Empathy is in a weird place right now. Most of us probably think the ability to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes is a good thing. That’s what compassion is all about right? But a recent trend in conservative Christian circles is calling empathy into question. Some people even believe it’s a sin.
Even those who think of empathy as a good thing struggle with the concept. Erica Steenberger, a therapist based in Chicago, admits that at times it can be overwhelming — and she’s basically empathic for living. “I’ve been really thinking a lot lately about the darker side of being someone who practices empathy on purpose as a career all day, every day, and there’s been some really hard parts of it that I was not prepared for,” she told the Explain It to Me hotline, Vox’s weekly, call-in podcast.
If therapists struggle with empathy, Steenberger says she sees the way people in different professions do too. “Maybe somebody works retail and throughout the day, they deal with some angry people, some disappointed people, and they have some regular interactions too. But they’re also chatting with their coworkers, and one of their coworkers is telling them about a really difficult thing happening in their family. And another coworker is talking about the stress of school. Then this person finishes their shift and they get in the car and they listen to the news and they’re hearing about Gaza or they’re hearing about deportations, and they’re imagining what it would be like to be in that situation,” she tells Vox. “I just don’t think someone going through that day is thinking about how much vicarious grief, vicarious stress, vicarious anxiety they’ve been around.”
So, is empathy a good thing, or a bad thing? According to Jamil Zaki, the answer is complicated. Zaki is a psychology professor at Stanford University, where he also leads the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. “I hesitate to just use good and bad to describe a psychological state like empathy. It just is,” he says.
How do we learn to be more empathetic? And what does empathy really mean in the first place? Zaki tells us on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
What is empathy? What exactly are we talking about here?
Empathy has three pieces. The first is vicariously sharing what other people feel, which is called emotional empathy. The second is trying to understand what life and reality is like for another person, which is cognitive empathy. And the third is caring about others and wishing for their well-being to improve, which is often called empathic concern, or compassion. These three pieces are connected to each other, but they can also be separated.
There’s this idea that empathy is a sin. How do you think of that, as someone who studies it?
I’ve seen this in a lot of the very recent critiques of empathy — this idea that if you empathize with somebody, you’re sort of giving up your own perspective, that you will end up agreeing with them or condoning whatever they do. That is not true at all.
I do think there are certain ways in which empathy can lead us to make decisions that we probably don’t want to make. For instance, favoring somebody who we empathize with versus somebody who we don’t know, or favoring people who we’re close to because we understand their emotions more. That said, the idea that empathy is always toxic or that we should remove it from our lives seems quite misguided to me as well, because empathy has enormous fundamental ways of supporting everything that we do well as a species.
We often think of empathy as something that we do for other people, but it turns out that it actually helps us in many cases. In our lab we find that when people feel empathy for their roommates, classmates, for the people that they’re close with, for instance, they themselves are less stressed, happier and less lonely. We also find that when you give to others, that’s one of the best things that you can do for your physical and mental health. It helps us, the people who feel empathy, but it also helps the people around us. Physicians who are empathic treat their patients in ways that are more effective. Bosses who are empathic have happier and healthier employees. Parents and spouses who are empathic have healthier connections with family.
Finally, empathy helps us connect at a broad scale. People who feel it are more likely to volunteer, to donate to charity, and to see people who are different from them free from the lens of prejudice, stereotyping, and bias. So there are lots of benefits.
“We often think of empathy as something that we do for other people, but it turns out that it actually helps us in many cases.”
What’s going on in our brains when we’re empathic?
Well, let’s be clear that empathy doesn’t always make us feel better. For instance, if you were in my lab right now and we were scanning your brain, and you saw somebody else experience pain — like stub their toe or accidentally cut themselves with a knife — the parts of your brain that would come online would not be those associated with pleasure, but with pain. Your brain would look as though you were going through the situation that this person was.
But when we can use that empathy to make a positive difference for somebody else, that’s when you start to experience benefits. If I were to scan your brain while you instead did something kind for somebody who you felt connected to, the parts of your brain that come online when you eat chocolate would also be active. I think a lot of us these days feel empathy, but don’t take any action. You go online and you see tragedy after tragedy, suffering all over the world and you feel helpless. That’s not a very healthy state for a person to be in. But when we can turn empathy into action, that’s when it starts to benefit us.
Are people naturally empathetic, or is this something we learn over time?
I think a little bit of both. As a species, we are enormously empathic. We can care for people who are thousands of miles away, who we will never meet. We can care for future generations who haven’t been born yet. We can care for fictional characters who don’t even exist. That’s something that no other animal does. So our capacity for empathy is fantastic.
That said, it’s also something that changes with our experience. Certain experiences can cause our empathy to weaken and atrophy, and others can cause it to strengthen and grow like a muscle. It is a skill, and crucially, that means that by practicing the right habits, we can build our empathy on purpose.
Okay, so if empathy is like a muscle, how do we work that muscle? How do we become more empathetic?
We’ve found that people who think that empathy is a fixed trait are less likely to work on it and less likely to grow. But people who know that it’s a skill try to work on it — try to grow and actually do as a result. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you think you can change, you’re going to be right. And if you think you can’t change, you’re also going to be right. Empathy changes, not because you do some grandiose thing once, but it changes because you just take a slightly different approach to what you do every day. I encourage people to put a daily calendar hold for just five minutes where they can perform a small act of goodwill or service.
Another really critical habit to develop is humility. Oftentimes, the reason that we can’t empathize with other people is because we’re too confident in our own perspective, especially during disagreements. It’s critical to say, “What don’t I know? What does this person have to teach me?” And shifting our goal in conversations from scoring points and dunking on people to trying to learn from them.
