Thank you. It's great to be here. I look forward to this conversation.

Thanks for starting there. And hi everyone. By the way, it's great to see where you all are tuning in from. It's really important to start by defining our terms because throughout my career, I've heard Hitendra probably give me hundreds of different definitions of empathy, each as confident as the next, and all of them disagreeing with each other. So as researchers think of it, empathy is an umbrella term that describes at least three ways that we connect with each other's emotions. So, for instance, let's say that as I logged on to this call, instead of being excited and enthusiastic as I am, I was weeping in anguish. Well, if you saw that a bunch of things might happen to you first, you might vicariously take on my feelings, becoming sad or upset yourself. That's what we would call emotional empathy or emotion contagion. Second, you might say what is happening with the feeling and why. That type of detective work is what we call cognitive empathy. And then third, Hitendra, because you are a good friend, you would probably care about what I was going through and wish for me to feel better, which we would call empathic concern or compassion.

Now, these three pieces of empathy might just sound like different ways of describing the same thing, but they split apart in really interesting ways. For instance, they're only a little correlated across the population. So if I know that you're someone who takes on other people's feelings, that doesn't tell me that much about how good you'll be at understanding what someone else is going through. These different pieces of empathy are also supported by different systems in the brain. So a lot of my work early in my career focused on dissecting empathy, trying to figure out its different parts, the same way that a mechanic might try to figure out the different parts of a car and how they work together to make the whole engine run.

Oh, my goodness. I would say that what you were describing is a steering process where we don't just meet people where they are, but we try to guide them to where we might imagine they would like to be. Another way of thinking about that is that in those cases, you're connecting not just with the person's current experience but with their potential future. And you may be trying to create that future with them. I think that one really beautiful thing about what you just said is that it may be a slightly more poetic way of describing empathy because it has two sides to it. The first is deep in our body, an acknowledgment that someone else's reality is just as true as our own, even if it's very different from ours. So they might see things in a different way than we do, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong or that we are right that those two realities are both valid.

The second, though, is an invitation or an action that we take to try to merge parts of our reality together. And we can get into talking about the relationship between art and empathy. But I think a lot of art and science is a process of discovering something and then trying to get that into other people's heads. It's just this miraculous biological feat where I am perturbing the air between us and somehow trying to get your brain into a state similar to the state in my brain right now. It's honestly miraculous if you think about what we're able to do is that it's that the connection you're trying to draw here, Hitendra.

That's right, and that comes from the Western philosophical tradition, really the study of empathy, it doesn't begin, but it really gains a lot of steam with a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith. Adam Smith, of course, is more famous for the Wealth of Nations and being kind of the father of modern capitalism. But he wrote about what he called sympathy, which we would now consider emotional empathy, that sort of vicarious taking on what other people feel. And he called it the moral sentiment because he basically said this is the foundation of our sense of right and wrong. And to build on your point, Hitendra, if I see you in pain, it feels like I am in pain. I have every motive not to cause you pain. And if I see you happy, I feel happy. I have every motive to do whatever it takes to help make you happy or fulfilled or to help you find meaning. In other words, one way of thinking about this is we often talk about the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated. Empathy really makes clear how blurry the division is between you and me and, therefore, how instinctual the golden rule can be. We often think of the golden rule as like the vegetables that you need to eat. We'd rather be selfish, but we need to be kind to others because that's some principle we have. Well, empathy is not necessarily a principle. It's an experience that turns that into a very natural impulse because it acknowledges that you and I are merged in some way. And so treating you well is treating me well, and treating you poorly is treating myself poorly.

First of all, I think one interesting part of my life over the last many years has been living as a scientist who studies something and then just as a human being connected to it. And I don't think that I'm uniquely connected to empathy. I think we all are connected to it because we're all connected. But to answer your question, there is a lot of data about the shift in empathy over time, and those data do not point to a very optimistic picture, I'm afraid to tell you so. The most common way that psychologists in my corner of science measure empathy is a simple questionnaire, a series of statements, and you're asked how well each one describes you from one to five. So, for instance, I might ask you how well this statement describes you. I often have a tender concern, feelings for people less fortunate than myself, or I try to look at everyone's side of a disagreement before I make a decision.

