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Culture of Empathy Builder: Jamil Zaki
http://j.mp/10w0wE7

 

Jamil Zaki

 

Jamil received his BA from Boston University, his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Now that he's in the Bay Area, his hobbies include compulsive hiking, eating avocados, and trying to remember how to drive again.

 

 

 

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World Hardcover
by Jamil Zaki
(Google Books) (Amazon)


  (Media)

Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren't like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an "empathy deficit." Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.

It doesn't have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait-something we're born with or not-but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort.

Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can harness this new mindset to overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles-fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don't succumb to burnout.
 

Book Claims

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

EPILOGUE

 

 

 

Empathy as a Radical Act | Forum

"Are we born with a certain level of empathy? Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki explores that question in his new book, "The War for Kindness," which looks at the declining level of empathy in society. He argues that, like a muscle, empathy must be trained or it can atrophy.

Cris Beam, author of “I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy,” similarly provides methods for exercising and improving one's capacity for empathy. Zaki and Beam join us to discuss the science of empathy, and ways to recognize and respect the emotions of others. Tell us: how do you practice empathy in your daily life?"
 


Can We Teach Empathy? Standford Neuroscientist Says We Can.
By HANA BABA
Though it seems that's just the way society is, there may be a solution. Teaching empathy. Jamil Zaki heads Stanford's Social Neuroscience Labratory and has been studying empathy. His research shows that, contrary to prior thinking, empathy is not a fixed trait. It's a skill we can learn. He writes about it in his new book "The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World."


The Empathy Gym Hidden Brain
July 29, 2019  

(starts at 6 min)

  • Family story

  • Benefits of empathy

    • patents of doctors

    • relationships

    • give empathy - less stress, better adjusted.

  • Explain empathy - sense the friend is upset

    • catching feeling  = emotional empathy

    • try to understand what and why they are feeling = cognitive empathy

    • feel concern for them and desire for their well being. = empathic concern/compassion

  • Metaphor of the muscle groups.

  • Empathy levels scores - university student test.

    • Why empathy going down?

    • People living on their own

    • The internet?

    • living with a lot of people but it's not deep

  • 22 - people who have experienced deep suffering (trauma) can go open or closed -

    • altruism born of suffering

    • factor is how much support you get

  • 25:34 - empathy double edged sward

    • Paul Bloom -  empathy is parochial

    • oxytocin - become more ingroup caring

    • Jamil - we can broaden our empathy

  • 27:30 - The Police and empathy training

    • (confuses taking sides and empathy)

    • (individualistic empathy)

    • empathy for ingroup..  making a judgment.

    • (confuses identifying with empathy)

  • 30:00 - Oncologist - they suffer giving bad news

    • has a person cost

    • empathy can be an occupational hazard for the people who give it

  • Psychotherapist friend, sensitive to depressed patients

    • will absorb negative, painful feelings of others

    • also will lose themselves

    • caring professions - feel they have to turn off their empathy

  • People avoid situations where they will avoid situations

    • similar seeing the homeless

    • being

  • 34:00  level of the group

    • we can dehumanize people because we are reluctant to feeling the pain of empathy for a group

    • empathy can hurt us,, we can see ourselves in ways we do not like

  • 38:00 Person wants to help

  • Building Empathy - Gym

  • 41 - VR for identifying with others

    • feel being homeless

    • putting ourselves in the story can build empathy

  • Acting - role taking

    • actors become more empathic

    • narrative fiction  (most stories are Us v Them,  reinforces us-them)

    • "they form greater empathy for those groups"

  • 46 -  In-groups

    • soccer fans supporting each other. (why are psychological researchers so deceptive? does the deception have an effect of the study)

    • expand the size of what we consider our group

  • empathy is the understanding that someone else's world is just as real as yours.

 

THE WAR FOR KINDNESS
The Commonwealth Club
(Audio Recording)

"Are Americans suffering from an "empathy deficit," as Barack Obama claimed in 2006? Studies do show that we are less caring than we were even 30 years ago. But Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait we're born with. It's a skill we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles-fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action."


