he also demonstrated unfailing empathy andgenuine commitment to their progress.

Because if we do not work on our humanity, our humanity will work on us.

The Logics of Caring

what i want you to do is to now imagine somebody whose body you would like to have 00:28:23 as your own either for a few minutes or maybe long term i'm not going to ask you why you want that body i don't want to get that deep into your psyche and that might be very personal um 00:28:35 but i'll tell you whose body i'd like to have and for how long just to give you a warm-up feel for this i really would like to have usain bolt's body of a few years ago for 9.6 seconds 00:28:47 because i would love to know what it feels like to run 100 meters that fast now when i form that does i think it's a coherent desire how do i why do i think that because i really do desire it i would love it i'd pay a lot of money to 00:28:59 do that um but what i don't want is to be usain bolt because usain bolt is already the same bolt and that doesn't do me any good um what i want is to be me 00:29:12 j with usain bolt's body so i can know what it feels like to run really really fast now i'm not claiming that this is a coherent desire i'm not claiming that it's 00:29:24 possible for me to remain jay and have usain bolt's body but i am claiming that i can desire it and if you are anything like me for some body or other you can desire to 00:29:36 have it for some time or other if you can form that desire then you in deep in your gut don't believe that you are your body you believe that you have a body and that 00:29:48 you might have a different body just like you might have a different hat or a different cat and if you believe that then you really do believe that whatever you are you are not your body 00:30:01 now you might think well that's obviously true i've never thought i was my body um but maybe on my mind i don't think you really believe that either and i want to do the same thought 00:30:13 experiment to convince you of that now i want you to think about somebody's mind that you'd really like to have maybe not for a long time maybe only for a few minutes um i'll tell you mine again i'm really 00:30:25 big and divulging you know hyper sharing over sharing personal secrets um i would really love to have stephen hawking's mind when he was still alive of course not now um and i'd like to have it only for about five or ten 00:30:36 minutes because what i would really like is to be able to really understand quantum gravity and i can't really understand it but if i had stephen hawking's mind for a few minutes then i could understand it now i obviously 00:30:48 don't want to be stephen hawking for one thing he's dead for another thing he was already stephen hawking and it didn't do me a damn bit of good what i want is to be me jay with his mind so that i can 00:31:00 use it to understand quantum gravity um i think that'd be really cool again i'm not claiming this is coherent i'm not claiming that it's possible but i am claiming that it's a 00:31:11 psychologically possible state to be in to crave somebody else's mind and if you like me can form that desire then you like me deep in your gut do not believe that you are your mind 00:31:25 you believe that you're something that has a mind just like you have a body um and that you possessed that mind and you could still be you with another mind and another body i mean just imagine having 00:31:37 the same bolts body in stephen hawking's mind that would be totally cool then i could understand quantum gravity while setting a new record for the 100 meter sprint um but that's not going to happen alas 00:31:50 um the moral of these experiments um takes us right back to chandragiri serpent i think the moral of these experiments is that deep down at an atavistic gut 00:32:02 level we believe that we are something that stands behind our minds and our bodies that thing is the self the thing that is not the mind in the body but possesses the mind in the body that's the thing 00:32:14 that sean decurity identifies as the serpent in the wall our arguments are going to be aimed at that not at our bodies not as our minds not as our personal identities they're 00:32:27 going to be aimed at that self that we really atavistically believe stands behind all of those that's the illusion that's the thing that causes us to be incompetent morally that causes us to be 00:32:41 confused about our own identities and to be confused about our role and our place in the world

générer des résultats d’apprentissage significatif sous la formed’empathie en utilisant un jeu vidéo basé sur le divertissement, Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa)(Upper One Games, 2015), dans le cours « Interactions and Cultural Communities » /« Interactions et communautés culturelles » (351-CC1-AS) du programme de Techniquesd’éducation spécialisée

really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard.

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

Leaders in higher education are mission-driven individuals who want what’s best for students.

Eighty-seven percent of students who report feeling understood are satisfied with their experience overall compared to just 45% of students who say their institution doesn’t understand what's important to them.

