Five things worth knowing about empathy - The Washington Post

The viewers are responding to what many interpret as empathy — a sign that even in the animal world, life isn’t just dog-eat-dog.

For all its popularity, empathy isn’t nearly as simple as so many blogs and books make it seem.

This basic sort of empathy also inspires us to take care of friends and relatives, encouraging cooperation that helps our tribe survive.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that empathy has expanded over the past several centuries, due to trends such as increasing literacy and global commerce that make people more interdependent.

But other scientists contend that empathy has been waning among young people in recent years.

In a 2010 study, Sara Konrath, then a researcher at the University of Michigan, compared students’ responses spanning three decades with statements expressing empathy, such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Students’ scores on a measure of empathy called empathic concern declined between 1979 and 2009, with the steepest drop after the year 2000, she found.

The subjects were more likely to want to stop the speech when the speaker was attacking their own party — but only if the subjects scored high on a measure of empathy.

Despite the controversies over empathy, most people say they want to be more empathetic, says Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford University.

People who believe they can “grow” their empathy, Zaki has found, will spend more effort expending empathy in challenging situations.

Other researchers have found that a meditation practice can also help enhance empathy, or at least improve people’s accuracy at reading emotions from facial expressions.

In a 2009 study, researchers showed that people exposed to fiction performed better on an empathy test.

The idea is that reading about other people helps us extend empathy to a wider circle.

Konrath helped design a free one called Random App of Kindness (RAKi) to help teach empathy?

It offers games in which players help characters through an interconnected journey, with each game providing a way to practice basic forms of empathy, such as identifying emotions on other peoples’ faces and reading the signals of crying babies.

In its simplest form, as emotional contagion, empathy may fail to lead to altruistic action, because altruism often demands some sort of sacrifice, argues Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.