 

Stanford Prof. Creates Kindness Class To Help College Students Find Empathy

 "Empathy in our culture is quickly receding, especially among college students, the latest findings from Sage Journal show. The report says that the average American college student in 2009 was less caring than three quarters of students in 1979. Are people giving up on empathy?"

 

 

SXSW Live: 9:30am–10:30am | Featured Session: Jamil Zaki

  • Starts at 5 min mark. - ends at 1hr 5min

  • Sapiens cared for each other. worked together.

  • why worked well together. Empathy

  • psychologically we integrate

  • feeling of the tightrope

  • Adam Smith - fellow feeling - now called empathy.

  • Empathy an umbrella term

  • Benefits of Empathy

    • reduced depression - loneliness

    • Improved adolescent adjustment

    • professional success

    • patents more satisfied

    • employees do better

    • happier marriages

    • generosity for  community

    • more open-mindedness

    • interest in environment

  • Empathy can be hard

    • hard in modern life

    • living in cities - don't know neighbors

    • alone in a crowd.

    • relationships are transactional

  • Compassion collapse

    • Hard to care about large groups.

  • Anonymous, Tribalism and Disconnected

  • Empathy Test - Empathy going down in society

  • Does it have to be this way? empathy down.

    • There is the idea that empathy is fixed.

    • Empathy is learnable - is a skill

  • Personal family story, divorce and empathy

  • Strategies to increase empathy

    • Conformity - can work for good.

    • create an Empathic norm

    •  intervention - school test

    • Police Training. Washington 

    • can create empathic culture

    • empathize with one person

    • life after hate

  • Believing you can increase empathy - increases empathy

  • Q and A

    1. empathy goes up and down - feelings come and go

    2. astronaut empathy

    3. political polarization

      • being aware of manipulating

      • be aware and louder about empathy

    4. crippling empathy  - developing communication skills

    5. empathy paralysis in large societies

    6. unempathic manager

    7. empathy in the body and chemicals - and VR

    8. empathize with peoples negative qualities

    9. how to empathize with people who are different

      • contact theory - have connection with the other side

    10. role of touch and empathy

    11. empathize with others and losing sense of self

    12. empathy for non humans

 

 

 

ARTICLES

 


 

Compassion can be cultivated, argues a psychologist
By Sara Konrath 
18 June, 2019
"Google searches for "empathy" have been increasing over the past 15 years, and it's the latest buzzword at companies as diverse as Facebook and Ford. Joining several recent books on the topic [such as (1-3)] is The War for Kindness by Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, which sets out to help people increase their empathy in sustainable ways."

 

Empathy is a skill that improves with practice, Stanford psychologist-author says
 Holly MacCormick
June 11, 2019

"Much like our eye color or our hair's hue, empathy is sometimes thought of as a trait that's determined by our genes and fixed for life. If you believe this to be true, you may think that failing to empathize with another person means this kind of compassion is missing from your biological makeup. Fortunately studies of empathy suggest this isn't the case. As Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, PhD, explains in a recent Stanford news story, empathy isn't doled out to us in a fixed quantity at birth, it's a skill that improves each time we use it."

"Empathy is something like a muscle: left unused, it atrophies, put to work, it grows."

 

 

Episdoe 78: Jamil Zaki & Michael Nye
(audio) June 11, 2019

"A night spent drinking and writing about his parents' divorce uncovered an urgent need in Stanford professor Jamil Zaki to author THE WAR FOR KINDNESS: BUILDING EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD. He and James talk about how empathy can literally grow parts of the brain, hating the term hard-wired, facing the problems of the world today, and (sigh) STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. Plus Michael Nye returns to talk about reviving and relaunching STORY.

 

EMPATHY IS A SKILL. HERE'S HOW TO CULTIVATE IT

JUNE 10TH, 2019
BY MELISSA DE WITTE
"While empathy offers numerous social benefits-for example, patients of empathic doctors are more satisfied with their care-empathy might not be a good thing, Zaki says. When healthcare professionals care too much, they are at elevated risk for burnout, depression, and trauma from over-empathizing with others' suffering, he says.

