Empathy

Discover the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People

A popular speaker and co-founder of The School of Life, Roman Krznaric has traveled the world researching and lecturing on the subject of empathy. In this lively and engaging book, he argues that our brains are wired for social connection. Empathy, not apathy or self-centeredness, is at the heart of who we are. By looking outward and attempting to identify with the experiences of others, Krznaric argues, we can become not only a more equal society, but also a happier and more creative one.

Through encounters with groundbreaking actors, activists, designers, nurses, bankers and neuroscientists, Krznaric defines a new breed of adventurer. He presents the six life-enhancing habits of highly empathic people, whose skills enable them to connect with others in extraordinary ways – making themselves, and the world, more truly fulfilled. | "One of Britain's leading lifestyle philosophers."
—The Observer

“Authentic relationships require us to see the world through the eyes of others. This engaging and insightful book helps us do just that.”
—John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

“Empathy explores the essence of being human…. Inspiring, fascinating and helpful.”
--Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness and Buddha’s Brain 

“I thoroughly enjoyed the book—as much for its inspirational stories of super-empathizers, as for its creative ideas on increasing empathy in everyday life. We would all do well to expand our circle of empathy and to build upon our sense of common humanity in order to take action to improve society.”
—Jill Suttie, Psy.D., Greater Good

"A powerful case for empathy as the key to a better life and better world"
—Matthew Taylor Chief Executive, Royal Society of the Arts

“Having spent the past decade studying empathy, I can say without hesitation that Roman's work is exactly what we need to bring this powerful concept off the pages and into our lives. Empathy inspires with a unique combination of teaching, storytelling, and a serious call to action.” 
—Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, author of the New York Times #1 Bestsellers Daring Greatly and The Gifts of Imperfection
 
“Informative and practical, Krznaric’s techniques are easy to incorporate into daily life and provide a road map toward better rapport with both people we know and strangers on the street. Useful advice that promotes a more contented, fulfilling lifestyle.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“In this bold and adventuresome book, he has set out to form and fortify a new movement. Krznaric is convinced that empathy can transform lives and put in motion a revolution in relationships.”
—Spirituality & Practice

“Where would humanity be without empathy? Our lives would be disconnected, our societies would fall apart. Growing planetary integration calls for us to pay more attention to this ancient mammalian capacity, and Roman Krznaric is our expert guide to explain how it works and how to fix the deficit that faces humanity today.”
—Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy
 
“An extraordinary understanding of the importance of utilizing empathy in our everyday life, has been translated into vital guide for personal wellbeing and professional success.”
—Patricia Moore, industrial designer and gerontologist

“A mesmerizing mélange of history, social science, neuroscience, psychology and sociology. Krznaric is calling for nothing short of an empathy revolution and paints a compelling and practical picture of how to get there. His concept of an ‘Empathy Museum’ is as brilliant as he is.”
—Mary Gordon, Founder/President, Roots of Empathy

Praise for Roman Krznaric’s How Should We Live?

“Appealingly provocative…Mr. Krznaric writes with passion and lucidity.”
—The Wall St. Journal

“Part psychological manual, part cultural manifesto, part philosophical memoir of our civilization’s collective conscience…an illuminating and awakening read.”
—Maria Popova, Brainpickings | Roman Krznaric is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, and advises organizations including Oxfam and the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change. He has been named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading lifestyle philosophers. | THE REVOLUTION OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Empathy has a reputation as a fuzzy, feel-good emotion. Many people equate it with everyday kindness and emotional sensitivity and being tender and caring toward others. This book offers a very different view. Empathy is, in fact, an ideal that has the power both to transform our own lives and to bring about fundamental social change. Empathy can create a revolution. Not one of those old-fashioned revolutions based on new laws, institutions, or governments but something much more radical: a revolution of human relationships.

Over the past decade there has been a surge of empathic thinking and action around the globe driven by political activists and advice columnists, business gurus and religious leaders. Protesters in the Occupy movement in Britain and the United States erected Empathy Tents and ran workshops on empathic activism. A radio soap opera in Rwanda, listened to by 90 percent of the population every week, inserts empathic messaging into its storyline about Hutus and Tutsis living in neighboring villages, in an effort to prevent a revival of ethnic violence. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have been taught empathy skills through Roots of Empathy, a Canadian education program that has spread to Britain, New Zealand, and other countries, that brings babies into the classroom and turns them into teachers. A German social entrepreneur has established a worldwide network of museums where blind guides have taken more than seven million visitors around exhibits that are in total darkness, to give them the experience of being visually impaired. All these initiatives are part of a historic wave of empathy that is challenging our highly individualistic, self-obsessed cultures, in which most of us have become far too absorbed in our own lives to give much thought to anyone else.