But reenacting the experience of being a novice need not be so literal; expertscan generate empathy for the beginner through acts of the imagination, changingthe way they present information accordingly. An example: experts habituallyengage in “chunking,” or compressing several tasks into one mental unit. Thisfrees up space in the expert’s working memory, but it often baffles the novice,for whom each step is new and still imperfectly understood. A math teacher mayspeed through an explanation of long division, not remembering or recognizingthat the procedures that now seem so obvious were once utterly inscrutable.Math education expert John Mighton has a suggestion: break it down into steps,then break it down again—into micro-steps, if necessary.

instructors and experts must also become more legible models. This can beaccomplished through what philosopher Karsten Stueber calls “re-enactiveempathy”: an appreciation of the challenges confronting the novice that isproduced by reenacting what it was like to have once been a beginner oneself.

imitation more generally. Emmanuel Roze hasfound that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trainsmore empathetic

Empathy – This is perhaps the most important element of emotional intelligence. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the wants, needs, and viewpoints of those around you. People with empathy are good at recognizing the feelings of others, even when those feelings may not be obvious. As a result, empathetic people are usually excellent at managing relationships , listening , and relating to others. They avoid stereotyping and judging too quickly, and they live their lives in a very open, honest way.

A key issue is the role of empathic communications in forming trusting relationships (Pr eece, 1998).

as leadership and management

reason can also serve empathy and social connection as well as self-interest and let me tell you how this was discovered 00:21:11 because empathy turns out to be physical back in 1996 in Parma Italy a remarkable thing happened in the neuroscience lab 00:21:24 there and I've been there Vittorio galazy was running an experiment for professor ritsu lottie's in which they had macaque monkeys and they were 00:21:36 training the monkeys too they trained them to push buttons and peel bananas and grab rings and do certain things and then they had probes in the monkeys brains neuron by neuron in what is 00:21:50 called the premotor cortex which choreographed actions it sort of puts actions together and they were looking at which neurons fired when the monkeys did which actions they had it hooked up to a computer so every time the monkey 00:22:03 moved and did this versus peel the banana etc you would see exactly which neurons were firing the monkey breast something you would see which neurons are firing and if he grasped with the right hand to be one set left hand 00:22:15 another set et cetera and this was going just fine then it was lunchtime and in Italy you take a nice lunch so you take a nice lunch for toriel comes back didn't have dessert as a pile 00:22:29 of bananas thank you take a banana he starts to peel it and he finds that the computer is registering click click click click click that the monkey's brain which we're supposed to register 00:22:42 register monkey movements is registering his movements and when they checked it out it turns out these were exactly at least 1/3 of the neurons firing 30% 00:22:54 actually will were the neurons for peeling bananas then they did further experiments and they found out that there was an interesting phenomenon that 00:23:06 there's a connection between vision and action that the same neurons that are firing when you peel a banana are firing when you see someone else peel a banana 00:23:18 well not quite all of them 30% the other 70% are doing interesting variations on that but those 30% are interesting they're called mirror neurons they mirror what you're doing and they link 00:23:31 vision in action and then they found out why there is a neural pathway Direction directly between the premotor cortex and the parietal cortex just behind it that 00:23:45 integrates a vision and they are you know tuned as you're growing up to length vision and action so that vision and action are linked together but then the other interesting thing is that 00:23:58 mirror neurons are connected to the emotional regions and emotionally something wild was discovered back in 00:24:09 the 1950s and 60s by Paul Ekman namely that we have a physiology that corresponds to our emotions Darwin first hypothesized this that around the world 00:24:23 when people are happy they smile when they're sad they frown when they're angry they bare their teeth etc and animals do a lot of the same things 00:24:35 and that basically there are other physiological adji of emotions when you're angry your skin temperature rises half a degree which is why you say my blood boils you know why you get burned 00:24:49 up and so on there's a reason for that those metaphors are for anger are based on your actual physiology and that physiology of anger is tied to the mirror neurons because the physiology 00:25:02 has to do with what your body is doing and if it's connected to vision you can see with someone else's body cuz doing and you can tell if somebody is writhing in pain or deliriously happy or really 00:25:15 sad or whatever you are emotionally connected to other people Briah your brain you have a brain and everybody else has the capacity for 00:25:29 what's called empathy it's a physical capacity linking you to others and that's how social connection works that is a physical thing and actually most 00:25:41 the reason Oh a huge amount is based on social connection and empathy it's not just self-interest and that's important for many reasons having to do with 00:25:52 morality and with politics