These are some of the key findings to emerge from Zaki's research into the various dimensions of empathy. Zaki has brought these insights, many from his own research, into his new book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Crown, 2019)."



How to increase empathy and unite society
Jun 7th 2019
by K.N.C. - The Economist
"We can design institutions and interactions so people get along more, says Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford and the author of "The War for Kindness".

IF THERE is one thing that people on both the left and right can agree, it is that expressions of our political and social differences have become markedly less cordial-and that this makes it harder to find common ground and solve common problems. The good news is that science is on the case."

 

 

'A War For Kindness' Favors The Practical Over Polemical
June 5, 2019
NICHOLAS CANNARIATO
"A war for kindness would be a non-violent war for hearts and minds. And since empathy is really a union of heart and mind, fellow feeling in the service of understanding, internal struggle and social complication are inevitable. Empathy can't happen without them.

I had high hopes for Jamil Zaki's The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. But after reading, I was left ambivalent."

 

 

Stanford scholar examines how to build empathy in an unjust world
BY MELISSA DE WITTE
 JUNE 5, 2019
"Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki examined the different dimensions of empathy – including its positive and in some cases, negative effects – and found that through the right practice, empathy can be cultivated in sustainable ways.


In an increasingly divisive world, it might seem that empathy for other people's opinion and views is becoming ever less common. But the trend is not irreversible, according to new research by Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki."
 


Here's Why You Should Choose Empathy, Even When It's Hard
Being busy can make us forget what matters. Here's some perspective.
By Jamil Zaki

June 4, 2019

"Even when empathy doesn't feel good, we know it can make us look good. If Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, or Jesus are any indication, compassion and generosity are the clearest signs of virtue. When people must establish their moral bona fides, they turn to empathic actions. Individuals are more generous in public than in private, and also act kindly to convince themselves of their own goodness. In several studies, psychologists have put people under "moral threat," for instance asking them to remember times they betrayed someone else's trust. To compensate, these participants help strangers, donate to charity, and advocate for environmentally friendly behaviors more than people who were not threatened."

 

 

Curious Minds: Jamil Zaki On The Science Of Empathy
(audio) June 3: 2019

"If you're sensing that people are less empathetic today than decades ago, your instincts would be right. We are. Though human beings are wired to care about each other, we need the right conditions for those feelings to grow.

Jamil Zaki, author of the book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, argues that an increase in online interactions and urban living has made relationships more "…narrow, transactional, and anonymous." He explains that in this kind of environment, it's "…really not great soil for empathy to grow." "

 

 

Making Empathy Central to Your Company Culture
by Jamil Zaki
May 30, 2019
"Research demonstrates that Cook and other leaders are on to something. Empathic workplaces tend to enjoy stronger collaborationless stress, and greater morale, and their employees bounce back more quickly from difficult moments such as layoffs. Still, despite their efforts, many leaders struggle to actually make caring part of their organizational culture. In fact, there's often a rift between the culture executives want from the one they have."

 


The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
April 12, 2019
By James R. Doty,
"Jamil Zaki's new book shows us how to "bring light to a world that seemingly has darkened."
By James R. Doty, M.D., Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine"
 

 

Psychology professor from Stanford speaks on how empathy can mend our broken society
March 12, 2019
BY LANDRY ALLRED

People filled the ballroom of the Hilton Austin Downtown Hotel, waiting to hear about e"mpathy's short supply yet extreme importance. Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor from Stanford University, spoke at SXSW on March 12 at the Hilton. Highlighting his upcoming book "The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World," Zaki discussed empathy and how society can use it to mend gaps within cultures.

To better understand empathy, Zaki began by taking the crowd back in time and speaking about how though early humans on earth were intellectually underdeveloped, the thing setting them apart from animals was each other."
 

 

How to Use Empathy to Better Your Life - Jamil Zaki

How do we navigate our differences at work, at home, in politics and in society? In this enlightening, lightly humorous, and research-based talk, Dr. Jamil Zaki delivers an astonishing overview of empathy: how it really works, why it truly matters (especially to work places), why it's on the decline, and how to build it back up through deliberate practice.