But what exactly is empathy? And what does it look like in practice?

First, let’s get the meaning clear: empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.1 So empathy is distinct from expressions of sympathy—such as pity or feeling sorry for somebody—because these do not involve trying to understand the other person’s emotions or point of view. Nor is empathy the same as the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” since this assumes your own interests coincide with theirs. George Bernard Shaw remarked on this in characteristic style when he quipped, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.” Empathy is about discovering those different tastes.

If you want to grasp just what it means to make the imaginative leap of empathy, then let me introduce you to Patricia Moore, a pioneering figure for today’s empathic activists. In 1979, Moore was working as a product designer at the top New York firm Raymond Loewy, which was responsible for creating the curvy Coca-Cola bottle and the iconic Shell logo. Age twenty-six and fresh out of college, she was the only woman designer among 350 men at their Midtown Manhattan office. During a planning meeting to brainstorm a new refrigerator model, she asked a simple question: “Couldn’t we design the door so that someone with arthritis would find it easy to open?” One of her senior colleagues turned to her and replied with disdain, “Pattie, we don’t design for those people.” She was incensed. What did he mean, “those people”? Riled by his response, she decided to conduct what turned out to be one of the most radical empathy experiments of the twentieth century. She would discover what it was like to be an eighty-five-year-old woman.

“I didn’t just want to be an actress pretending to be an elderly person,” she told me, “I wanted a true immersion character, an empathic character, where I could really walk in someone else’s shoes.” So with the help of a professional makeup artist, she transformed herself. She put layers of latex on her face so she looked old and wrinkly, wore clouded glasses that blurred her vision, plugged her ears so she couldn’t hear well, clipped on a brace and wrapped bandages around her torso so she was hunched over, taped splints to her arms and legs so she was unable to bend her limbs, and finished off her disguise with uneven shoes so she was forced to hobble with a stick.

Now she was ready.

Between 1979 and 1982 Moore visited more than a hundred North American cities in her persona, attempting to negotiate the world around her and find out the everyday obstacles that elderly people faced and how they were treated. She tried going up and down steep subway stairs, riding on crowded busses, pushing through heavy department store doors, crossing busy streets before the lights changed, using can openers and, of course, opening refrigerators.

The result of her immersion? Moore took international product design in a completely new direction. Based on her experiences and insights, she was able to design a series of innovative products that were suitable for use by elderly people, including those with arthritic hands. Among her inventions was a line of potato peelers and other kitchen utensils with thick rubber handles, which can now be found in almost every home. She is credited as the creator of “inclusive” or “universal” design, where products are designed for people of all abilities, whether aged five or eighty-five. Moore went on to become an expert in the field of gerontology and an influential campaigner for the rights of senior citizens: she was instrumental in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act onto the statute books. Throughout her career, she has been driven more by the desire to improve people’s lives than by the lures of financial success. Now in her sixties, she is currently designing rehabilitation centers where U.S. soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq with missing limbs or brain injuries can go to relearn how to live independently, practicing everything from buying groceries to using a cash machine.

Moore has become famous for her “empathic model,” which has enlightened a whole generation of designers who now recognize the importance of looking through the eyes of the people who will use the products they create. “Universal design is driven by empathy,” she explains, “an understanding that one size doesn’t fit all—and that’s what my whole career has been about.”2

Her experiment in time travel across the generations is a touchstone for the empathists of the future. Making the effort to look through other people’s eyes can be personally challenging—and sometimes deeply exhilarating—but it also has extraordinary potential as a force for social change.

THE SIX HABITS OF HIGHLY EMPATHIC PEOPLE

Patricia Moore discovered the power of empathy in the 1970s. Then why are so many people suddenly talking about it now? The idea of empathy is not new. It first rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, when the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith wrote that our moral sensitivity derives from our mental capacity for “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” But the recent explosion of interest is largely due to groundbreaking scientific discoveries about human nature.