Basically you take an idea, convert that idea into a character then whenever you want to think about that idea you imagine yourself as that character and then explain that idea to yourself through that character. For example: We first take an idea (lets use automation) Then we turn it into a character (lets see automation as a mass of cogwheels and pistons moving around randomly) Then you imagine yourself as that character and see the world through that characters eyes (in this case we would be disgusted by humanity because of how slow and inefficient it is) Now when we are asked a question about automation or when we want to think about automation we can imagine ourselves becoming that character and we can speak through them to answer that question

The empathy map, one of Gamestorming’s methods for understanding audiences, including users, customers, and other players in any business ecosystem, has gotten some press lately because it was featured in Alex Osterwalder‘s excellent book, Business Model Generation as a tool for discovering insights about customers.

There’s a stigma to applying for help, she says, and many students who need aid feel there are others who could more urgently use the assistance.

I remember even defending a person from the Marshall Islands because a Mexican guy had taken his food. I said, "Hey, man, don't take his food. That's all he got to eat." They were like, "So, what, are you going to defend them now?" I'm like, "I'm just defending a person. He's just like us. We're all detained. We shouldn't be like that." But they got onto me and they said, "Either you're with us or against us. If you're against us, we're more." I said, "Okay, I guess I can be with you guys," just for being scared. Then after that I was there for about a month. Then they took me to a real prison. I remember they asked us to do jobs like clean your cell, clean the bathrooms, and things like that. Again, I was only 18 years old. I didn't know why I was put in prison with those people. In there, yes, I met some people that really had done some really bad stuff.

I used to give my mom crap about that, because I was like, "Why couldn't you just start your life right here? What's so wrong about this? That you put us through all this stuff that we have nothing over there?" And then I realized when I came over here—I actually cried, because I'm like, "Damn, she did all that for us to have a better life."

Mike: And it hit me in the face. I was like, "Damn, my mom went through a lot of sacrifices and it sucks." I was embarrassed because I'm like, "Damn, I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything with the blessings that I got." I felt bad. But in a way I feel like everything is for a reason.Mike: I feel like I'm here for a reason and whatever I need to do to help, or whatever my little part I have to put in, I feel like this is why I'm here, and I'm just waiting on that so I could go back and just be with my kids.

Mike: None of them, they still don't have kids. So I look up to that man a lot, because he's done a lot of sacrifices. At the same time, we're like the push he needed. So we both helped each other out.Anne: They're still in Arizona?Mike: Yeah, he's actually married to my mom. They got a house. I don't know how they do it, but they're blessed. Good people, do good things, I feel like you get blessed. Yeah, good karma just come back.

This game is intentionally frustrating! If it’s frustrating for you, imagine how students feel.

Once the person opens up about what they’re feeling, resist the temptation to find a solution. Instead, validate. McGrath suggests telling them their emotions makes sense, reiterating how hard their experience sounds, then asking what they need.If you’re burning to share how you see things, ask permission before dishing out advice. Sometimes, well-intentioned attempts to fix the problem send a message that you’re uncomfortable with the other person’s emotions, which does anything but forge trust and connection.

simple as tacking on an “I could be wrong, but” at the beginning, or an “Am I off base?” at the end. “This way, you provide an out so the other person can deny they feel that way,” she says, and give them a chance to correct the record by sharing what’s actually going on, if they choose.

Observations, on the other hand, cultivate connection by showing you’re paying attention, Braman explained in her post; that’s why she encourages parents to lead with statements like “You seem frustrated,” or “You’re full of smiles.”

I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating.

“To be in the shoes of an Other still leaves you with your own feet.”

they’ll work their asses off not to disappoint you.

But the business model that we now call surveillance capitalism put paid to that, which is why you should never post anything on Facebook without being prepared to face the algorithmic consequences.

other literacies

For my literature students, my emphasis is helping them understand stories that come from cultures other than theirs. Are they able to see the humanity and connections across the stories? That’s essential. Whether they remember all of the characters and the authors—that’s not essential.

foundation of empathic design is observation and the goal to identify latent customer needs in order to create products that the customers don't even know they desire, or, in some cases, solutions that customers have difficulty envisioning due to lack of familiarity with the possibilities offered by new technologies or because they are locked in a specific mindset. Empathic design relies on observation of consumers

Who wants these kind of relationships with their kids?

