The Age of Introspection
But how do you discover who you are and why you’re here?
Pick up any self-help book written in the last few decades and you’ll be told that the best way to learn about yourself is to spend time on introspection or in quiet contemplation. By examining your innermost desires, hopes and aspirations, you’ll discover meaning and direction in life.
The Limitations of Introspection
Roman Krznaric, Australian-born philosopher and author of the book Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It, thinks so. He believes the introspection of our era of self-help and navel-gazing has made us less empathic.
“The 20th century I see as the age of introspection.That was the era in which the self-help industry and therapy culture told us that the best way to discover who we are and what to do with our lives is to look inside ourselves; to gaze at our own navels. This has not delivered the ‘good-life’.”
Krznic believes that we need to challenge our highly introspective, self-obsessed cultures. Most of us have become too absorbed in our lives to give much thought to anyone else.
“We need to shift to the age of outrospection. Discovering who you are and what to do with your life by stepping outside of yourself, discovering the lives of other people and civilisations.”
Empathy: The Key to Outrospection
How you interact with others is greatly influenced by your ability to understand other people’s mental lives — their feelings, desires, thoughts and intentions. Cultivating your ability to empathise with others has the power to transform your own life.
Kriznic defines empathy as:
“The art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.”
The Neural Basis of Empathy
When we’re young, we gradually become more aware that other people possess thoughts and feelings that differ from our own. Various cues teach us to guess other people’s mental and emotional states. For example, facial expressions, body language and learning about other people’s perspectives and beliefs. This ability is often called ‘theory of mind’ or mentalising.
Mentalising and empathy are similar. Both require an understanding of someone else’s mental or emotional state. But empathy also requires sharing the emotional experience of the other person.
- Mentalising: understanding someone else’s perspective.
- Emotional empathy: understanding someone else’s feelings.
Neuroscientists and psychologists who study the neural basis of human empathy believe that when we empathise, we generate an emotional map of the other person’s feelings. The more powerful or clearly rendered the map, the more likely we will feel empathy.
Researchers are busy using fMRI and other technologies to visualise the complex neural networks involved in mentalising and empathy. But like many studies of complex emotional or mental states, numerous brain structures appear to be involved, including networks responsible for:
- social cognition
- emotion processing
- face recognition
- predicting the future
- pain processing.
Can Empathy Be Learned?
The development of the theory of mind follows a reasonably predictable development trajectory in infants and children. Different children show differences in the degree of empathy they might show another child — some kids are naturally drawn to share or comfort a crying friend. Other kids are slower to warm up to others or more egocentric.
One twin study showed that genetics heavily influences mentalising, but experiences are more influential for empathy.
The simple fact is that empathy is a skill that can be learned and cultivated over time.
Teaching Empathy: Evidence from Medicine
There is a strong focus and rich literature on teaching doctors empathy. In part because of the rather unfortunate and well-documented finding of a decline in empathy in medical students as they progress through their clinical training.
Unsurprisingly, being treated by an empathic doctor leads to improved patient satisfaction, greater adherence to therapy, better clinical outcomes, and lower malpractice liability.
In one randomised controlled trial, 99 doctors were assigned to receive standard post-grad medical education or three 60-minute empathy training modules. The modules were designed to improve listening skills, the ability to decode facial expressions and body language, and the importance of understanding patients’ life stories. Multiple patients then assessed the doctors without knowing which doctor had received the empathy training.
Training improved empathy in the doctors as measured by patients, tests of understanding the neurobiology of empathy, and doctors’ ability to decode subtle facial expressions of emotion.
The researchers stated:
“…we found an improvement in physician empathy in the training group and a decline in the control group during the 4 month period between initial and final data collection. Thus, the training may have reversed the well-documented decline in empathy during residency.”
AI Chatbots and Empathy in Healthcare
As an addendum to the exploration of empathy in medicine, a 2023 study made a striking discovery: when comparing responses to patient questions from a social media forum, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot not only matched but was preferred to those given by physicians. The AI chatbot’s replies were rated significantly higher in quality and empathy (9.8 times more empathic!!) suggesting that AI could play a pivotal role in providing empathetic communication in healthcare settings if those medics can’t be trained!
Empathy Education for Children
If skilled medical professionals can be taught empathy, can children?
The Roots of Empathy program is an international, evidence-based classroom program designed to teach empathy, and it has had great success.
