Empathy Podcast

The War For Kindness

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

428 views • 22 Jun 2020

Feeling you belong to a group can be great - but it also has a darker side, leading us down an unhappy path of hatred and violence towards people with different identities and backgrounds. Dr. Laurie Santos talks to Jamil Zaki about how we can fight hatred with empathy, kindness and difficult conversations.

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[00:16:09] 

SANTOS: This is my friend Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Jamil Zaki has just written an important new book called The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.

[00:16:19] 

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ZAKI: I started writing it in 2015 and I don’t know, around late 2016, early 2017, I can’t quite put my finger on what it was, but something changed in our in our culture. I felt like things were getting crueler and less connected, and people were getting really exhausted trying to connect with each other and were really embracing social division in a way that I hadn’t seen in my adult life. I felt like I was being a Pollyanna2 just writing this kind of positive, hey, you know, you can choose empathy, when all around me it seemed like this giant tire fire—people just hated each other more than ever.

[00:17:01]

SANTOS: If you’ve paid any attention to the news in the last few years, you understand that Jamil’s war for kindness is becoming more and more of an uphill battle. A growing body of work shows that our empathy in general seems to be decreasing over time. In one study, in 1979, the average American scored like a 4 out of 5 on an empathy scale, which doesn’t sound terrible. But by 2009, the average American had dropped down to a 3.5 out of 5. This rising level of disconnection means that more and more of us are missing out on a potential boost to our well-being.

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[00:18:42]

ZAKI: It’s surprising to a lot of people that empathy is good for us. We typically think of empathy almost like a transfer, like I give up my money or time or emotional peace in order to help you have more of it. It’s sort of the quintessential act of self-sacrifice. It turns out, though, that the data point almost exactly in the opposite direction, that caring for others is one of the most important ways we can care for ourselves. 

People who experience a lot of empathy also tend to be happier, less stressed, and experience less depression. They find it easier to make new friends and to maintain important relationships like their marriages. Seventh graders who are able to understand what others feel are also better able to survive seventh grade, which is not easy.

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[00:23:22] 

SANTOS: It turns out that, in fact, empathy is like a skill and there are lots of things that we can do to cultivate empathy in ourselves and others. When Jamil taught his “Becoming Kinder” class at Stanford, he gave his students a super hard assignment, an empathy challenge that demonstrated this.

[00:23:45] 

ZAKI: I told my students, instead of yelling at each other, judging each other, or even debating, I want you to try to cultivate curiosity about each other. Ask the other person how they came to have their opinion in the first place and share with them the story of how you came to have your opinion in the first place. Students then embarked on hard conversations with racist Facebook posting uncles and frank discussions about sexuality with their less-than-progressive parents. They predicted that these exchanges would end in frustration or even tears. But in nearly all cases, those story-sharing conversations went better than expected. 

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When you start with narratives, instead of either calling people out or saying how wrong they are, you get to a new type of discussion right away, one in which it actually doesn’t matter as much if you would agree on every point. But something just as important or maybe even more important also happens, which is that you grow to appreciate the people you disagree with. No one should feel like they’re obligated to connect with or empathize with somebody who’s saying awful things. No one has to do this. It’s not anybody’s job. But when we do, it’s remarkable how powerful that can be, because sometimes what you realize is that people on the other side are also waiting for a chance to be human.

1 Pushkin: Pushkin Industries is a podcast and audiobook production company

2 Pollyanna: a term derived from a children’s book by the same name, has come to mean an excessively or blindly optimistic person