This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
The Art and Science of Relating: Build and Monitor Empathy, with Alan Alda, Actor & Author, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
Keep your empathy thermometer hot
The strange thing about empathy is, as valuable as it is, we tend to lose it. It tends to evaporate. It’s very easy to lose your touch in making contact with other people. I see it happening to me, I see it happening to other people. So I thought, is there something I can do on my own that would build empathy and keep my empathy thermometer at a high enough temperature? So I started experimenting on myself, I love to experiment on myself. And I thought, ok, it has something to do with reading emotions. So why don’t I as I walk down the street, as I go into a restaurant or talk to friends, why don’t I try to figure out what they’re feeling. And maybe it’ll be really good if I name the feeling.
And I was talking to a psychologist about this and he said, “You came up with this by yourself?” I said yeah, he said “I’d like to study that.” So he did a study where he had people doing this during the day for a week. He gave them a standard empathy test at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week he gave them another empathy test to see if their scores in empathy would go up by doing this exercise. And he had other things they did to control variables.
Now, what was interesting was, not only did their scores go up the more they did it – so that the people who only did it twice didn’t go up very much but the people who did it a hundred times during the week, their scores went up considerably – not only that, it wasn’t just naming the emotion that they thought they saw in the other person. It was just noticing the other person. Noticing your hair. Noticing your eyes. What color are your eyes? Just think about this the next time you’re talking to somebody. How long do you talk to somebody you just met before you really notice what color their eyes are? What shape is their eyebrow? What color clothing are they wearing? If it’s a woman, or a man, are they wearing jewelry? What is it? Where did it come from? How are they sitting? What clue am I getting from them? We don’t notice one another nearly as much as we think we do. And those people who noticed the other people got higher scores in empathy at the end of the week. And I’ve found it’s built up my empathy.
Maintain possession of your tools
It’s a good idea to monitor your own empathy a little bit, to be aware of the empathy as you experience it. And I’ll give you a concrete example of this. I have a friend who went to a doctor with a foot problem. And he examined her, and he said, “Oh my God! I think you’ve got plantar fasciitis!” She got scared to death. She thought, is this an incurable disease? Because she hadn’t heard the term before. And it’s a painful condition, and he had had the condition once, so once he figured out she had this condition, he thought, “Oh my God, she’s going to feel terrible. I experience her pain.” He was swamped with her emotion. He was swamped with her pain.
And I interviewed someone in writing the book who teaches doctors to be empathic. And one of the things she teaches them is: you have to get inside the other person’s head, but then you have to get out again. You have to manage your own empathy and you can’t be swamped with it. It becomes what she calls “affective quicksand,” where you just sink into the feeling. Because part of the theory of empathy is that you understand what the other person is feeling because you feel it yourself. You recognize the feeling in yourself, and that gives you an understanding of what they’re going through. But if you sink into that feeling and get lost in it, and if it begins to rule your end of the communication, then it’s no longer a tool. It’s something that’s working against you. You’ve got to have possession of your own tools.