The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, religious studies, ethics, morality, sociology, and related fields.
This Book Will Make You Kinder: An Empathy Handbook is by the English author Henry James Garrett.
Empathy is the ability to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from their ownpoint of view, by putting oneself in someone else’s place. The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of empathy.
Researchers have identified different types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.
Morality, empathy and kindness are essential parts of any society. The author concludes that to improve kindness, the ability to show empathy is required. It is possible to improve in this area and become a more moral person. Someone who can listen to, and understand, others will improve the ability to show empathy. If a person can identify with others, event those they disagree with, they will probably find it easier to accept the viewpoints and actions of others, and show more empathy and kindness.
People who lack empathy tend to misunderstand other peoples’ situations. Mr. Garrett suggests that we must learn how to listen, make mistakes and learn from them, and how to change our opinions.
Psychology Today magazine noted some basic definitions involving empathy:
Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character. Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately. It involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just one’s own, and enables prosocial or helping behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced.
Some surveys indicate that empathy is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere, findings that motivate parents, schools, and communities to support programs that help people of all ages enhance and maintain their ability to walk in each other’s shoes.
Empathy helps us cooperate with others, build friendships, make moral decisions, and intervene when we see others being bullied. Humans begin to show signs of empathy in infancy and the trait develops steadily through childhood and adolescence. Still, most people are likely to feel greater empathy for people like themselves and may feel less empathy for those outside their family, community, ethnicity, or race.
Why is empathy important?
Empathy helps us connect and help others, but like other traits, it may have evolved with a selfish motive: using others as a “social antenna” to help detect danger. From an evolutionary perspective, creating a mental model of another person’s intent is critical: the arrival of an interloper, for example, could be deadly, so developing sensitivity to the signals of others could be life-saving.
How do children develop empathy?
Babies display an understanding that people’s actions are guided by intentions and are able to act on that understanding before they are 18 months old, including trying to comfort a parent. More advanced reasoning about other people’s thoughts develops by around age 5 or 6, and research shows that parents who promote and model empathy raise more empathetic children.
What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy?
Empathy, sympathy, and compassion are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Sympathy is feeling of concern for someone else, and a desire that they become happier or better off, while empathy involves sharing the other person’s emotions. Compassion is an empathic understanding of a person’s feelings accompanied by altruism, or a desire to act on that person’s behalf.
Can we increase our empathy?
Researchers believe people can choose to cultivate and prioritize empathy. People who spend more time with individuals different from themselves tend to adopt a more empathic outlook toward others. Other research finds that reading novels can help foster the ability to put ourselves in the minds of others. Meditation has also been shown to help cultivate brain states that increase empathy.
Here are some thoughts about empathy by authors, some of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
The cause of enmity is lack of empathy.
- Imam Ali, Ghurar al-Hikam
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
- Roger Ebert in: Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2011
A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.
- Neil Gaiman
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
- Yann Martel in: Life of Pi
Why did it take so long for Donald [Trump] to act? Why didn’t he take the novel coronavirus seriously? In part because, like my grandfather, he has no imagination. The pandemic didn’t immediately have to do with him, and managing the crisis in every moment doesn’t help him promote his preferred narrative that no one has ever done a better job than he has. As the pandemic moved into its third, then fourth month, and the death toll continued its rise into the tens of thousands, the press started to comment on Donald’s lack of empathy for those who have died and the families they leave behind. The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside for caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.
- Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)