamil’s insightful Q&A with our studio audience of Googlers.

Googler: How does the concept of the squeaky wheel getting oiled fit into this paradigm, particularly when two squeaky voices are in opposition to each other?

Jamil: I’ll resonate with what you’re saying, which is that negativity bias can change our perception of the landscape socially around us. If people are being really negative, then we can just become convinced that life is negative, right? And I think that’s especially true if that negativity is pointed in certain directions. I think that there’s negativity bias on some social media platforms and positivity bias on other ones. Like, on Instagram, everyone’s living their best life. And then on Twitter, we’re all like in this toxic angry cesspool. But I think that both of those can be damaging to the extent that they’re imbalanced. Being on Facebook, for instance, robustly tracks people’s depression, and I think that’s a lot of times because we’re seeing other people’s highlight reels and living our own blooper reels. So I would argue that changing incentive structures on social media in ways that allow people to invite connection rather than either advertising for themselves or attacking each other, would be a really important thing to try.

Googler: What are your ideas for improving the publicity and terminology around empathy?

Jamil: What I’m doing in this moment is trying to publicize this idea, and I hope that people spread it and pass it on to the extent that they find it useful. I’ve been really fortunate, since writing this book, to have received lots of interest from leaders in lots of different spaces: media, the arts, business. I realize that half of this talk is really pessimistic, but I’ve actually been cautiously optimistic since starting speaking about these ideas because people seem like they’re really hungry for them. And again, you might not see that very much in our culture, because of the voices that are dominating, but I feel like there’s groundswell in the opposite direction.

Empathy is not just a soft skill. In many settings, it’s one of the most powerful skills that we have, even at things like pushing along a successful project or building a cohesive team. And so there’s lots of advantages. I try not to sort of give the Machiavellian case for empathy, because I think it’s also good to do things that help other people, because they are good, but making that case is part of spreading this idea of empathy more broadly.

Googler: I really liked your point around making empathy loud and rewarding and recognizing kindness, which incentivizes others in the culture. You shared a couple of technological examples of that. I’m wondering if you can share any other kind of innovative things you’ve seen in other companies or other organizations that have really highlighted this?

Jamil: IDEO is a leader in this space. Harvard Business Review did a great case study on them where they basically create all sorts of incentives for people to help each other. One thing that really interferes with empathy is stress. So if just your organizational culture is tuned up so that everyone is just racing as fast as they can on the hamster wheel of their own to do list, that’s not very conducive to creating help across the organization. So they put slack in people’s schedules. They also incentivize and recognize helpers in the culture explicitly for their role in helping others. And they model helping behavior from the top. So even people in the C-suite will come and spend time collaborating with others on their projects, and as a result, IDEO has this massively interconnected culture of helpers.

Another thing that I really like that some organizations do is peer-to-peer bonus systems, because that allows people to recognize each other. And also because helping behavior is contagious. There’s evidence that if you introduce peer-to-peer bonus systems, people who are not bonusing each other still help each other more in informal contexts. So that behavior sort of ripples out even beyond the actual programs.

Googler: I know you briefly touched on it in the stress context, but can you speak to how you have empathy, but still have a healthy and kind relationship?

Jamil: And one of the key survival skills is to know how to tune between different types of empathy. Contemplative exercises, like a loving-kindness meditation, are some of the best psychological technology that we have for helping people empathize in healthy ways. So there’s all sorts of really fantastic recent research (not that these traditions need Western neuroscientific research to confirm their efficacy, they have 1000s of years of evidence on their own) and there’s a lot of really great collaborations these days between practitioners of things like loving kindness and compassion meditation and neuroscientists showing that not only does that type of meditation allow people to more accurately understand other people, it increases their tendency to help other people and decreases their tendency to burn out by taking on other people’s pain. All of those things are true, and all of those things are also pegged to the neuroplasticity that is the result of taking part in practices like that. So it’s hugely powerful.

Googler: It’s interesting rise of meditation techniques for calming people down and making them more compassionate is tracking with the unfairness of society since the 80s. I wonder if the ability of meditation to help is hobbled by the unfairness of society?

Jamil: Let me be really clear that I’m not meaning to suggest that the job of making our culture more caring rests solely on the individual. There are structures in our culture and every culture that make caring harder or easier. And if you separate people structurally and increase inequality to record levels, that’s going to make it harder to connect with people.

The rise of things like loving kindness meditation have co-occurred with maybe a sense of erosion in our culture. Likewise, if you look at Google searches, for instance, searches for empathy have skyrocketed in the same period of time that self-reported empathy has tanked. It’s almost as though people are looking for empathy because they’re just looking for empathy. I do think that there is a sense that our culture is fraying that people are wanting to figure out how to create a solution for that. So one way of saying it is we’re looking for empathy because everything around us sucks. Another way of saying it is that everything around us sucks, but people seem to at least independently be looking for forces that can push back and if we could get those people together maybe that could be productive.

What happens to empathy over the course of childhood development? Does it go down or up?

Jamil: Kids generally get better at empathizing. Cognitive empathy sort of comes online between three and four years of age and kids continue to get better, especially at more complicated forms of social influence, until they’re eight or 10. But they also become more aware of social divisions between people and so they become more parochial or tribal in their empathy. So they learn to empathize better, but they use their empathy in more selective ways that are often unhelpfully bounded by social categories.

Googler: How can we better set up the next generation to be empathetic?

Jamil: There are lots and lots of educators working on this. Socio-emotional learning is a term that some of you might be familiar with, which is a focus on building soft skills which we should probably stop calling soft skills, and on building things like emotion regulation and emotion recognition, naming your feelings, and also building compassion for others. There’s an entire kindness curriculum that was created at the University of Wisconsin that is now delivered at thousands of schools that integrates contemplative practices as well.

There’s a real problem, which is that this is stratified, so socio-emotional learning is mostly delivered in privileged contexts, and one could argue there’s a real powerful need to flatten out that that delivery system. Education in the arts is often not recognized as also education in psychology, which it deeply is. So that’s another thing that I think needs to be pushed on.

It’s also really important in my estimation to point our children and family structures towards rewarding and recognizing and being grateful for acts of kindness because that makes it more likely that they proliferate.

Googler: Suppose you have a super-busy leader and they want to take one action step toward empathy in the next week. What do you suggest that they do?

Jamil: I talk with lots of people and they say I want empathy to be one of my key corporate values, what should I do? And I tell them it’s going to be really tricky because if you say that and write about it and talk about it, but people don’t see it in their on-the-ground reality, it’s worse than not saying it.

There’s what we say we should do and then what people actually are doing, and people strongly track towards what people around them are actually doing and if they see a discrepancy between the two, they actually get really burnt out on whatever the stated value is. So I tend to tell leaders not to roll it out as a value unless you have policies that you’re ready to roll out at the very same time that make this really actionable. So things like peer-to-peer bonus systems, incentivizing and programs to recognize and elevate to leadership status people, not just based on their individual performance, but on their ability to bring teams together, to bring out the best in others, finding ways to recognize and reward and make visible those qualities seems really important to me.

The other is to encourage vulnerability and to make people feel as though they can bring their whole self to work. Sometimes when people feel as though they need to present themselves only as the person who doesn’t need help then it doesn’t really create that many opportunities, even for an eager super-empathy positive leader who wants to help people if they’re not asking. So I think sort of de-stigmatizing vulnerability and requests for help, and even celebrating those requests and that vulnerability is another key step.