Being Empathetic Is Easier when Everyone’s Doing It

As a grid of video feeds blinks into view, attendees across the country prepare for an ideological collision. All have signed up for a virtual forum billed as an “empathy cafe,” held to spark dialogue between police and community members. Among the participants are officers as well as people who’ve been burned in encounters with law enforcement.

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Increasing empathy, says Stanford University social psychologist Jamil Zaki, will take more than teaching skills such as listening actively to others. Empathy is a socially motivated process, Zaki and other researchers say, meaning that people won’t necessarily empathize just because they know how. Instead—much as kids with athletic peers often want to excel at sports—people want to understand others when they enter into communities where empathy is the established norm.

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This style of listening, Rutsch emphasizes, does not mean absorbing others’ stances as your own. This kind of spongelike empathy is what Yale psychologist Paul Bloom rejects in his 2016 book Against Empathy.

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