During the program, a primary school class ‘adopted’ a baby for a year. Every three weeks the baby and parent visit the classroom, and the students are encouraged to observe the baby’s development and to label the baby’s feelings. For example, the baby may start crying, and the facilitator will ask the children, “Why do you think the baby is crying?”
Numerous evaluations have shown Roots of Empathy reduces playground bullying, improves pupils’ relationships with their parents, improves academic performance, and increases mentalising and emotional empathy!
Practical Steps to Cultivate Empathy
Empathic AI chatbots aside, we still need to rely on our human capacity for connection. Because empathy is a skill we can cultivate no matter our age, here are six actions Krznic suggests for cultivating empathy.
- Switch on your empathic brain. Recognise that empathy is at the core of human nature. Empathy isn’t just something you are born with. Most people can expand their capacity for cognitive and emotional empathy — by practising mindful attention towards other people’s feelings and experiences.
- Make the imaginative leap. Make a conscious effort to step into another person’s shoes. Acknowledge their humanity, their individuality and perspectives. Try this for both your friends and your ‘enemies’.
- Seek experiential adventures. Explore lives and cultures that contrast with your own. Next time you plan a holiday, don’t ask yourself, ‘Where can I go next?’ but instead ‘Whose shoes can I stand in next?’
- Practice the craft of conversation. Engage others in conversation and practice radical listening — simply focus intently on listening to their feelings and needs without interrupting.
- Travel in your armchair. Transport yourself into the minds of others with the help of art, literature, film and online social networks.
- Get curious about strangers. At least once a week, have a conversation with a stranger. Ensure you get beyond everyday chatter about the weather and talk about the stuff that matters in life—love, death, politics, religion. “You might discuss with one of the cleaners at the office or the woman who sells you coffee each morning. It’s surprising how fascinating, energising and enlightening it can be to talk to someone different from yourself,” says Krznaric.
Take off your own emotional mask, and risk showing your vulnerability. Ultimately, most of us just want to be listened to and understood. Krznaric.
18 Comments
Leave a Comment
About Dr Sarah
Neuroscientist, Author, Speaker, Director of The Neuroscience Academy suite of professional training programs.
Latest Posts
download your brain health checklist
The 9 Habits of Highly Healthy Brains
Backed by neuroscience. Tested by neuroscientists.
For a cornucopia of resources on empathy see the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. http://CultureOfEmpathy.com
We invite you to join the International Empathy Trainers Association
http://j.mp/Empathy-Trainers-Association
warmly
Edwin
Director: Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
I discussed this in a recent essay I wrote on the brain: http://www.etherinform.com/dec2015_040.htm#2
and the first practical thing to do is to take an emotional intelligence test:
http://psychologytoday.tests.psychtests.com/take_test.php?idRegTest=3203
The style of questioning will give you an understanding of what to look for.
We don’t need car ads that tell you to get away from your neighbours – we need less distractions from pseudo empathetic media and more community oriented hands on activities. There’s no dollars in it so it must be funded by the collective i.e. the Government.
Without empathy we lose our culture and our humanity – with empathy we lose our self interest and perhaps our wars.
Dr. McKay, while I think that solely focusing on introspection doesn’t afford enough attention to the world outside of us, including other people, animals and nature, I do not think it should be relegated to something outdated or passe. Turning inwards, as one does in meditation, and nonjudgmentally acknowledging and letting thoughts and feelings go does teach one about herself or himself, but also allows for more space to be available to process external information. Besides all of the healthful brain consequences of meditation, it also makes us more self-compassionate. I’ve witnessed my own clients develop self-compassion and then, finally, become more compassionate and empathetic. Also, I know mirror neurons are controversial at present. Do you believe they have nothing to do with empathy? I do believe that empathy can certainly be learned but is it another case of the synthesis between nature and nurture?
I’m not too up to date on the mirror neuron debate, apart from being firmly in the ‘they are not solely responsible for the rise of civilisation’ camp. And I don’t believe we can attribute all our human capacity for social interaction to a few neurons. Perhaps they have something to do with empathy. But they also might not, empathy is a pretty complex cognitive, emotional and social behaviour.