So your response to those twenty-six other prompts would give you an empathy index from one to five. So that test was developed in the 1970s. And since then, I'd say millions of people have taken it. And researchers recently decided to look at the trends over time, and they found a steep decline in empathy over 30 years from 1979 to 2009. So to put this in perspective, the average American in 2009, according to their own self-report, was less empathic than three-quarters of Americans just 30 years before. And if you think about the way that we've been talking about what empathy does for us, the way it connects us, the way that it makes us healthier and more fulfilled and as supposed stronger people than losing, this is kind of like losing a vital resource except instead of an environmental one. It's a psychological one.

I'd like to think that. And one thing that I often really respond negatively towards is when I describe those data, and people kind of respond with some version of kids these days as though younger generations are all full of themselves and not focused on other people. Well, I interact with young adults. I teach college students on a very regular basis. I interact with hundreds of them, and they, to me, are deeply compassionate and, as you say, responding to a real awakening to the need for human rights, for instance, in a broad way, the need for global responsibility in a Broadway. They need to acknowledge privilege and understand what we can do for those who have less in a really powerful way.

Our cynicism, our belief that others are generally selfish, has skyrocketed. Even interestingly, in the use of language, we've changed. So the use of the first person singular I, me and mine has increased in frequency in the English language over this time. And finally, our mental health appears to be deteriorating. People report being much lonelier, much more anxious, and much more depressed than they did again decades ago. I mean, many of these trends have gotten worse during the pandemic. But I'm describing a prepend. I'm sorry to be such a downer, Hitendra, but I'm afraid the decline in empathy is part of a cluster of really troubling signs.

Let's start with the world that created empathy, right? I mean, whenever you look at a feature of our psychological lives, you can start by going back to two hundred thousand years and think about the environment in which that characteristic developed. And so if you think about empathy, well, when empathy, human empathy in its modern form developed, we were living in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, just a few families apiece. And so what that meant is that if you ran into somebody else, they were probably really familiar to you, maybe even related to you. You were interdependent. You counted on one another. You were invisible to each other. We could see pain and pleasure in each other's faces and hear it in each other's voices, and people were accountable to one another. I knew your history of kindness and cruelty and could pay it back. I mean, karma was real and palpable at that time. I think of those parts of social life as empathy is primordial soup, the sort of the environment in which it grew. And even now, empathy comes most naturally and most powerfully to us when life is that way, when I'm in the room with you, when I know you well, when we have a history of interaction and when we have a future of interactions.

Our interactions with each other are more irregular and more transactional. And finally, we're technologically mediated in a way that we have never been. I mean, this conversation is terrific because it's got a lot of those prompts that allow us to connect. I can see you. I can hear you. We've got a long space to chat and to open up. But I think you would agree that many interactions that we have are much more thinned out and not created for us to fully connect with each other as human beings.

I mean, it's one of the biggest topics in the world of empathy. Why is empathy so fragile? Why does it disappear in moments of conflict or when we define or divide the world into us and them, as we often do? It's almost as though these two ancient psychological forces are a very natural, really easy division of the world into categories, which is useful in some cases but harmful in others. And the other is this natural ability we have to connect, and they sort of like seesaw with each other. If I decide that you are them, that you're distinct from me, and especially if we conflict, well, that will, as you say, snuff out my empathy. And by contrast, when people make really important sort of personal one-on-one connections with somebody who's on the other side of a social boundary, suddenly we become aware that the social boundaries are artificial and that we're just two human beings instead of two members of of an hour of different armies at war with each other. And so one of the things that's most powerful in overcoming those divisions is simply longer conversations, less judgmental conversations, simply being willing to pause and to hear each other's stories instead of just sniping at each other about our opinions. A lot of work is coming out on this now in both psychology and political science. The big question is, how do we produce more conversations like that? Because right now, our world isn't really built for them.

