Table Of ContentThis book is dedicated to all who know the feeling
of being “othered” and to faith that empathy and
our shared humanity will one day unite us.
Contents
Foreword by Alan Alda
Introduction
Part I
CHAPTER 1 Shared Mind Intelligence
CHAPTER 2 How Empathy Works
CHAPTER 3 The Empathy Spectrum
CHAPTER 4 The Seven Keys of E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.®
CHAPTER 5 Who’s In, Who’s Out
Part II
CHAPTER 6 Growing Up with Empathy
CHAPTER 7 The ABCs of Empathy in Education
CHAPTER 8 Texts, Screens, and Digital Empathy
CHAPTER 9 Empathy, Art, and Literature
CHAPTER 10 Leadership and the Politics of Empathy
CHAPTER 11 Digging Deep for Empathy
CHAPTER 12 Self-Empathy
Acknowledgments
References
Index
About the Author
About Sounds True
Copyright
Praise for Empathy Effect
Foreword by Alan Alda
D
own the road, headlights askew, a mangled car sat crosswise in an
intersection. A man sat in the road, covered in blood. My friend George saw this
and stopped his car. Someone said the police were on the way. George got out of
his car, but he didn’t stand by, watching in silence, as a few others did. He sat on
the pavement and held the man in his arms, pressing him to his chest and
whispering words of comfort and encouragement as the man’s scalp leaked
blood onto his clothes. What gave George the strength to do this? He went
toward trouble, not away from it.
Years earlier, my friend Bert was in a hotel room in Chicago. It was 1968
and the Democratic Convention was in an uproar of protest. Young people were
shouting slogans in the street just outside Bert’s hotel. Suddenly violence
erupted, and the police responded with violence of their own. Some of the
protestors ran into the hotel, hoping to escape the police. Within minutes, there
was knocking on Bert’s door, and when he opened it, there were several young
men who were bloodied. Bert let them into the room, but after another few
minutes the police were at the door. They removed the protestors, dragging some
by the hair.
When they were gone, Bert felt an undeniable urge to do something. He put
on a tie and jacket and went down to the street, walking cautiously through the
mob. He made his way to the police station where the young men had been
taken.
Bert walked up to the desk sergeant and pretended to be a lawyer from New
York (he was, in fact, an actor). He claimed to be representing the young men
who had just been brought in. He was taking the risk that at that late hour the
police would not be able to call New York and check his credentials. And it
worked. He got the students out of jail and to a hospital, without being arrested
himself.
I’ve often thought about these two friends and wondered where they got the
courage to perform these acts of kindness.
I’ve come to believe the source of their courage was what this book is about:
empathy.
For more than twenty-five years I’ve been trying to understand what makes
people relate in the most positive way to one another, to communicate clearly,
without snags and misunderstanding, and it’s been increasingly clear to me that
I’ve really been on the search for empathy.
Helen Riess is an expert on the subject, and when I met her, I felt I had
finally found a deeper understanding of my friends’ courageous behavior. They
had experienced a moment of empathy and had acted on it.
But what exactly is empathy? Trying to define it, people say all kinds of
contradictory things. Some say empathy is compassion, while others say that it
could be a stepping stone to compassion but doesn’t in itself lead to good
behavior. Others say that whatever it is, you’re born with a certain amount of
empathy and you’ll never have any more. No, say others: you have to be taught
empathy as a child. And, of course, there are those who declare emphatically that
empathy can’t be taught.
Helen Riess steps into this cacophony of assertions and quiets the crowd.
Helen knows that empathy can be taught because she teaches it and studies it.
Her teachings have reached thousands of medical professionals. She has seen
levels of empathy increase, and she’s documented the results of her studies.
She’s dealing in a fundamental way with a fundamental human trait.
Scientists who have studied what makes us stand out among the other
animals have told me that empathy plays an awfully big part in making us who
we are.
It gives us the ability to read another person’s mind, or, put less dramatically,
to take their perspective and see the world as they see it. And this ability may be
to a great extent what makes life possible for modern humans.
Empathy not only allows conversation to happen; it allows commerce to take
place and even makes politics possible. (How can you convince someone that
what you’re proposing is in their self-interest unless you have the ability to
figure out what interests them?)
It’s not surprising that we’ve been wondering about this trait of ours for
centuries.
The word “empathy” has only been in use in our language for about a
hundred years, although writers and philosophers have been exploring it for a
long time.
