A study involving 900 students in six countries found that a short program of empathy lessons led to measurable, positive changes in their conduct, emotional awareness and curiosity about different cultures. An analysis of a short program teaching empathy in schools has found it had a positive impact on students’ behavior and increased their emotional literacy within 10 weeks…..Continue reading…
Provided by University of Cambridge
Source: Phys
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Critics:
People who score more highly on empathy questionnaires also report having more positive relationships with other people. They report “greater life satisfaction, more positive affect, less negative affect, and less depressive symptoms than people who had lower empathy scores”. Children who exhibit more empathy also have more resilience. Empathy can be an aesthetic pleasure, “by widening the scope of that which we experience… by providing us with more than one perspective of a situation, thereby multiplying our experience… and… by intensifying that experience.
Epilogue People can use empathy to borrow joy from the joy of children discovering things or playing make-believe, or to satisfy our curiosity about other people’s lives. People can severely overestimate how much they understand others. When people empathize with another, they may oversimplify that other person in order to make them more legible. It may improve empathic accuracy for the empathizer to explicitly ask the person empathized with for confirmation of the empathic hypothesis.
However, people may be reluctant to abandon their empathic hypotheses even when they are explicitly denied. Because we oversimplify people in order to make them legible enough to empathize with, we can come to misapprehend how cohesive other people are. We may come to think of ourselves as lacking a strong, integral self in comparison. Fritz Breithaupt calls this the “empathic endowment effect”.
Because the empathic person must temporarily dampen their own sense of self in order to empathize with the other, and because the other seems to have a magnified and extra-cohesive sense of self, the empathic person may suffer from this and may “project onto others the self that they are lacking” and envy “that which they must give up in order to be able to feel empathy: a strong self”.
Some research suggests that people are more able and willing to empathize with those most similar to themselves. In particular, empathy increases with similarities in culture and living conditions. Empathy is more likely to occur between individuals whose interaction is more frequent. A measure of how well a person can infer the specific content of another person’s thoughts and feelings was developed by William Ickes.
In one experiment, researchers gave two groups of men wristbands according to which football team they supported. Each participant received a mild electric shock, then watched another go through the same pain. When the wristbands matched, both brains flared[clarification needed]: with pain, and empathic pain. If they supported opposing teams, the observer was found to have little empathy.
Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, points out that empathic bias can result in tribalism and violent responses in the name of helping people of the same “tribe” or social group, for example when empathic bias is exploited by demagogues. He proposes “rational compassion” as an alternative; one example is using effective altruism to decide on charitable donations rationally, rather than by relying on emotional responses to images in the media.
Higher empathy tends to reduce the accuracy of deception detection, and emotion recognition training does not improve deception detection. Empathy can also be exploited by sympathetic beggars. Bloom points to the example of street children in India, who can get many donations because they are adorable but this results in their enslavement by organized crime.
Bloom says that though someone might feel better about themselves and find more meaning in life than they give to the person in front of them, in some cases they would do less harm and in many cases do more good in the world by giving to an effective charity through an impersonal website. Bloom believes improper use of empathy and social intelligence can lead to shortsighted actions and parochialism.
Bloom points out that parents who have too much short-term empathy might create long-term problems for their children, by neglecting discipline, helicopter parenting, or deciding not to get their children vaccinated because of the short-term discomfort. People experiencing too much empathy after a disaster may continue to send donations like canned goods or used clothing even after being asked to stop or to send cash instead, and this can make the situation worse by creating the need to dispose of useless donations and taking resources away from helpful activities.
Bloom also finds empathy can encourage unethical behavior when it causes people to care more about attractive people than ugly people, or people of one’s own race vs. people of a different race. The attractiveness bias can also affect wildlife conservation efforts, increasing the amount of money devoted and laws passed to protect cute and photogenic animals, while taking attention away from species that are more ecologically important.
Another growing focus of investigation is how empathy manifests in education between teachers and learners. Although there is general agreement that empathy is essential in educational settings, research found that it is difficult to develop empathy in trainee teachers. Learning by teaching is one method used to teach empathy. Students transmit new content to their classmates, so they have to reflect continuously on those classmates’ mental processes.
This develops the students’ feeling for group reactions and networking. Carl R. Rogers pioneered research in effective psychotherapy and teaching which espoused that empathy coupled with unconditional positive regard or caring for students and authenticity or congruence were the most important traits for a therapist or teacher to have. Other research and meta-analyses corroborated the importance of these person-centered traits. Within medical education, a hidden curriculum appears to dampen or even reduce medical student empathy.
According to one theory, empathy is one of seven components involved in the effectiveness of intercultural communication. This theory also states that empathy is learnable. However, research also shows that people experience more difficulty empathizing with others who are different from them in characteristics such as status, culture, religion, language, skin colour, gender, and age.
To build intercultural empathy in others, psychologists employ empathy training. Researchers William Weeks, Paul Pedersen, et al. state that people who develop intercultural empathy can interpret experiences or perspectives from more than one worldview. Intercultural empathy can also improve self-awareness and critical awareness of one’s own interaction style as conditioned by one’s cultural views and promote a view of self-as-process.
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