For the past three hundred years, influential thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Sigmund Freud have been telling us that we are essentially self-interested, self-preserving creatures who pursue our own individualistic ends. Over time, this dark depiction of human beings has become the prevailing view in Western culture. In the last decade, however, it has been nudged firmly to one side by evidence that we are also Homo empathicus—wired for empathy.3 The recent discovery of our empathic selves is one of the most remarkable stories of modern science. I will be telling this story in the next chapter, but in short, there have been pathbreaking advances on three fronts. Neuroscientists have identified a ten-section “empathy circuit” in our brains which, if damaged, can curtail our ability to understand what other people are feeling. Evolutionary biologists have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to be empathic and cooperative, just like our primate cousins. And child psychologists have revealed that even three-year-olds are able to step outside themselves and see other people’s perspectives. It is now evident that we have an empathic side to our natures that is just as strong as our selfish inner drives.

This radical shift in our conception of who and what we are has started to filter into public life, prompting a wave of fresh thinking about how to educate our children, how to organize our institutions, and what we really need for personal well-being. “Looking after number one” is becoming an outdated aspiration as we begin to realize that empathy is at the core of being human. We are in the midst of a great transition from the Cartesian age of “I think, therefore I am,” to an empathic era of “You are, therefore I am.”4

Yet for all the unprecedented media coverage and public discussion of empathy, there remains a vital question that few people are talking about—and it is the one at the center of this book: How can we expand our empathic potential? We may well be wired for empathy, but we still need to think about how we are going to bring our circuits to life.

I have spent the last dozen years searching for an answer to this question, exploring the research on empathy in fields from experimental psychology to social history, from anthropology to literary studies, from politics to brain science. Along the way I have delved into the lives of pioneering empathists, many of whom you will meet in these pages, including an Argentinian revolutionary, a best-selling American novelist, and Europe’s most famous undercover journalist. I have also done fieldwork, speaking to people from every walk of life about their experiences of empathy, or its absence. Whether they’ve been trauma nurses or investment bankers, police officers or professional working mothers, people living on the streets of inner-city London or wealthy Guatemalan plantation owners, almost everyone has a story to tell about stepping into the shoes of others.

What I have discovered is that highly empathic people have something in common. They make an effort to cultivate six habits—a set of attitudes and daily practices that spark the empathic circuitry in their brains, enabling them to understand how other people see the world. The challenge we face, if we hope to fully realize the Homo empathicus that lies within each of us, is to develop these six habits in ourselves as best we can.

There are habits to suit every temperament and personality, whether you are an extrovert or an introvert, a risk-taking adventurer or a connoisseur of intimacy and subtle emotions. Making them part of your everyday life will change how you think, how you feel, and what you do. You’ll start to be fascinated by entering people’s mind-sets and trying to see where they are coming from—their underlying motives, aspirations, and beliefs. Your understanding of what makes people tick will expand beyond measure and, like many highly empathic people, you may begin to find others more interesting than yourself.

There is nothing utopian about living by these six habits: the capacity to empathize is one of the great hidden talents possessed by almost every human being.

Nearly all of us have it—even if we don’t always put it to use. Only a tiny proportion of people display what the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen calls “zero degrees of empathy.” Among them are psychopaths, who have a cognitive ability to enter your mind but make no emotional bond with you (think Hannibal Lecter), and, arguably, some people with autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger syndrome, who have a harder time understanding the emotions and experiences of others. Together they account for no more than around 2 percent of the general population. The other 98 percent of humanity is born to empathize and wired for social connection.5

We also empathize much more frequently than we would ever imagine. Most of us exercise our empathic brains every day, although we are often not conscious of doing so. When you notice a new work colleague is nervous before giving a presentation, you might try to imagine the anxiety and uncertainty she is feeling, and give her the reassurance she needs. You see someone begging under a bridge, and rather than just pitying him (remember, that’s sympathy), you may think about what it feels like to sleep out on a cold winter night or to have people walk straight past you without even bothering to look you in the eye. But empathy is not just about an awareness of the pain and suffering around us. Even when choosing a birthday present for your favorite aunt, you think about the kind of gift that would really delight her—someone with her particular tastes, and of her age and background—not what you might personally wish for as a present.

I am convinced that we cannot explain vast realms of social life without acknowledging the reality and importance of everyday empathy. Just try to imagine a world where it did not exist. It is almost impossible to do so. Mothers would ignore the hunger cries of newborn babies. Charities fighting child poverty would fold due to lack of donations. Few people would make the effort to help a person in a wheelchair trying to open a shop door. Your friends would yawn with boredom as you told them about your marriage breaking up.