I love that. And I think that that's absolutely part of a conversation that works and part of one that can replace division with empathy. I think withholding judgment is critical. I think that is less wedded to your own perspective, again, gets back to this idea of acknowledging that somebody else's reality is real to them. Just because it is different from yours doesn't make them disingenuous or unintelligent or evil or anything like that. I often think about, do you remember the dress that was black and blue? But some people, for some wild reason, thought it was white and gold. Do you remember this dress, Hitendra?

Oh, it was called the dress, and it was this famous image of a dress that was a designer fashion dress and it created a war on the Internet because some people experienced it as being black and blue. I see. And others believed fervently that it was white and gold. And this is not a political division. It's just literally a division in what we are seeing. And I think that example always stuck out to me because people just couldn't imagine somebody seeing things the other way and vice versa. And I think that that's critical to remember when you're entering a conversation where there's any disagreement, is that this person, unless you have any reason to believe that they're lying to you, is probably not. They're probably representing their version of the world as honestly as they can. And I think that that's a very brave thing to do during a disagreement.

So I would say that certainly holding on to our opinions less strongly is part of it. And then I think acknowledging and believing and having faith in the other person on the other side of that conversation as a full human is important. That sounds obvious, but I think we often, instead of focusing on the other person, just live in our reactions to what they're saying. And I think that's a very natural but a very toxic way to have conversations. So one thing that I often suggest to people is if you're disagreeing, ask yourself, what am I learning? What is one thing that I now think of differently after this conversation than I did before? What is one thing that I didn't know that I learned? And if the answer to that is nothing, then maybe you haven't been listening as well as you think you have.

It's to me one of the most moving examples of what in psychology we call contact theory. So contact theory is this idea that, in essence, prejudice and hatred are easier to do from a distance. If I don't know you, I can just slap a label on you, whether it's a category related to your ideology or your ethnicity or whatever, and decide that you are fundamentally different from me. But once you get close up, you realize that people are just too complicated and idiosyncratic to be described through any one part of their identity. And you awaken to the richness and humanity on the other side again of those boundaries. I think the really beautiful thing about Tony's story is that he was confessing, as you say, his past as a real virulent anti-Semite to a Jewish person.

That man, Dov Baron, did not need to add any responsibility to respond with empathy. We never owe empathy to people who would treat us with hatred. But Dave decided to take that step. He decided instead of reacting to what Tony was saying with his fear or anger, which would have been natural and invalid, he decided to respond with compassion. And I think that that's such a powerful decision that we make too seldom. We often don't turn the other cheek. We often meet anger with anger or hatred with hatred. And we don't realize that if we instead, again, it's not our job, but if we instead decide to take that first step to respond with the opposite, to respond to hatred, with compassion, how powerful that can be, how revolutionary that could be for people who are caught in that cycle of hatred.

That's gorgeous. Wow, I love that. Thank you for sharing.

I'm going to try to be brief here because two things come to mind for me. The first is work that came out of Leipzig, Germany, in about 2017. That was a collaboration between people in contemplative traditions, Buddhist traditions, and neuroscientists. This was a huge project where many people practiced different meditation forms, including love, kindness, and meditation, which is a compassion-building practice every day. And then, they examined their empathy, a battery of different tests, psychological tests, and then also scanned their brains before and after this practice. And they found that after engaging in these meditation practices every day for a few months, not only were people more effective at understanding what other people felt at sharing other people's feelings, they were more motivated to act kindly towards others. Their brains shifted. Parts of their brain associated with empathy and empathizing with others grew in volume. So, I often talk about empathy as a muscle that we can build and exercise. That's the best description of how real that is. It's metaphorical in certain ways. But truly, when we change our minds, we change our bodies and our brains.

