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Empathy is certainly harder to muster when you’re typing onto a screen instead of looking into someone’s eyes.
compassion is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with them.
We can only know what it’s like to imagine being someone else.
The people who scored higher in empathy also scored much higher in reading body language, conflict-resolution skills, resilience, and standing by their values.
Empathetic people are happier, more self-aware, self-motivated, and optimistic. They cope better with stress, assert themselves when it is required, and are comfortable expressing their feelings. There was only one scale where non-empathetic people scored higher: Need for Approval.”
This reaction tends to be less common with tragedies that affect larger groups of people, a phenomenon sometimes called the “collapse of compassion.” Experts think this happens because we automatically regulate our emotional reactions when we expect them to be overwhelming.
every little notification and validation is like a small neurological treat, literally releasing dopamine, the “reward” chemical. Social technology is ostensibly about connecting people, but it doesn’t often foster the empathy that’s needed for real human connection. This problem is hard to quantify, but it’s showing up in homes, offices, and classrooms around the country.
text messages, they were in constant communication. But Stumbras observed that they cared less about what was said than about how many times they said it. Tools like the “streak” feature in Snapchat prioritize quantity over quality, making a game out of keeping a back-and-forth of messages going as long as possible. Not only is this annoying in the classroom, but Stumbras worries that it causes social skills to atrophy.
time went on, empathy among young people decreased. College students in 2010 appeared to have 40 percent less empathy than people their age had in 1979. Perspective-taking
taking and empathic concern (acting on empathy) saw the most declines, contributing to the biggest drop in empathy during the period studied.
“Philosophers say that our capacity to put ourselves in the place of the other is essential to being human,” she writes. “Perhaps when people lose this ability, robots seem appropriate company because they share this incapacity.”
In 2015, researchers in Canada surveyed more than seven hundred fifty students in grades seven through twelve and found that those who used social-networking sites more than two hours a day also self-rated their mental health as poor and had higher levels of psychological distress and suicidal ideation than those who used it less.
“As a species we are very highly attuned to reading social cues,” she said. “There’s no question kids are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating . . . puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kind of vocal reactions are rendered invisible.”
Our new social-tech culture has made it seem acceptable to verbally attack “friends” and strangers alike in the most vulgar ways. Women
In a world in which we’re each increasingly individualistic while also being constantly tethered digitally to others, everything is presented as extreme and binary.
The problem exists among those with good intentions too. Without tone of voice, facial expressions, or any real accountability for what we say, even those of us with the best intentions can have a hard time remembering the humanity of the people on the other side of the keyboard. The
Unknowns cause us anxiety, and when we perceive them to be connected to our identity in some way, even talking about them can feel like being threatened.
Green and her colleagues did an experiment in which they presented participants with issues that people generally tend to agree on—food safety, support for veterans—as well as some that are more polarizing, like stem-cell research. The subjects were then asked to rate how threatening a computer-generated face with a neutral expression looked. They thought the face was a lot more threatening if they had just been presented with a polarizing issue.
“We no longer have to be face to face to showcase a power imbalance between two people.”
“Some of the best hope we have is that you aren’t born with a specific amount of empathy,” she reminded me. “We used to think you were either empathetic or you weren’t, but the truth is you can increase your empathy, and one of the best and most effective ways is by hearing other people’s perspectives and experiences.”
He reminded me how unnatural empathy can feel, especially when the topic is politics and identity. But
“It can feel weird to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with,” Marron said when we met, “especially in an age when people say you’re just as bad as them if you empathize with them. But all my guests . . . I think they’re just good people trying to do the best they can. We all have these really different experiences, different things that drive us to be who we are. That’s largely what divides us, and how we present that version of ourselves online is where all this comes from.”
people we disagree with seem less human to us when we read their views than when we hear them spoken aloud. In
voice—the way it’s expressed or the way we process it—that triggers empathy in
Seeing someone’s face all the time creates a kind of expertise that allows a person to understand another’s mental state just by looking at them.