Walt Whitman was thinking of the effect another person’s suffering can have
on us when he wrote, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. I myself
become the wounded person.” He was discovering the idea that we understand
what another person is feeling when we experience those feelings in ourselves.
In a way, our own feelings are the lens through which we see another’s feelings.
As David Hume said, “The minds of men are mirrors to one another.”
And the thought goes at least as far back as Homer, who in the eighth
century BC wrote: “ . . . taught by time, my heart has learn’d to glow for others’
good, and melt at others’ woe.”
Empathy is not the same as compassion, but it’s hard to think of compassion
taking place without empathy. It seems to be central to our humanity, to the risks
my friends took on those nights long ago for the safety of people they didn’t
even know.
What allows us to connect to others? What helps us to build things together?
To collaborate unselfishly? What is this powerful force that can push us over
into our best selves?
If the question is how can we get hold of that very fundamental thing that
helps us thrive?—the answer is in the book you’re holding in your hands.
Introduction
Why Empathy?
In my first year at Boston University School of Medicine, my psychiatry
professor, Dr. Richard Chasin, arranged a collection of chairs on a stage in a
circle that represented a family system in which members had endured trauma.
Each chair represented a family member. Rather than focusing exclusively on a
traumatized individual, he demonstrated that the entire family was involved in
expressing and managing the emotions of those who suffered. Each time a chair
was removed from the system, the family had to grapple with what would
happen without that member playing his or her role.
This was the first time I realized that my own family was not as unique or
even unusual as I had always thought. It was a relief to recognize that the themes
that had shaped my early life were recognizable and shareable—the basic
elements of empathy.
My parents came to the United States after losing nearly everything in World
War II. When my father was just fourteen years old, his parents were executed
by a dictator’s regime. In that moment, he and his two sisters were ripped from a
life of privilege and sent off to a starvation camp. My mother’s family was also
forced to leave their home and all their belongings to work in labor camps,
where her own father died. These grim stories hung around the edges of our
home like curtains around a window; plenty of light came in, but the drapes were
always there, casting a shadow.
Further complicating their story, my parents were of German heritage and
Protestant. Their ancestors moved to the Danube Valley in Yugoslavia in the
1800s, where they lived peacefully until near the end of World War II. Under the
Tito regime, they were suddenly swept up in the ethnic cleansing involving the
removal of Germans and other “undesirable” groups. In a sad twist of fate, the
Tito regime drove these Germans from their homes and sent them off to
concentration camps, just as the German regime under Hitler was doing to
millions of Jews and others in Europe, and ruthless regimes had done to millions
of others throughout history whose own stories remain untold.
My parents escaped from the camps with the help of their faith and
transformative empathy from people in their church community. Later they met
and married in Austria and immigrated to America. People who didn’t
understand or want to know about their story instantly judged them because of
their background and German accents. Many assumed because they were
German they must be complicit in the very horrors that they themselves had
been subjected to.
The pain of being judged and associated with the horrific crimes of the war,
compounded by receiving little empathy for their own experience, had a
profound effect on them. On top of the tragic losses of family, home, and
homeland, being misjudged was difficult for them to bear. And these
misconceptions affected me deeply too.
As a child, I got very upset when my classmates ridiculed others because of
things they could not control, such as the color of their skin, where they lived, or
their family situations. The unfairness of judging a book by its cover roiled
inside of me. It led to a preoccupation with social justice that has stayed with me
to this day. It was this desire to heal the emotional pain of others that led to my
career in psychiatry. Now as a professional, I listen to my patients tell stories
about being stigmatized for having mental illnesses, or being grilled about why
they “take so many psych meds,” and I chafe at the lack of empathy for their
struggles.
I was already involved in empathy research by the time headlines started
appearing about a decade ago in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and
Washington Post that consistently called for greater empathy in health care. In
my work in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital
(MGH), we investigated whether physiological parameters between patients and
doctors matched up during visits when doctors behaved more empathically. We
were interested to see whether we could find physical evidence to show when
two people were “in sync.”
By way of a simple technology known as galvanic skin response, which
measures changes in the electrical resistance of the skin and is one of the most
sensitive measures of emotional arousal, a former student of mine, Dr. Carl
Marci, obtained physiological tracings that revealed when doctors and patients
were in sync with one another and when they were not. The tracings revealed
