The Future of Feeling Quotes

“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”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“You may have been affected by the empathy-tempering effects of social technology even if you don’t spend much time using it. The ubiquity of smartphones has brought us another new word: phubbing, or ignoring the people around you in favor of your phone. A 2018 University of Kent study showed, unsurprisingly, that when people were phubbed in one-on-one situations, they felt worse about their interaction with that person, and they rated the phubber as having lower communication skills and empathy.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“The ubiquity of smartphones has brought us another new word: phubbing, or ignoring the people around you in favor of your phone.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Kids aren’t immune to this dynamic either. They learn social skills and habits largely by watching their parents and other adults; if those adults are constantly absorbed in screens and getting upset or angry about what they’re reading on those screens, it has an effect on the little ones.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Empathy is certainly harder to muster when you’re typing onto a screen instead of looking into someone’s eyes.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Studies show that teaching traits like kindness, compassion, and empathy, in an explicit and intentional way at a young age, can make a difference. A 2011 meta-analysis of social-emotional learning, which many US curricula have embraced in recent decades, suggested that it led to higher graduation rates and safer sex, even eighteen years later.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Those who could only hear the teasing got the lowest (best) scores, suggesting that there was something about voice—the way it’s expressed or the way we process it—that triggers empathy in a way that seeing facial expressions (a more typical measure of empathic accuracy) doesn’t. In other experiments, the researchers found that people who had a conversation in a dark room were better at guessing each other’s mental state, and people who listened to others talk in a dark room were better at it than those who could see the people they were listening to.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“For those of us who have lived much of our lives online, giving up on the possibility of empathic connection via technology doesn’t feel like a real option.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“In an actual debate—formal or not—both people are usually aware of the stakes and have previously agreed on some rules. On social media, you never know when someone might swoop into a comment thread and demand that everyone else start playing by their rule book. And if you don’t comply, they “win.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Being able to recognize—if not always fully understand—another person’s mind-set or perspective is about more than having civil conversations. Empathy is also key to learning, child rearing, and participating in a human community, both online and off.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist and author of the book Against Empathy, believes empathy is inherently selfish. It biases us toward the people we can most identify with, and against those we can’t, he writes. And when it comes to making a real difference in the world, he argues, it’s best to set empathy aside and skip right to compassion.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“These two terms eventually morphed into the two that are most commonly accepted today: cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings). Most experts believe these two types work together, but people often use them interchangeably or say “empathy” when what they really seem to mean is “compassion” or “kindness.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“CEOs at Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media networks don’t use their own products the way the rest of us do, prioritizing privacy and control of their time.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“robots,”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“The people who scored higher in empathy also scored much higher in reading body language, conflict-resolution skills, resilience, and standing by their values.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“More than Words If you’ve ever worked in a startup office, you’ll be familiar with a particular kind of quiet—one punctuated only by tap-tapping from keyboards and the occasional sneeze or chair scrape. Everyone sits with earbuds in, listening to music or podcasts or sometimes nothing at all. Most conversations happen via chat programs like Google Hangouts, Skype for Business, and Slack. Even in more traditional offices, it’s become”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“Now we see empathy more as an intangible capacity to understand what someone else is feeling.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“The word comes from the Greek empatheia, which means affection or passion.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“It’s true that we can’t hear each other’s tone, can’t see each other’s faces. Empathy is certainly harder to muster when you’re typing onto a screen instead of looking into someone’s eyes.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that most of the time on social media, especially with strangers, I wasn’t having real debates or even real conversations; more often than not, it was just a game to the other person. Even when the topic was sexual assault or police brutality, I found myself—and saw my friends—regularly sparring with people who were either simply saying outrageous things to get a rise out of us, or who seemed to have no empathy about the situations being discussed but felt entitled to opine on them and, if they could, to “win.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“People like this are often called “trolls.” Some of them have one goal: to derail a conversation and turn the attention on themselves. They will start off civil, then purposely change their rules with every response from their target, and they feel they’ve won if the other person seems angry or upset or shows any emotion.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

“When the term empathy was initially coined in the early 1900s, it was primarily discussed as a state of mind, an act of “feeling into” another person. In recent years it has increasingly come to also be seen as a skill that can—and arguably must—be learned and practiced.”
― Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World