This heartless world of indifference is not the one we live in. Open your eyes to it, and you will realize that empathy is all around us; it’s the stuff we swim in. Yet if that is the case, what’s the problem? Why should we care about cultivating the six habits of highly empathic people? Because at this moment in history we are suffering from an acute empathy deficit, both as a society and in our individual lives.

The Six Habits of Highly Empathic People

Habit 1: Switch On Your Empathic Brain

Shifting our mental frameworks to recognize that empathy is at the core of human nature and that it can be expanded throughout our lives.

Habit 2: Make the Imaginative Leap

Making a conscious effort to step into other people’s shoes—including those of our “enemies”—to acknowledge their humanity, individuality, and perspectives.

Habit 3: Seek Experiential Adventures

Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own through direct immersion, empathic journeying, and social cooperation.

Habit 4: Practice the Craft of Conversation

Fostering curiosity about strangers and radical listening and taking off our emotional masks.

Habit 5: Travel in Your Armchair

Transporting ourselves into other people’s minds with the help of art, literature, film, and online social networks.

Habit 6: Inspire a Revolution

Generating empathy on a mass scale to create social change and extending our empathy skills to embrace the natural world.

TACKLING THE EMPATHY DEFICIT

In the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama made empathy one of his major campaign themes:

There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to see the world through those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant cleaning your dorm room. . . . We live in a culture that discourages empathy, a culture that too often tells us that our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe and entertained.6

While the Obama administration may have had a mixed record on tackling the empathy deficit (the Guantanamo Bay detention camp remained open throughout his first term in office despite his pledge to close it), he was certainly right to highlight it as a major social problem. A recent study at the University of Michigan revealed a dramatic decline in empathy levels among young Americans between 1980 and today, with the steepest drop being in the last ten years. The shift, say researchers, is in part due to more people living alone and spending less time engaged in social and community activities that nurture empathic sensitivity. Psychologists have also noticed an “epidemic of narcissism”: one in ten Americans exhibit narcissistic personality traits that limit their interest in the lives of others. Many analysts believe that European countries are experiencing similar reductions in empathy and increases in narcissism as urbanization continues to fragment communities, civic engagement decreases, and free market ideologies deepen individualism.7

These trends are especially worrying given that the rise of social networks and online culture is believed to be making us more connected and globally aware than at any time in history. Facebook may have attracted over a billion users, but it has not served to reverse the empathic decline and might even be contributing to it. Social networks are good at spreading information, but—at least to date—less adept at spreading empathy.

Evidence of the empathy deficit in society is everywhere we turn. In the month I write these words, over five thousand civilians have been killed in Syria’s civil war. I open the newspaper and read about the scandal of Catholic priests in Ireland who have been accused of molesting young children. New figures reveal that two-thirds of high-income countries have a wider gap between rich and poor than they did in 1980, while a study at the University of California shows that the richer you are, the less empathic you are likely to be—it seems there is nothing like wealth to make you insensitive to human deprivation and suffering.8 And don’t forget the international negotiations to reduce carbon emissions that continue to stall, evidence of our inability to put ourselves in the shoes of future generations who will have to face the consequences of an ecological crisis we are collectively responsible for creating.

Political and ethnic violence, religious intolerance, poverty and hunger, human rights abuses, global warming—there is an urgent need to harness the power of empathy to tackle these crises and bridge social divides. This requires thinking about empathy not just as a relationship between individuals, which is how it is typically described in psychology textbooks, but as a collective force that can shift the contours of the social and political landscape.

I am hopeful about the possibilities. Looking back through history, there is no doubt we can see moments of mass empathic collapse, from the slaughter of the Crusades to the horrors of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. But there have also been waves of collective empathic flowering, such as the humanitarian revolution in eighteenth-century Europe, which saw the rise of the movement to abolish slavery, the decline of torture in the judicial system, improved prison conditions, and growing concern for the rights of children and workers. This moral revolution, writes Steven Pinker, was rooted in “the rise of empathy and the regard for human life.”9 We should be turning to examples like this for inspiration—and to others whom I will describe in this book—and put empathy to work to tackle the great issues of our time.

