How to Increase Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand others to the point that you can experience their emotions and internal drives. Most of us are good at being empathetic with those we love, but increasing your empathy beyond your social group takes practice.
- Difficulty:
- Moderately Challenging
Instructions
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1
Understand your own emotions. To increase your empathy, you need to start with yourself. Pay close attention to your emotional state, noting what situations change your emotions, what gives rise to positive emotions and negative emotions. Use this material as a point from which to understand others' emotional responses.
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Interact with a wide range of people. Get to know people of all ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, socio-economic backgrounds and levels of physical ability. The more types of people you get to know, the more experiences you will have to draw on as you try to increase your empathy.
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3
Seek out similarities between you and others. When we stress difference between ourselves and other people, it's much more difficult to understand others. Especially seek out the similarities between you and people you do not like or who you disagree with. For even greater empathy, seek out the similarities between you and other species.
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4
Practice taking on another's perspective. Train your mind to be open to perspectives other than your own and evolve to actually immersing yourself in a different perspective. For example, if you are pro-life, take on a pro-choice stance to better understand the other side. You can do this on a personal level as well and it doesn't have to just involve moral and political ideas.
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Examine the lives and work of famous empathetic people. It's easier to become more empathetic when you have good role models. Choose people deeply involved in a social cause you respect and read biographies to better understand how they used their empathy.
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Read good fiction. Recent studies have shown a connection between reading fiction and gaining empathy. Fiction generally contains accounts of individuals' difficulties and being exposed to emotionally evocative material can help you better understand people's internal states.
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Foster empathy in your children and in those around you. Respond to children you are close to in a non-authoritarian way, reasoning with them about the effects their behavior can have on others. Let children know that it's in their nature to be good, sharing members of a community.
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Tips & Warnings
Females of all ages tend to show higher empathy than males, but this difference can be overcome through practice.
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Comments
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@havefour I agree with your post, although the title does state how to improve empathy, and if a person has gotten to this website, they were probably looking for it. Be that as it may, the decline in empathy (and even the empathic levels of people thirty years ago) is not desirable for a democratic nation, how can we expect to elect people to office if we don't try to understand other people? It's never too late to change a social norm, but there has to be an active movement that is dedicated to such a cause, a serious one.
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Some ideas for developing greater empathy.
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Nick Corona
Feb 01, 2011
Why the hell would anyone want to become more empathetic? It's an emotional burden that I would best live without. Empathy is a useless emotion. -
havefour
Sep 28, 2010
Alas, this post is missing item 0 - WHY should an un empathic person want to learn this? What is the reward for "me"? That is the point of view you have to deal with. But its probably too late, studies have shown that empathy in younger generations have fallen drastically. And when they start voting in selfcentered unempathic politicians the human society is on the fall.
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trepanator
May 31, 2010
The post somehow assumes that it's obvious that people want or need to be more empathetic. However, actually you need to learn how to control your empathy - on the one hand, to easily get into others shoes when appropriate, connect to and deeply understand your friends and loved ones; and on the other hand, to be easily able to consciously "disconnect" in order to be effective and happy in your life. Can you imagine working at a debt-collection call center; always trying to put yourself in the other guy's shoes, and staying sane after that when you come home?