Listen, I know that the biggest indicator of success in school-aged kids is parental involvement. How could I forget? The media is constantly banging that gong via books, articles and nightly news programs. And it seems most of us have gotten the message; the percentage of students whose parents report attending meetings, conferences and school events reached an all-time high in 2016.

It is a tricky line to find, to be engaged with our children and their lives, but not so enmeshed that we lose perspective on what they need," Dr. Gilboa says.

Today, Third-Generation individuals whose professional lives have been shaped by their grandparent’s ordeals are found in the creative arts, in helping professions, human rights work and in Jewish studies and communal work. The Third-Generation members are no different from those in the Second-Generation, who gravitated towards the creative arts in order to remember the barbarity committed against the Jews living in German-occupied countries and , the Jewish life that was destroyed, and to raise consciousness about present-day racism, human-rights violations, and genocides.

Flora Hogman conducted a case study of Second and Third-Generation, and in her sample of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors she noticed that they feel a sense of pride and awe of the survivors. This awareness of the suffering is part of the fabric of their lives, but is channeled into empathy, political activism, greater consciousness of others suffering, and a reluctance to intermarry.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by ‘a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness.’ When individuals with psychopathy imagine others in pain, researchers have found that brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and compassionate decision-making.

When you are in an agreeable and comfortable situation it is more difficult to empathize with another person’s suffering. At a neurobiological level – without a properly functioning supramarginal gyrus – your brain has a tough time putting itself in someone else’s shoes.

The right supramarginal gyrus ensures that we can decouple our perception of ourselves from that of others. When the neurons in this part of the brain were disrupted in the course of a research task, the participants found it difficult to stop from projecting their own feelings and circumstances onto others. The participants' assessments were also less accurate when they were forced to make particularly quick decisions.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience on October 9, 2013, Max Planck researchers identified that the tendency to be egocentric is innate for human beings – but that a part of your brain recognizes a lack of empathy and autocorrects. This specific part of your brain is called the the right supramarginal gyrus. When this brain region doesn't function properly—or when we have to make particularly quick decisions—the researchers found one’s ability for empathy is dramatically reduced. This area of the brain helps us to distinguish our own emotional state from that of other people and is responsible for empathy and compassion.

can’t be created

Turkle’s major concern is what she perceives as a decline in empathy brought on by mobile devices causing a shrinking of face to face conversation.

For me, personally, empathy does not come from responding to a situation en masse, and trusting strangers, but from getting close to people different from myself online, getting to know them enough that I can (however partially) see a different worldview, and then also trust what they say in a 140-character tweet and can engage with them deeply, through layers of context.

Discrimination on the basis of gender or sex is omitted

submitting to God’s will is the only way I have not to go utterly mad with grief fighting it?

rimination on the basis of gender or sex is omitted.

“Although Mrs Lee Kuan Yew was one of the first women to sign up as a PAP member, she was never admitted into the inner sanctum of the party.Truth be told, she attended the first meeting with S. Rajaratnam, K. M. Byrne, Philip Hoalim Jr and his wife Miki.

Was it only by this twist of fate and chance –Lee Kuan Yew wanting to stop the wife of another colleague from attending –that the founding team became and then stayed an All Men’s group?

Part of this change according to D2L exec interviews was that in the past it was easier to talk to CIOs, but now they are learning how to talk to faculty and end users.

While the study didn’t examine why empathy may be declining, the authors draw on prior research to speculate that culprits could include the corresponding rise in narcissism among young people, the growing prevalence of personal technology and media use in everyday life, shrinking family size (dealing with siblings may teach empathy), and stronger pressures on young people to succeed academically and professionally.

reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.

The tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more accurate mental picture of the victims.

The point is not to be defeatist, but to remind ourselves again and again that the process is always iterative, and that we must keep working to maintain, to improve, and thus to sustain our work.

How can I add value to this network – contribute, amplify, connect, share, listen, support?

Six facets of under-standing—the capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empa-thize, and self-assess—can serve as indicators of understanding.

The people on the other end were targets. They were nothing. They were nobody.