Hi Sarah, Thanks for your posts which I always enjoy reading. I just want to agree with Simone Ravicz’s comment above and say that, as a psychotherapist, I don’t agree with Roman Kraznaric that the world of therapy is solely about introspection or ‘navel-gazing’ as he describes it. I actually find this quite derogatory to the journey of people who are brave enough to seek out professional counselling/therapy to help better understand themselves, their relationships, how they operate in the world and how they can change and grow for the better. In my experience, this leads to people growing in both self-compassion and empathy for others. The counselling/therapy space is also a wonderful place for people to experience the power of empathic understanding for themselves.
I agree to a point. And I personally don’t intend derogatory to people who seek help. I’ve done it myself. But what Kraznaric implies is that its not the only way to figure out what matters in life, and certainly not the straightforward route to cultivating empathy.
Funnily enough, I was teaching a primary ethics class on empathy today and we discovered (these were 8 year olds) that when they felt upset about something (e.g. imaging their dog was dying) they had FAR less capacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. But when they were back under control emotionally, they could much easily do so. I’m pretty sure adults have similar experiences …and this is what Simone above is getting at (I think!).
I just wonder if there is a connection between people/countries who are rated high on a happiness ranking and yet are low on wealth,with a poor infrastructure,so much so that they,out of necessity,have to lead a more empathetic life.Perhaps the western world could learn a lot from empathy studies in these countries?
I guess you could ‘Maslow’ this idea!?
Thank you for this post Dr. Sarah.
I am not quite sure what Krznaric means when he says that introspection hasn’t delivered “the Good Life.” That’s an Aristotelean term and a great deal of what Aristotle writes about is how introspection and self reflection, as well as the cultivation of virtue, lead to the good life because they also lead to empathy and community involvement. Such a broad statement by Krznaric seems rather wobbly philosophically and scientifically.
My guess also is that a lot of the empathy training is about paying attention. This is what meditation and introspection teach — how to pay careful attention. And the idea is to take that with you out into all that you do. Otherwise it isn’t true introspection or self awareness.
If you follow the work of John Bowlby who was one of the first to research and write about attachment, then it would be hard to imagine that if we are hard wired for attachment (to other human beings) then we are not hard wired for empathy.
Just because it has to be cultivated doesn’t mean that we aren’t born with the ability, which like other skills may be cultivated to greater or lesser degrees.
Neuroscientist Antonio Demasio explains that the higher neural processes are inherently slow in development, so that empathizing unfolds more slowly. He follows Heidegger who cautions that some kinds of thought, particularly more decision making about other people and the situations they are in requires adequate time and reflection and paying attention. These are the qualities of mind that meditation and other contemplative practices teach.
In fact, it may be that we find it harder to empathize because we are so distracted and too busy with life. Demasio’s research shows that fast pace and multitasking distract us and make it harder to fully experience other people’s emotions. Meditative practices are antidotes to this. Of course it’s important to find a good teacher and to do the practices. But anyone doing them seriously is likely to disagree with Krznaric.
Thanks again for raising the topic! It’s an important one.
Caring for others can bring people closer together. Act of kindness will help others and make you feel better too. The studies have shown the kindness is linked with positive emotions and activate the brain areas related to emotional processing and empathy. Therefore people who are generous and care for others feel happier and fulfilled in life. Make an effort to reach out and show your kindness, you never realised how big and impact of a small gesture can make. @wellbeing_solution
i like this article so much, it has a lot of info i need to know, thanks for sharing
Hello Dr Sarah,
I loved reading this article, it inspired me to talk to people I normally wouldn’t dare to.
One thing about the name of the author referenced here, sometimes it’s written Krznaric and other times Krznic. The advantage of having a similarly complicated surname I guess 🙂
I think the first step to listening well to others is to listen well to self. Like the first step towards becoming compassionate towards others is to learn to be more compassionate towards ourselves. This has been my experience. I have been influenced by Dr Kristin Neff’s work in this area. She found people who are highly compassionate are also highly self-compassionate. I think we need both – insight and “other” sight. I don’t know if you can have one without the other and be authentic. Listening well helps me understand what matters most to another. Deep listening of this kind is like a surrender because I risk being changed by what I learn.
Good content
To be able to start working on our own empathy skills, one first needs to develop self-awareness. It’s well aligned with Carl Jung’s individuation theory and most worldwide indigenous traditions, practising initiation. A person needs to detach self from the group and befriend their own personhood to be able to return to the community as a fully grown person capable of empathetic connection. In our modern society, it looks more like a process of self-discovery and “ navel-gazing” before reconnecting with the group as a self-regulated individual capable of true empathy.