Alongside the empathy deficit that plagues contemporary society is a less obvious one that exists on the level of our individual lives. This more personal deficit takes the form of a failure to grasp the enormous opportunity that empathy offers to improve the quality of our everyday existence. We need to recognize that empathy doesn’t just make you good—it’s good for you too. Many well-being experts are beginning to recognize this fundamental truth of the art of living. Among them is the economist Richard Layard, who advocates “deliberate cultivation of the primitive instinct of empathy” because “if you care more about other people relative to yourself, you are more likely to be happy.” Similarly, personal development thinker Stephen Covey argues that empathic communication is one of the keys to improving interpersonal relations.10 So what can empathy really do for us?

For a start, it has the power to heal broken relationships. So many relationships fall apart because at least one person feels that their needs and feelings are not being listened to and understood. A healthy dose of empathy, say couples counselors, is one of the best cures available. Empathy can also deepen our friendships and help create new ones—especially useful in a world where one in four people suffer from loneliness. Creative thinking improves with an injection of empathy too because it enables you to see problems and perspectives that would otherwise remain hidden. And, as the stories in this book reveal, there is nothing like looking through someone else’s eyes to help question your own assumptions and prejudices and spark new ways of thinking about your priorities in life.11

These are the kinds of benefits that are prompting a growing number of people to adopt empathy as a philosophy of life in its own right, turning their personal empathy deficits into a healthy surplus. They can take their lead from designer Patricia Moore, who explained to me exactly why empathy matters so much to her:

Empathy is a constant awareness of the fact that your concerns are not everyone’s concerns and that your needs are not everyone’s needs, and that some compromise has to be achieved moment by moment. I don’t think empathy is charity, I don’t think empathy is self-sacrifice, I don’t think empathy is prescriptive. I think empathy is an ever-evolving way of living as fully as possible, because it’s pushing your envelope and pushing you into new experiences that you might not expect or appreciate until you’re given the opportunity.12

Empathy might well be a route to the good life, but we should also appreciate how it can make us good, shaping our ethical visions. Philosophers and social thinkers have long considered empathy to be one of the most effective means we have of expanding the boundaries of our moral universes. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, novelist Ian McEwan wrote: “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”13 But perhaps the most famous and influential statement on this theme was made by Mahatma Gandhi, shortly before his assassination in 1948. It is known as “Gandhi’s Talisman”:

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.14

Gandhi’s empathic thought experiment offers a compelling—if challenging—moral guide to live by. Just imagine if this talisman sat framed on the desk of every political leader, banking titan, and media baron. Or even on our own.

Anthropologists have also found that empathic thinking underpins moral codes in cultures around the world. A Cheyenne Native American proverb advises, “Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.” Most Pacific Island languages possess expressions that denote a sense of caring based on understanding other people’s emotions and looking at the world from their perspective, such as the term te nanoanga, used by the Banaban people of Fiji.15 In southern Africa, the humanist philosophy of Ubuntu is known for its empathic elements. “A person with Ubuntu,” writes Desmond Tutu, “is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished. . . . Ubuntu speaks about our interconnectedness.”

Ultimately, the best reason to develop the habit of empathizing is that empathy can create the human bonds that make life worth living. Once we truly recognize that we are Homo empathicus, social animals who thrive on connection rather than isolation, it makes little sense to suppress the empathic side of ourselves. Our well-being depends on us stepping out of our own egos and into the lives of others, both people close to us and distant strangers. The pleasures of doing so are real and profound. Without empathic bonds we are lesser beings, only part of who we could be. Or as the poet John Donne put it in the seventeenth century:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

FROM INTROSPECTION TO “OUTROSPECTION”

Where have we got to so far? Put simply, empathy matters. We need to move beyond a scientific understanding of empathy, and recognize it as a powerful tool that can both create radical social change and give greater depth and meaning to our lives. This should be cause enough to place it right at the top of our to-do lists. But before making a start by exploring the six habits of empathic people, there is an even bigger picture we need to see, an overarching reason why empathy deserves to be at the center of how we approach the art of living: it is an antidote to the self-absorbed individualism that we have inherited from the last century.

I think of the twentieth century as the Age of Introspection. It was the era in which the self-help industry and therapy culture promoted the idea that the best way to understand who you are and how to live was to look inside yourself and focus on your own feelings, experiences, and desires. This individualistic philosophy, which has come to dominate Western culture, has failed to deliver the good life to most people. So the twenty-first century needs to be different. Instead of introspection, we should create a new Age of Outrospection, where we find a better balance between looking inward and looking outward. By outrospection I mean the idea of discovering who you are and how to live by stepping outside yourself and exploring the lives and perspectives of other people.16 And the essential art form for the Age of Outrospection is empathy. I am not implying