For anyone who works in HR, who leads teams, or is part of one, Zaki will redefine how you understand, empathize, and work with others-an issue companies have been debating forever. Zooming out, Zaki's insights will help you revitalize your connection to your neighborhood, your community, the world at large. Empathic people are happier, more creative and productive, in all sorts of ways.

 

 



 

 

 

Experts in Emotion -- Jamil Zaki on Empathy

 

0:00 Chapter 1. Introduction to Dr. Jamil Zaki
1:12 Chapter 2. What got you interested in studying emotion?
2:27 Chapter 3. What are the central discoveries of your work?
16:37 Chapter 4. What do you see in store for the future of emotion?
18:03 Chapter 5. What is your advice to viewers?

  • About Jamil Zaki

  • On Empathy and emotion

  • How did it start?

    • Grandmother in Peru - a collectivist society

  • Definition of empathy

    • complex - multiple definitions

    • put multiple definitions together - 3 parts

      • 1. emotional response

      • 2. cognitive understanding - TOM

      • 3. motivational piece - understanding you do I have a motivation to do something?

    • these are different distinct parts

      • emotional contagion

      • psychopaths can understand others but don't feel them or help them.

        • may manipulate or harm others

  • 5:00 How different for sympathy and pity?

    • pity - don't' enter into the emotion of the other

  • What are most interesting science discoveries?

    • the pieces - components of empathy are separate

    • Mirror neurons -

    • TOM - figuring out what people are feeling

  • understanding the context - full empathic response

  • 9:30 Understanding the context

  • is it uniquely human?

    • degrees of empathy in animals

    • mice

    • chimps

  • How does this fit into society?

    • Pinker - society is less violent - maybe has to do with expanding empathy

  • Is empathy a fixed quality? interventions

    • it can be changed - with perspective taking interventions

    • dissolve boundaries between people and groups.

    • compassion mediation helps

    • online interventions would be good

  • 16:37 Chapter 4. What do you see in store for the future of emotion?

    • filed going in 2 directions

      • 1. Fine grain assessment of empathy - math models

      • 2. complex and naturalistic tests - how it unfolds in real life situation

  • 18:03 Chapter 5. What is your advice to viewers?

    • what are the next steps - the undiscovered teritory.

 

 

 

How to Avoid Empathy Burnout – Issue 35: Boundaries
by Jamil Zaki
"At least in this case, sustainable and deep empathic concern for others began with that ancient mandate: Love thyself. And self-love is often the most difficult kind. But helpers, and the rest of us, have a flexible emotional life and the power to shape our feelings to better suit our needs. This opportunity is especially important for people who work in empathy's trenches. To the extent that they can even out their emotional spotlight, they can benefit immensely. So can the lucky targets of their kindness."


 

Jamil Zaki - Choosing empathy

Invited Symposium on Prosociality and Empathy
Society for Philosophy and Psychology 2016 
The University of Texas at Austin

 



 

 

Choosing Empathy

JAMIL ZAKI is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

 


 

 

BUILDING EMPATHY: How to hack empathy and get others to care more


"In a fractured world, can we hack our own sense of empathy and get others to become more empathic? Professor, Department of Psychology, Stanford University Jamil Zaki is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. His research examines social cognition and behavior, especially how people understand and respond to each other's emotions.

This work spans a number of domains, social influence, prosocial behavior, and especially empathy (see ssnl.stanford.edu for details). In addition to studying the mechanics of empathy, Dr. Zaki's work focuses on helping people empathize better. For instance, new research from his lab examines how to encourage empathy for people from distant political and ethnic groups, and also how caregivers and healthcare professionals can effectively empathize with their patients while maintaining their own well being."

 

 

 

Choosing Empathy: A Conversation With Jamil Zaki [10.20.15]

"If you believe that you can harness empathy and make choices about when to experience it versus when not to, it adds a layer of responsibility to how you engage with other people. If you feel like you're powerless to control your empathy, you might be satisfied with whatever biases and limits you have on it. You might be okay with not caring about someone just because they're different from you. I want people to not feel safe empathizing in the way that they always have. I want them to understand that they're doing something deliberate when they connect with someone, and I want them to own that responsibility.