The other thing that I would say about that study is that when I first learned about kindness, I thought it sounded squishy, to be honest, and I was not convinced. And that collaboration really opened my eyes and made me very humbled that the best way is to change ourselves, develop ourselves, and build our empathy might not come from research labs. They might already be here in ancient cognitive technologies that have been developed in spiritual traditions. And the fact that I'm engaged with hypothesis testing and statistical validation doesn't mean that's the only way of learning and knowing.

I mean, so the first step, which is not always the first step that people think to take, is just realizing that we can do this. This is what we would consider a growth mindset, an understanding that we are malleable, and frequently, people don't realize they think, okay, there are parts of me that I can develop, but empathy is not one of them. We tend to have this trait-like view where we imagine that some people are just born empathic, and some are not. And that belief is not just wrong. Science indicates that we can become more empathic, but it can also be toxic because it can discourage us from changing. I've heard a lot of people tell me, wow, Jamil, you've convinced me that empathy is this valuable quality to have. Too bad I'm just not good at it. So I won't try and say, well, hey, don't let yourself off the hook that easily. When we realize that we can change, the only thing we can't do is not change.

We realize it's our responsibility and our opportunity to kind of steer the ship. It's moving one way or another. But we can decide in which direction. And with that in mind, I think one of the most powerful little practices to do in building our empathy is, again, not to necessarily focus on the big, I think when people imagine becoming more empathic, they think that they need to turn into Mother Teresa by Thursday or something like that or take some big giant action that redefines them. But I compare being empathic and growing our empathy to trying to become more physically fit. It's not about the big grandiose actions. It's about the little habits that we cultivate. So a couple of things that I encourage students in my becoming kinder class to do is to try to form tiny habits of other issues. So not selfishness, but other, and that can be really centering somebody else's perspective, really trying to be curious about their humanity or trying to engage in small acts of kindness, but doing this in a very low-intensity way, very frequently, potentially every day, taking just a few moments of their day to intentionally reset around another person's experience instead of their own, and that those little habits can be enormously powerful in creating long-lasting, steady change.

Another issue is the other richness.

I mean, one of the most profound insights from social psychology is that our reality is so constructed that what I experience, my version of the world, and yours might be independent in certain ways, but they affect each other pervasively and profoundly. So if you imagine that, if you realize and truly acknowledge my capacity for empathy, my tendency to empathize isn't just my solo sport. It's affected by, as you said, the social norms, my beliefs about what is typical or valued in the space that I'm in. And they can change, right? I might be at home thinking that empathy is hugely valued, and so I express it. And then, at work, I enter a competitive organization where people are pitted against each other and decide, well, it's not safe to empathize here. So the first step is to acknowledge the profound effect that we have on each other and that social norms are beliefs about what's normal have on us. And then I think there are two sides to this.

The first is to be mindful of what we're taking in in terms of our social environment because I think of the people we spend time with, the information that we consume is very similar to the food we eat or the air we breathe. It changes us. And so when you make choices about which news station to tune into, which social media platform to engage with or who to follow on, social media or simply who you want to be friends with, we want to work with. You're shifting your social environment, which will, in turn, shift you to another side of that same reality. That same insight is that you are somebody else's social environment, that everything you do, every act that you take, will change what they think is normal, typical, and valued, and that that will shape their tendency, for instance, to act empathically or not as well. And I think that's especially important for anybody in a leadership position because the norms that they set will shape the people they lead.

Oh, no. I just wanted to co-sign what you're saying. I mean, I think that some of the most profound work on the development of empathy shows how malleable it is coming from parenting, particularly from a group of people who tragically lacked parents. These are orphans in Romania. There's an entire generation of children who, for political reasons, were institutionally raised, which meant that they had access to enough food. They had shelter, but they just didn't have a human connection early in their lives. And those children tragically developed very little empathy. I mean, their levels of empathy were sort of on par with that of someone who has psychopathy. But there was a happy ending for some of them, which is that they were adopted, some of them by sort of your standard nuclear families. It turns out that those children went from having psychopath-level empathy to having typical levels of empathy. And that tracked how warm and, I guess, emotionally generous their parents were. So, you're right that parenting is the first and maybe the most profound norm-setting we ever do. And I think it's no surprise to probably many listeners here that that's also one of the defining things in who we become. And that carries when it comes to empathy and continues to carry with our adult relationships.

