Empathy is on the rise in young people. Here’s how to build yours

By Riane Lumer, CNN

(CNN) — It doesn’t often feel as if we’re living in empathetic times.

Over the past two decades, partisan gaps on all the issues included in a Gallup analysis have widened or remained roughly the same. Some argue that in this tumultuous landscape filled with social and political divisions, the United States is on the brink of a civil war.

But that outlook is different from what social psychologist Sara Konrath found.

After studying and noting a decline in empathy in young people between 1979 and 2009, Konrath, director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and her coauthors updated their research in a recent report published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Empathy is the compassionate capacity to detect and feel others’ emotions coupled with an ability to understand another person’s perspective. This awareness is not a fixed trait.

The research team found that young American college students (average age of 20 years old) and American high school seniors are engaging in perspective-taking and empathic concern at higher rates compared with previous years of study. Perspective-taking (a form of cognitive empathy) measures people’s ability to imagine others’ viewpoints, while empathic concern (a form of emotional empathy) measures compassion and concern for others. The study included data collected from 1979 until 2018. The team’s analysis spanned that entire period.

That increase in empathy can be undermined by our cynicism toward each other, according to Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who is also director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

People often believe that “their craving for a more empathetic community is theirs alone when other people all around them also want the same thing,” said Zaki, author of “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.” This mistaken belief weakens conversations by creating biased views before you even start talking.

While Konrath found that empathy is rebounding among young Americans, other experts say there is still a need to encourage greater face-to-face conversation across all age groups to build empathy in an increasingly digitally driven era of communication.

Misperceptions matter

People sometimes have an inaccurate sense of what other people think.

That’s why “gaining a more accurate perspective on who is surrounding us right now can make us more hopeful about how we can build a better future together,” Zaki said.

For example, most Americans support policies to protect the climate, but they believe that’s a minority opinion.

Those lower expectations about other people can also morph into self-fulfilling prophecies, said Zaki, whose research at Stanford showed that finding.

“Students who underestimated their peers’ empathy were less willing to strike up conversations with people in their class … less willing to confide their struggles and they ended up lonelier and less connected over time,” he said.

If we do not believe in other people’s capacities for empathy, “we are less likely to take a chance on them … (and) we don’t learn that we’re wrong … so we end up separated from really the beautiful warmth and kindness of each other,” Zaki emphasized.

Underestimating the empathy of others fuels disconnection and avoidance of those one disagrees with. “People on both sides imagine that folks on the other side are twice as hateful, twice as anti-democratic, and four times as violent as they really are,” Zaki said. “We’re fighting phantoms, not each other.”

False notions of others’ views also make people more likely to escalate conflict despite that “conflict is extraordinarily unpopular,” Zaki said. “In essence, we are all driving ourselves into a culture war that almost no one wants because we have no idea who we’re fighting.”

Face-to-face conversation deficit

We are hardwired to need person-to-person, live contact with others, said Dr. Edward Brodkin, associate professor of psychiatry at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the adult autism spectrum program at Penn Medicine.

“That’s the place where we can best connect with each other,” added Brodkin, coauthor of “Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections.”

Despite the benefits of digital communications, it’s in these in-person conversations where you can begin to grasp others’ perspectives and feel their emotions, according to Brodkin. “Social media and the internet can distort the way we connect with each other, and then the companies that are using it for profit (can) tilt it towards disconnection, polarization, hostility and so on,” he said.

“Empathy happens best face to face,” when you can read someone’s expressions and tone of voice, said sociologist Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.”

In polarizing times, there can be a tendency to vilify the other side, which can further amplify disconnection. “If people connected more and listened to each other, they would realize that these (examples of hateful rhetoric) are just the most extreme things,” Brodkin said.

Growing empathy as a muscle

Having a growth mindset, or the belief that you can develop your abilities, Zaki noted in his book, drives people to feel more inclined toward putting effort into building empathy across their lifetime.

“It’s not about the big, gigantic things that you do. It’s not about donating 50% of your income to charity or spending your vacation working to build houses for Habitat for Humanity,” he said.  Changing your empathy happens through a little shift in how you approach every day.

What should people do to increase their empathy? Brodkin and book coauthor Ashley Pallathra lay out a framework for developing it through four components, each building on the prior skill: relaxed awareness, listening, understanding and mutual responsiveness.

Relaxed awareness is an ability to be aware of yourself, your conversation partner and the conversation while maintaining a relaxed state not overtaken with emotion.

Listening entails active listening in the broadest sense, not only absorbing what the other person is saying but also paying attention to nonverbal cues such as body language and tone. “Being able to resonate with them to some extent, like feeling some of the emotion coming from them. That’s listening,” Brodkin said.

Understanding refers to an attempt to understand where someone’s opinions and positions stem from, their arrival at their perspective. Brodkin clarified that understanding another person’s perspective doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It’s about trying to see them from another vantage point.

Mutual responsiveness involves meeting others where they are, engaging in the back-and-forth flow of a conversation through attunement to one another.

Brodkin hopes these four techniques increase people’s willingness to listen and view the other in a more humanized light, “and perhaps even be able to work together in some ways, to come to a consensus opinion,” he said, although he knows this is isn’t always possible in situations in which people are unwilling to compromise on strongly held values.

Turkle’s empathy rules include embracing not knowing, radical difference, commitment and community. She also expressed the significance of stepping away from the idea that you need to be right or win.

How does empathy help our democracy

Democratic institutions require people to respectfully challenge each other and learn from different perspectives with an inclusive approach.

“Empathy is a democracy’s job,” Turkle said.

“At the end of empathy, people are not supposed to agree with each other,” Turkle said. “You’re supposed to have listened to each other, and be willing to share a bit of road with another person (and) find a way to make peace so (we) can live in real life with each other in a democratic community.”

While people in a democracy exist in a community with those of diverse, conflicting views, people can seek out what they do have in common, begin to recognize their similarities and problem-solve around agreed upon goals, Turkle said. For example, prioritizing children’s safety may be a widely held value and so the community may coalesce around creating a safe environment for children to play in.

“Even if you don’t agree with the other person … engaging in that kind of discussion can then lead them to be more willing to listen to you and try to understand your perspective,” Brodkin said. “That increased mutual understanding could take the edge off the angry tone of the dialogue and the tendency to kind of accuse the other side of being all bad.”

“The future is up to us. And I think that, you know, we live in a cultural moment where, again, because of cynicism, we immensely underestimate how much people want empathy and connection, and when we lose faith in each other, now, we also lose a clear vision of what future we could build together,” Zaki said.

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