JAMIL ZAKI is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil Zaki's Edge Bio Page."
 

Responses from

 


The Neuroscience of Fierce Compassion | #skollwf 2016
Apr 29, 2016
"What parts of the brain are stimulated when we feel fierce anger or compassion? Can compassion be learned or is it innate? Does empathy have limits, especially for those of us working on the frontlines of social change? Take an extraordinary visual trip through a real brain and hear from a new wave of researchers using the methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to challenge our views on these questions. Explore how compassion-and its limits-might inform our work as social innovators."


 

 

Empathy is a moral force by Jamil Zaki

FORTHCOMING in Gray, K. & Graham, J. (Eds.), The Atlas of Moral Psychology

"More recently, however, a growing countercurrent has questioned the utility of empathy in driving moral action. This argument builds on the broader idea that emotions provide powerful but noisy inputs to people's moral calculus (Haidt, 2001). Affective reactions often tempt people to make judgments that are logically and morally indefensible."

Full Empathy is a moral force The chapter is here.

 

 

Empathy: A motivated account by Jamil Zaki

"We often think of empathy as an automatic process. However, empathy is often context-dependent. Our willingness to empathize with others changes with different situations and with different people .A new paper by Jamil Zaki resolves this tension by underscoring the role of motivation in empathy. Motives drive our willingness to empathize. In his paper, Zaki highlights specific motives that drive people to avoid and approach empathy, illustrates a motivated model of empathy, and suggests potential interventions to maximize empathy."

 


Using empathy to use people: Emotional intelligence and manipulation
November 7, 2013

"People tend to stereotype psychological phenomena. It's tempting to think that stress is always bad, resilience is always good, and so forth. Like other stereotypes, these beliefs help us neaten the world and extract signal from noise. Also like other stereotypes, such beliefs are misleading and often harmful. Call me pessimistic, but whenever the media breathlessly praises a practice or trait-meditation and grit come to mind-I always wonder about its downsides. Jogging is great for you, but not always, and not in every way (ask my knees). The same goes for happiness. My own favorite human characteristic, empathy, is no different. "
 

 

Empathy as a choice
July 29, 2013

"About 250 years ago, Adam Smith famously described the way observers might feel watching a tightrope walker.  Even while standing on solid ground, our palms sweat and our hearts race as someone wobbles hundreds of feet in the air (you can test this out here).  In essence, we experience this person's state as our own.
 

Centuries later, this definition does a surprisingly good job at capturing scientific models of empathy.  Evidence from across the social and natural sciences suggests that we take on others' facial expressions, postures, moods, and even patterns of brain activity.  This type of empathy is largely automatic.  For instance, people imitate others' facial expressions after just a fraction of a second, often without realizing they're doing so. Mood contagion likewise operates under the surface.  Therapists often report that, despite their best efforts, they take on patients' moods, consistent with e vidence from a number of studies."


 

 


Article: Empathy Fatigue and What the Press Can Do About It

 

 

5 ways to be a more empathetic person
BY REBECCA RUIZ
"No matter how you struggle with empathy, these 5 strategies can help:
1. Understand that empathy is a skill, not a fixed trait. 
Though humans do inherit a genetic predisposition toward empathy and generosity, Zaki says it's a mistake to believe that one's capacity for both traits are permanently stuck at a certain level. In fact, research shows that our experiences influence our empathy. ..
2. Increase your contact with "outsiders....
3. Practice self-compassion...
4. Use the internet wisely. ...
5. Help build empathetic systems. ..."


 

 The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise
Jamil Zaki & Kevin N Ochsner
15 April 2012

"The last decade has witnessed enormous growth in the neuroscience of empathy. Here, we survey research in this domain with an eye toward evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. First, we take stock of the notable progress made by early research in characterizing the neural systems supporting two empathic sub-processes: sharing others' internal states and explicitly considering those states. Second, we describe methodological and conceptual pitfalls into which this work has sometimes fallen, which can limit its validity. These include the use of relatively artificial stimuli that differ qualitatively from the social cues people typically encounter and a lack of focus on the relationship between brain activity and social behavior. Finally, we describe current research trends that are overcoming these pitfalls through simple but important adjustments in focus, and the future promise of empathy research if these trends continue and expand."