This famous phrase in clinical psychology is that hurting people is the creation of suffering in others is an expression of the suffering that we have experienced ourselves. Now, let me clarify that that's not the same as removing responsibility for my actions. You can still hold someone accountable for their actions while understanding that they act from a human place because humanity includes many dark places. And I think that when we dehumanize criminals and focus only on one side of the issue and don't think about what we are doing to people or what is happening to people, that is driving them so far off of what we would think of as a healthy life path. I don't think that we do anyone any favors. And I think one of the hardest things to do with our empathy is to extend it to people who don't seem to have it themselves. But that's one of the most powerful and important things that I think we should try to do as a society.

So I was doing this a little bit during our definitional work at the beginning. But compassion is a motivational state. So if you think about empathy as having three different pieces, one is emotional. My co-experience of a feeling with you, the other is cognitive, my ability to understand what's happening with you. And the third is motivational. My desire for your well-being to improve compassion is that third motivational piece. So most researchers and I think of that as a component of the broader umbrella of empathy. There are people in the field who would say that no compassion is different from empathy. That's a definitional battle that probably is not of great interest. But I think the important thing is that compassion is the motivational part of empathy. And it's the part that is most related, by the way, to kindness, to the actions that we do take to benefit other people.

Jason is a really inspirational person. So he grew up in Memphis, quite poor and black. And he had two older brothers who got in a lot of trouble. He was a straight-A student for quite a while and a responsible kid. But he was judged by his educators based on his brother's actions and based on the color of his skin, based on the clothes he was wearing. And so, he was repeatedly given suspensions and detentions for very little cause and then eventually arrested for really not doing much of anything. And he was really at a crossroads where if he had been judged, as many young black people are, he would have been on a very tough life path. But instead, a judge saw his report card and said that he was getting all A's, and he ended up on a different path. And that path is that he's now a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. He got his Ph.D. with us at Stanford. And his work is basically on what he experienced, how educators sometimes tend to judge black versus white students. And because those educators are in power and setting norms, setting the structures, they don't give those kids a chance to reach their full potential.

Jason developed one of my favorite projects, which was an intervention to reduce suspensions among poor and black children. But the intervention didn't focus on the kids. It focused on teachers and, in particular, focused on when teachers encountered a student who was struggling, maybe who had misbehaved in class or was doing poorly in the class. Instead of judging that student, Jason taught them to deliver discipline in a more empathic way to ask more questions about how the student was doing to frame their discipline, even if it was sending a kid to detention as a way of trying to help them through a difficult moment. It turned out that that compassionate sort of punishment is still punishment, that compassionate discipline reduced suspension rates among especially black, brown, and poor children enormously. So I think, again, Hitendra, that empathy isn't just about an individual process. It's about the structures that we build. And if you see empathy in the people in power, they can create more just and equitable structures that allow the people in that system to thrive.

It's so beautiful, and it's just really quick. I think that part of what Jason does, it's so incredible to me. And he's also, by the way, doing this with parole officers and reduced recidivism or sort of re-imprisonment of the people who they are supervising. Part of it, though, Hitendra, is that I think many of us value empathy if we just slow down enough to think about it. We value other people. We love other people. That's what we're built to do. And I sometimes think about the hustle and bustle of our day-to-day lives. You think about these teachers. Many of them are probably so stressed dealing with so much. And just asking them to pause and reflect on what was most meaningful to them and their connection to their students changed them. Often you have to force people to be empathic. You remind them of who they truly want to be and who they truly are.

No, I've never heard of him. But I will check that out. It reminds me of the book Compassionomics, which is sort of, I guess, the opposite of that, a case for how more compassionate medicine would save everybody both time and money in addition to being more human and healthy.

What do you think would happen to our culture, Hitendra, if everybody had a kid around a baby picture of themselves and yet to look at it before you interacted with them?

