The family had almost nothing, like a stove or refrigerator. The adults slept on the rug, and the baby who came home on a ventilator was in a laundry basket, wrapped in a cloth. After seeing the family's situation, Bazzy wanted to help them. She collected the extra household appliances and items from her relatives and gave them to the family on the same day. The impact of this experience remained with her for a long time.
Bazzy noticed the widespread poverty in her city. She promised herself that she would help other families overcome such pain. We tend to think of empathy as an automatic response. However, a new study suggests that while most of us have the capacity to feel others' pain, we are more likely to empathize when we have the urge to do so, just as happened with Bazzy. This means focusing on this desire. Our drive to understand others' feelings and perspectives can be an important way to awaken our empathy and develop a more empathetic society.
Empathy effect
Empathy sometimes seems as instinctive and immediate as pulling your hand from a hot object. Philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1790: "When we see another person having a stroke and falling on their leg or arm, we automatically pull our leg or arm back."
This may seem like a very primitive phenomenon. When a child starts crying, other children - of 1-2 years old - might cry. However, while empathy can activate quickly, this activation is not guaranteed.
How you respond to seeing a hungry person sitting on the sidewalk or a refugee family struggling depends on some factors, such as your past, your view of the needy, and the influence of others on your perspective. While trying to help people develop their empathy, previous empathy training programs tend to hide such situational factors.
Instead, they focused on strengthening people's emotional acumen by teaching skills such as "perspective adoption, which is training students to view things from other people's perspective" or how to understand the feelings of others. However, follow-up studies of these programs sometimes show that their effect fades over time.
“The notion that all empathy interventions need to reinforce skills is wrong, as most people already have these skills,” says Erika Weisz, a psychologist at Harvard University. However, she noticed that people choose not to use them in certain situations.
In their new study, Weisz and her colleagues focused on cultivating empathy by enhancing people's motivation to empathize with others. The results were amazing. When the researchers boosted the students' desire for empathy, the students were more accurate at identifying how others were feeling after two months. Some of them also reported having more intimate friendships.
Motivation amplification
Weisz and her team, along with Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki, recruited freshmen, who naturally have abilities to understand their own feelings that match the social nuances of their environment.
“When students arrive on campus, they have this great burst of openness to experience. We were in a good position to find out how motivation works in this environment,” Weisz said.
The team tested three different ways to boost students' motivation to empathize with others. In one study, participants read a hypothetical letter from a new student who was having difficulty adapting to high school. They were asked to reply to him with a letter telling him that he should improve his empathy as they did, as doing so would help him communicate with his classmates.
This setting encouraged the students who wrote the letters to embrace the concept that empathy can be fostered. Weisz explains: “When we ask a participant to endorse a statement of another person, they tend to endorse these beliefs themselves.” This, in turn, can reinforce their motivation to hone their empathy because they believe that their efforts will achieve results.
In another study, researchers gave students texts that reinforced empathy as a social norm, including testimonials from other students about the importance of empathy in their lives. Then, participants wrote letters to high school students emphasizing how empathy is normal, prevalent, and expected in their community.
A third group of students, the intergroup group, participated in an activity that combined elements from the first two exercises. The control group easily wrote letters addressing the students' academic challenges. The results supported Weisz's intuition that boosting people's motivation would enhance their empathy. Participants in each study showed higher accuracy when asked to describe how people who spoke in a video felt, compared to the other group.
According to Weisz, these effects were persistent and lasted for at least eight weeks after the studies ended. Members of the intergroup group also reported making more close friendships at university, perhaps because of their improved empathy. It's something that Weisz believes could set them up for success later in life. She said: "Having that level of social integration is really important because it predicts all kinds of positive healthy outcomes."
How does desire encourage empathy?
Being motivated to feel someone's pain doesn't necessarily mean saying to yourself: "My friends understand what this person is feeling, so I will try to help them," or, "I can enhance my personal empathy, so I have to help them."
Like other types of influence, motivation often operates on a subconscious level, through which our priorities are shaped in profound ways over time. Nurse Bazzy's life course shows how to live with empathy. Her hometown of Dearborn, near Detroit, was filled with refugees from different countries who were always ready to help each other.
Neighbors used to sit on the front porch to share food. Bazzy told CNN's Kathleen Toner: "The kids were moving between houses swimmingly. The respect people had for each other was just amazing. This is where I learned to love my neighbor."
Just like the people in the Weisz study, Nurse Bazzy internalized social norms that place a high value on empathy, and motivated them to do the same. Other research suggest that social influences can smoothly reinforce this kind of value-constructing influence. In a basic study of Holocaust rescuers, those who saved people from the Nazis often had role models within their own families. This helped them activate their desire to serve others.
When the time was right, this deep-rooted drive inspired Bazzy to serve her community on a larger scale. Helping the struggling refugee family and their child reminded Bazzy of how many people have been in the same situation. In 2004, a non-profit organization called "Zaman International" was officially established to serve poor families throughout metro Detroit. To this date, Zaman has provided basics like furniture, food, and job training to more than 250,000 people.
How to enhance empathy?
After establishing that desire can influence empathy, Weisz, Zaki, and their colleagues are considering how to improve this outcome for empathy-training programs. Weisz believes that one of the keys is for program designers to take into account participants' unique needs and desires.
An effective empathy course in the workplace is likely to look very different from one designed for college students. The success of the results will depend on people's motivations in each case. If young employees at a startup are eager to please their bosses, those bosses can focus on sending a clear message, through actions and words, that they value empathy among the workers they supervise.
Furthermore, patients who have empathetic doctors are healthier, which reflects well on doctors. Middle school students agree with their friends' choices, so Weisz conducted experiences by showing seventh graders videos of their peers talking about the benefits of empathy.
“This approach holds promise for completing skill-building and creating a menu of empathy-boosting options designed for people’s needs,” Zaki says. Weisz's study results provide insight into how to boost our empathy in different contexts, from volunteering to rescuing someone in distress.
When you surround yourself with others who count empathy as a fundamental virtue, this social norm is likely to become rooted, as it did with the students in Weisz experiments. When you believe you can hone your empathy skills through effort and a "growth mindset" approach to empathy , you will be more inclined to do so.
Weisz says: "People are excited and willing to increase their empathy if they believe they can. Many people think of empathy as a fixed quality, but focusing on motives leads to permanent changes."
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