 

A Conversation with Jamil Zaki About Empathy and Writing
2011-12-02
"I had the opportunity to discuss with him Truman Capote, Sufjan Stevens, brains, and things that I barely understand.

James Scott: So one of the things we talk about a lot is empathy and how it relates to the arts. You believe it's a necessary component, and a critical building block, in becoming an artist in the first place, right?

Jamil Zaki: Human beings are not the world champions of many things. We're not big, strong, fast, or sharp (at least tooth-wise). But we are the world champions of understanding each other. In a way, art-and especially narrative art-is the greatest expression of that ability. Narrative is a way to embody lives and worlds we have yet to experience, and in almost all cases will never experience. In a way, it's a type of empathy boot camp: living as many lives as possible without having to leave a single room."

 

 

What, Me Care? Young Are Less Empathetic
January 1, 2011
A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.

"HUMANS ARE UNLIKELY to win the animal kingdom's prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people's emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years."

 

 

Empathy Fatigue and What the Press Can Do About It
2009-05-07
"An inborn tendency to share the feelings of others -- to feel joy at their joy, match suffering to their suffering (first labeled "Empathy" by psychologist and art theorist Theodor Lipps) -- probably forms the basis of our aversion to distress, and our willingness to help others. Empathy and altruism are evolutionarily old, as even non-human apes share emotions and respond to each others' distress: chimpanzees will forgo a chance to push a button and receive food if pressing that button also results in another chimpanzee being shocked. Apes in the wild are similarly prosocial, and will console the loser of a fight by putting their arm around his or her shoulders like friends buying each other a beer after a bad breakup. "

 

 

 

Interview

 

Definition of empathy

why not more about Carl Rogers?

 

Tania Singer Study

Study of SJW


The Empathy Circle

 

 

How to build Empathy?

  • realize you can increase empathy.

  • changing the culture - setting social norms

    • show there is empathy as a norm all around

    • create guardian culture

    • perspective taking exercises

    •  

  • compassion meditation

  • diverse friendships

  • fiction reading

Block to Empathy

  • technology

  • > individualistic thinking

  • burn out

  •  

Current work: Exploring - Cultural Empathy

 

 

 

THE WAR FOR KINDNESS

 

INTRODUCTION:  

CHAPTER 1: The Surprising Mobility of Human Nature

CHAPTER 2:   Choosing Empathy

CHAPTER 3:   Hatred Versus Contact

  • White Aryan

  • Work of Emile

  • Carl Rogers - listening

CHAPTER 4:   The Stories We Tell

  • Imagining

  • are stories imaginative empathy

  • acting

  • reading "Fiction is empathy's gateway drug."

CHAPTER 5:   Caring Too Much

  • "We could all use more empathy sometimes, but too much of it can debilitate us."

  • compassion fatigue.

  • caring too much - self sacrifice

  • few are at greater risk of overdoing on empathy than "caring professionals"

  • p96  if you empathize to much

  • (not empathizing with your own needs)

  • (an individualistic empathy)

  • you can empathize too much.  look at it from the relational viewpoint. what is the level of empathy in the system? 

  • Teaching Empathy

    • Metta mediaton

    • Contact with outsiders

    • Fiction

CHAPTER 6:   Kind Systems

  • Teaching Empathy

    • social norms

  • Policing  culture: - power over v. empathic

    • CJTC

  • Empathy In Teenagers

    • Erika Weis

      • show that majority of kids care

    • Empathic Discipline

  • Story of Jason

  • School culture:

    • SEL

CHAPTER 7:   The Digital Double Edge

EPILOGUE:   The Future of Empathy

Appendix A: What is Empathy

  •  

Appendix B: Evaluating the Evidence

  •