I’m realizing more and more how desperately this perspective is needed as I watch researchers and advocates, politicians and everyday people judge others from their vantage point without taking a moment to understand why a particular logic might unfold.

We woke up every morning glad we were alive, and went to sleep every night knowing we might not wake in the morning.

No sooner had the fifth graders in Jennifer Ellison’s reading class finished watching a series of videos about empathy than they came to her with an idea. They had noticed that when Ellison directed students to pair off and read with a partner, one student in particular, who is autistic, became anxious in the face of social pressure. "My class realized, we need a plan so that he feels comfortable," Ellison says. "That’s a lot of insight for 10-year-olds." They proposed a sticker-based system whereby reading partners are randomly assigned on a rotating basis. Now, Ellison says, "He doesn’t have that anxiety," because someone is always proactive about asking to read with him. A small change, perhaps, but a rewarding one for teachers like Ellison who entered the profession hoping to instill values like compassion and respect. And it was all precipitated by a short series of five-minute videos created by the education startup ClassDojo.

Theory of Mind tests: reading the mind in the eyes (RMET)

“counteranthropomorphism”—the tendency we have to remove the humanity of people we can’t see

And though I was grateful to James for calling them out, I wasn’t even challenging anyone’s access to making money. I just made humorous remarks about some books and some dead writers’ characters. These guys were apparently so upset and so convinced that the existence of my opinions and voice menaced others’ rights. Guys: censorship is when the authorities repress a work of art, not when someone dislikes it.

art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.

Removing the VR goggles, the adrenaline continues to course through me. I have only been inside the Project Syria immersive for a few minutes, but the effect is dramatic. It was commissioned for the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos to give politicians an insight into everyday life in Syria. And it works.

In one version of this experiment, if we gave participants synthetic oxytocin (in the nose, that will reach the brain in an hour), they donated to 57 percent more of the featured charities and donated 56 percent more money than participants given a placebo. Those who received oxytocin also reported more emotional transportation into the world depicted in the ad. Most importantly, these people said they were less likely to engage in the dangerous behaviors shown in the ads. So, go see a movie and laugh and cry. It’s good for your brain, and just might motivate you to make positive changes in your life and in others’ lives as well.

When people watch Ben’s story in the lab—and they both maintain attention to the story and release oxytocin—nearly all of these individuals donate a portion of their earnings from the experiment. They do this even though they don’t have to. This is surprising since this payment is to compensate them for an hour of their time and two needle sticks in their arms to obtain blood from which we measure chemical changes that come from their brains. 

Because the sad thing about empathy is that we are more likely to be empathetic toward people who remind us of ourselves. Where it is easier to imagine ourselves in their shoes. On a second level, we are more likely to empathize with a group of people of whom we know some personally (or at least we know of/about them) because in reality I deeply believe that most people are good. And so if you know enough people of a certain category, most of them will be good. When we don’t know anyone from a certain category we are likely to dehumanize them

British researchers Peter Woodruff and Tom Farrow are doing some of this important work. Their research suggests that the areas in the brain associated with forgiveness are often deep in the emotional centers, in the region known as the limbic system, rather than in the areas of the cortex usually associated with reasoned judgments. In one study, they asked people to judge the fairness of a transgression and then consider whether to forgive it or empathize with the transgressor. Ten individuals evaluated several social scenarios while the researchers recorded images of their brain activity. Whether people empathized or forgave, similar areas in the emotion centers of the brain lit up. When those same people thought about the fairness of the same transgression, though, the emotion centers stopped being as active. This could be a clue for interventionists. To help people forgive, help them steer clear of dwelling on how fair a transgression was or how just a solution might be. Instead, get people to see things from the other person’s perspective.

Train your brain for compassion over the long term. Mind-training techniques may be better suited to increase people’s ability (rather than motivation) to experience compassion. There are many meditation traditions that encourage people to cultivate compassion toward self, family, friends, enemies, and strangers. Compassion cultivation techniques have been shown to increase positive emotions and social support, reduce negative distress at human suffering, and reduce people’s fears of feeling compassion for others. Such training programs may prevent the collapse of compassion, by letting people overcome fears of fatigue and accept their own compassion.

Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone (also released during sex and breast feeding) that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others,

 research by Daniel Batson and others suggests that empathy is much more likely to lead to altruism when it elicits the specific feeling of empathic concern, which is when we observe someone in need and truly "feel for" that person--a state similiar to compassion--rather than wanting to escape the situation or feeling overwhelmed by distress.

Nancy Eisenberg, Richard Fabes, and Martin Hoffman have found that parents who use induction and reasoning raise children who are better adjusted and more likely to help their peers. This style of parenting seems to nurture the basic tools of compassion: an appreciation of others’ suffering and a desire to remedy that suffering.

Read fiction. Reading a great work of literature—or watching a film or play—allows us to temporarily step out of our own lives and fully immerse ourselves in another person’s experience. Indeed, research suggests that fiction readers are better attuned to the social and emotional lives of others.

If nothing else, you can remind yourself that you are both members of the human species.

The 20th century was the Age of Introspection, when self-help and therapy culture encouraged us to believe that the best way to understand who we are and how to live was to look inside ourselves. But it left us gazing at our own navels. The 21st century should become the Age of Empathy, when we discover ourselves not simply through self-reflection, but by becoming interested in the lives of others. We need empathy to create a new kind of revolution. Not an old-fashioned revolution built on new laws, institutions, or policies, but a radical revolution in human relationships.

Organizations, too, should be ambitious with their empathic thinking. Bill Drayton, the renowned “father of social entrepreneurship,” believes that in an era of rapid technological change, mastering empathy is the key business survival skill because it underpins successful teamwork and leadership. His influential Ashoka Foundation has launched the Start Empathy initiative, which is taking its ideas to business leaders, politicians and educators worldwide.

A final trait of HEPs is that they do far more than empathize with the usual suspects. We tend to believe empathy should be reserved for those living on the social margins or who are suffering. This is necessary, but it is hardly enough. We also need to empathize with people whose beliefs we don’t share or who may be “enemies” in some way. If you are a campaigner on global warming, for instance, it may be worth trying to step into the shoes of oil company executives—understanding their thinking and motivations—if you want to devise effective strategies to shift them towards developing renewable energy. A little of this “instrumental empathy” (sometimes known as “impact anthropology”) can go a long way.

Beyond education, the big challenge is figuring out how social networking technology can harness the power of empathy to create mass political action. Twitter may have gotten people onto the streets for Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but can it convince us to care deeply about the suffering of distant strangers, whether they are drought-stricken farmers in Africa or future generations who will bear the brunt of our carbon-junkie lifestyles? This will only happen if social networks learn to spread not just information, but empathic connection.

Adam Hochschild reminds us, “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts but human empathy,”

Empathy is a two-way street that, at its best, is built upon mutual understanding—an exchange of our most important beliefs and experiences. Organizations such as the Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle put it all into practice by bringing together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict to meet, listen, and talk. Sharing stories about how their loved ones died enables families to realize that they share the same pain and the same blood, despite being on opposite sides of a political fence, and has helped to create one of the world’s most powerful grassroots peace-building movements.

George Orwell is an inspiring model.  After several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma in the 1920s, Orwell returned to Britain determined to discover what life was like for those living on the social margins. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed,” he wrote. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat, and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result, recorded in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, was a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. He not only realized that homeless people are not “drunken scoundrels”—Orwell developed new friendships, shifted his views on inequality, and gathered some superb literary material. It was the greatest travel experience of his life. He realised that empathy doesn’t just make you good—it’s good for you, too.

We all have assumptions about others and use collective labels—e.g., “Muslim fundamentalist,” “welfare mom”—that prevent us from appreciating their individuality.

Curiosity expands our empathy when we talk to people outside our usual social circle, encountering lives and worldviews very different from our own. Curiosity is good for us too: Happiness guru Martin Seligman identifies it as a key character strength that can enhance life satisfaction. And it is a useful cure for the chronic loneliness afflicting around one in three Americans. Cultivating curiosity requires more than having a brief chat about the weather. Crucially, it tries to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day, like the heavily tattooed woman who delivers your mail or the new employee who always eats his lunch alone. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with one stranger every week. All it requires is courage.

Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to care for each other, just like our primate cousins. And psychologists have revealed that we are primed for empathy by strong attachment relationships in the first two years of life.  But empathy doesn’t stop developing in childhood. We can nurture its growth throughout our lives—and we can use it as a radical force for social transformation.