I think that especially for people who are leaders in any capacity. But let's focus on let's say you're leading a work team. There are so many different simple things that we can do. The first is distributing attention. So oftentimes, it's very easy for certain voices to dominate conversations in work, in the workplace, and beyond. And that's typical. But it doesn't have to be. And I think that there are many examples of ways that leaders can, for instance, flatten a team meeting or slow it down to ensure that everybody has a voice or feels that they can voice their opinions safely and openly in that space. And that can create not just empathy but also psychological safety, which is critical to a successful work team.

Another thing is how we reward people and what we encourage and what we highlight. And I often think in the workplace, we focus on individual contributions, and that's fine. But I think if we hyper-focus only on people's ability to excel at their tasks, we kind of put them in little silos where they're not that motivated to connect with or help one another. If, instead, as some organizations do, we highlight and promote and reward collaborative outputs, not just what people do on their own, but how they show up for each other. That again resets the social norm and resets the incentive structure of space and organization to encourage people, again, not to invent a kind person who they're not, but to express the kind of person, the empathic person they are in a workplace setting.

It's family life, right? I mean, I think that family is the root of so many parts of who we are. And for me, that's certainly true. So my mother is from Peru, and my father's from Pakistan. They both immigrated to the U.S. when they were in their 20s and met in, of all places, Pullman, Washington, this little tiny town in Washington state where they were both going to graduate school. And I think that my mother and father fell in love as many people who are foreign to a place do because of their sense of foreignness. I think that they both felt pretty uncomfortable in the U.S. and kind of found comfort in each other through that, or at least a shared journey. But then, of course, they became more comfortable in the USA. I have been here for forty-nine years now. I think they quickly realized how little they have in common, which as their only child, I can tell you is very little like nothing. And so, they had a long and pretty bitter divorce that engulfed much of my childhood. And I'm their only child. And so a lot of my time from when I was six to when I was 12 was spent basically as the single bridge between these two realities that were so different from one another, different culturally, different emotionally, and different personalities. And these two worlds that we're also at war with one another. And so a lot of my experience as a kid was basically trying hard to connect with my mother, learning how to do that, and then going to my dad's house and realizing that the same thing utterly failed to connect with him, and it was a real struggle.

It was a time of great pain for all three of us. But I think that at some point, I really learned that, hey, if I want to keep my relationship with my parents that I deeply, desperately did, I needed to learn to tune myself to their different frequencies. I often talk about my parents' divorce as being an empathy for me. A place that forced me to work at care and understanding was that these two people had very different worlds. But they were both wonderful, loving people who were in a lot of pain but wanted to be there with me. And I think that that's the most profound thing I ever learned in my life. Since then, one of my missions has been to create empathy gyms for other people, to give other people the opportunity to do that work, hopefully without the context of as much pain and struggle as I was going through at the time. But still to provide that opportunity for others.

There's a whole world of research on what is known as altruism, born of suffering. This is the idea that moments of great trial and tribulation and pain, both at a personal level and at a collective level, can show us who we are. And in many cases, that means showing us how much we want to be there for other people. And so there are all sorts of cases and stories and studies of people who have gone through trauma, whether it's war or assault or injury accidents, by turning around and really refocusing their lives on service to others. And that's part of what we would call post-traumatic growth.

I think he's under this a great note to think about as we move into the future because we're all going through probably the largest event of global adversity that I've ever experienced in most people's lifetimes where I live right now in the covered pandemic and continues. It will have reverberating effects on our lives for decades to come because of the pain that many of us have gone through, various forms of pain. I think a big question for me is, what will we do with this difficult, painful experience? Are we going to, as it can easily let it make us more divided and more sort of, I guess, crammed into ourselves? Or are we going to try to rediscover our common humanity through it to realize what we owe each other and what we need from each other and recently, I hope, human connection and whatever this new normal emerges after this pandemic.

Oh, and thank you, Hitendra. It's been an absolute pleasure. I obviously look forward to many more conversations to come.