1: “If I want to know you,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person, “it’s moderately important that I know what you think, but it’s very important that I have some sense of the flow of what you feel.”
Yesterday, we began our exploration of empathy. “Empathy is a set of social and emotional skills,” David writes. “Some people are more naturally talented at empathy than others; everybody improves with training.”
Empathy is comprised of three related emotional skills which build upon one another.
The first skill is mirroring: The ability to accurately identify and reflect back the emotion of the person in front of you.
“Historically, emotions have had a bad reputation,” David observes. “They have been thought to be these primitive forces, that sweep us up and lead us astray.”
Many philosophers believed that reason is separate from emotion. “Reason is the cool, prudential charioteer,” David notes, “and emotions are the hard-to-control stallions.”
The only problem with this line of thinking? It isn’t accurate.
“Emotions contain information,” he writes. “Unless they are out of control, emotions are supple mental faculties that help us steer through life. . . Every waking second, the people around us are experiencing emotions, which are sometimes subtle and sometimes overwhelming.”
To be effective at mirroring, we must pay attention to the other person’s body because “the body is the origin point of emotions, and the body communicates emotions,” he notes.
“The face has more than forty muscles, especially around the mouth and eyes. The lips can produce the cruel smile that sadists wear, the grin-and-bear-it smile that polite people adopt when another commits a faux pas, and the delighted-to-see-you smile that lights up another person’s whole day.
“A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers.
“A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed, posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels.”
When we mirror, we feel what the other person is feeling, at least to some extent.
“People who are good at mirroring also have what Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls high ’emotional granularity,’ the ability to distinguish between different emotional states finely. . .
“They can distinguish between similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, pressure, stress, anxiety, angst, and irritation.
“These people have educated their emotions by reading literature, listening to music, reflecting on their relationships. They are attuned to their body and have become expert at reading it, and so they have a wide emotional repertoire to draw on as life happens. They have become emotion experts. It’s like being a painter with more colors on your palate.”
2: David calls the next level empathy skill mentalizing.
“Most primates can mirror another primate’s emotions at least to some degree,” he notes. “Only humans can figure out why they are experiencing what they are experiencing.”
To understand another human being, we lean on our own experience and memory. We say, “What is this similar to?”
When I am aware of what a friend is experiencing, I can remember when I felt something similar. I predict what my friend is experiencing based on something I sent through.
We don’t notice “woman crying.” Instead, we see a “woman who has suffered a professional setback and a public humiliation.” David writes. “I’ve been through a version of that, and I can project some of what I felt onto her.”
When done well, mentalizing allows us to see “emotional states in all their complexity,” David states.
“People generally have multiple emotions at once,” he observes. “If I see you on your first day on the job, I may notice your excitement about starting this new chapter in your life, your timidity in front of all these new people, your anxiety that maybe you’re not yet up to the tasks in front of you. I remember my own first days on a new job, so I can predict the contradictory emotions flowing through you.”
Using this aspect of empathy, we are also able to make judgments about the situation.
“I may feel genuinely bad that you are miserable because somebody scratched your Mercedes,” David writes. “I may also think you are reacting childishly because too much of your identity is wrapped up in your car.”
3: The third component of empathy is caring. “Con artists are very good at reading people’s emotions, but we don’t call them empathetic,” he notes, “because they don’t have genuine concern for the people they are reading.”
Mentalizing involves projecting my experiences onto the other person.
“Caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation,” he writes. “This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.”
Imagine that someone is having a panic attack. “Caring is not necessarily offering what I would want in that situation: a glass of wine,” David notes.
“Caring begins with the awareness that the other person has a consciousness that is different from my own. They might want me to hold their hand while they do some breathing exercises. I’m going to find that completely awkward, but I’m going to do it because I want to practice effective empathy.”
David points out that children are naturally good at empathetic distress—”feeling what we are feeling—but are not as good at empathetic concern: knowing what to do about it. We’re crying because we had a bad day at work, so they hand you a Band-Aid–which is sweet but not what you’d want a grown-up to do.”
When a friend is diagnosed with cancer, it may feel like we’re being empathetic by saying how sorry we are.
But what David’s friend, Kate Bowler, who has cancer, “says that the people who show empathy best are those ‘who hug you and give you impressive compliments that don’t feel like a eulogy. People who give you non-cancer-thematic gifts. People who just want to delight you, not try to fix you, and who make you realize that it is just another beautiful day and there is usually something fun to do.”
That’s what caring looks like. That’s what empathy looks like.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Is there one of the three elements of empathy that I would most like to improve? What’s standing in the way? What experiment might I run?
Action: Discuss with a friend or colleague.
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