Mehmet Oz
“One thing I know; the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have
sought and found how to serve.”
Dr. Albert Schweitzer
Empathy[noun]: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Sympathy[noun]: feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune
If you have read my last two blogs, you know that they have dealt with two big
challenges we face in America today: ensuring both the safety and the economic well-being of our nation’s children. A key to successfully dealing with both of those challenges is nurturing empathy, first in ourselves and then in others, and putting that empathy to work.
Empathy is different from sympathy; it is more subjective and more dynamic. Sympathy makes us feel for a person—mostly pity. Empathy on the other hand makes us feel with another person; we actually experience the feelings of another. That capacity to feel what another is feeling, whether it be fear, hunger, frustration, loneliness or whatever, is more likely to move us to action on behalf of others.
Nurturing empathy in ourselves and others or staying in touch with the empathy we may already have is not so easy in this age of fast-paced, competitive, race to the top living. The Good Samaritan Experiment illustrates that.
For this experiment researchers Darley and Batson recruited a group of seminary students. The students were given a questionnaire about their religious convictions in one building and then assigned a task to complete in another building. One group was given the task of delivering a talk on the Good Samaritan story in the Bible.
On the way from one building to the other each student would encounter a man slumped in an alley moaning and coughing. Some students had been told that they had ample time to get to the other building to complete their task, another group was told that they had to hurry to get to the building on time and a third groups was told that they were late for their appointment.
Darely and Batson wanted to find out which students would be more likely to stop to
help the man in the alley: would people thinking religious thoughts (i.e. about their talk on the Good Samaritan), would those in less of a hurry be more likely to stop and help, or would those who valued religion for its own sake rather than the career it offered them be the ones who more often stopped to help. What they discovered was that the urgency that the individual felt in getting to the other building was by far the determining factor. Even many of those who were scheduled to give a talk on The Good Samaritan failed to stop and help if they were in a hurry,
http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/darley_samarit.html
Another obstacle to nurturing and utilizing empathy is the focus in our culture on what has been called “ruthless individualism” –the feeling that we have to get ahead of the other guy—whatever the cost; the belief that he who accumulates the most toys wins. There is no end of talk these days about self-fulfillment, self-improvement, self-actualization, self-respect. And while we should take good care of ourselves, too much focus on that task leads to self-indulgence and leaves little room for empathy.
So what can we do to bolster our own empathy and the empathy of our children, grandchildren or even our close friends?
Some Action Steps
My first suggestion might surprise you. Read and encourage others to do it.
Yes, believe it or not, reading increases empathy. Remember your feelings when you first read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school? Because we enter the minds and feelings of those we read about, we develop empathy for them.
That reality was reinforced for me a few weeks ago when I joined a reading group discussing the book Still Alice, the story of a wife, mother and research professor in the field of cognitive science who discovers she is suffering from early onset Alzheimers disease. You didn’t have to be a clinical psychologist to detect the empathy that the members of the reading group were feeling as they discussed Alice’s descent further and further into dementia, forever losing her grip on the person she once was.
Lest you think that the empathy one feels while reading a story won’t move him or her to action, think again. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often cited by historians as one of the major reasons the North went to war with the South over the issue of slavery. It created a tidal wave of empathy for those enslaved and a demand that slavery be abolished. In my own experience, two books Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and Craig and Marc Kielburger’s Me to We have moved me to action both as a donor and a volunteer. Reading does provoke empathy, and empathy does move us to action. That is if we read the right kind of books.
If we want to motivate others to be empathetic, one of the best ways to do it is to model it in our own lives. A couple of years ago my wife Brie (a cancer survivor) and I took our granddaughter Sirina to Relay for Life, a cancer fundraising event. Participants in the relay walk laps around a track and donors who have agreed to support them, pledge a certain amount for each lap they complete. It was during the relay that Sirina, then ten years old, met Alana, a five year old, who told her that she had been cancer free for three years.
After the event, Sirina asked her mother if children really can get cancer. When she found out they can, and what they must go through when they have it, including losing their hair, Sirina decided to donate her foot long, thick, gorgeous black hair to Locks of Love so that a child who loses her hair due to chemotherapy might have a beautiful wig to wear until her own hair grows back.
My last suggestion is: give suffering a human face. Simply hearing or reading the
statistics about human suffering, seldom moves people to action to relieve that suffering. The information, the statistics, are too abstract to be moving. It’s when we encounter the human face of illness or pain as Sirina did with Alana that we are most
often moved to altruistic action.
For the book we are currently writing, Surrounded by Heroes, Brie and I have interviewed over twenty remarkable young people, both in our own country and abroad, who have started and maintained humanitarian projects that are making the lives of others better. In every case they were moved to action when they personally saw the real faces of need. Here is a link to the website of The Burrito Boyz whom we recently interviewed. Visit it and watch the movie clip about them. You will be inspired. http://hunger2help.com/