Social Empathy Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Social Empathy

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Zusammenfassung von Social Empathy

Name: Social Empathy
Rating: 3.9 (123 reviews)
Author: Elizabeth Segal

Elizabeth Segal

The Art of Understanding Others

3.9 (123 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

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Social Empathy
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What’s in it for me? Learn to empathize on a large scale.

Turn on any news channel, open a news app or website, and you’re likely faced with the countless catastrophes taking place all over the world. If you’re like most people, you can’t help but be affected by these stories. And when it comes to tragedies that are inflicted by people, you might wonder how a person could commit such horrible crimes.

It seems that such people lack one important quality: empathy. After all, it’s what makes us share someone else’s pain and stops us from inflicting it on others.

As humans, we need to understand others and be understood by them in turn. It’s crucial to our survival and well-being as individuals and as communities. Yet seeing the world from someone else’s point of view is a skill that comes much more easily to some than to others. Why is it that some people are capable of seeing the world from a multiplicity of perspectives while others struggle to imagine what life might feel like for someone of a different gender, race, or culture?

The answer lies in people’s varying degrees of social empathy. In her book Social Empathy, Elizabeth Segal explains the role of the social aspects of empathy – how we can learn to put ourselves in another’s shoes, the fears and power structures that prevent us from doing so, and the benefits to ourselves and society that social empathy brings.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what empathy can do to increase a whole country’s happiness levels;
why coming from a lower-income background can make you more empathetic; and
how social media affects your capacity for empathy.

Social empathy looks at a situation’s wider context.

In August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina was battering New Orleans, the news cycle made a big fuss about looting. Images of people grabbing food, water, and clothing from shops went viral. Unsurprisingly, TV pundits condemned these people as criminals.

In the days following the crisis, some journalists took a more nuanced approach and discussed looting not as a crime but as a result of structural inequality. They described the historical neglect the levees suffered, the effect of the neglect on the poorest communities in New Orleans, and generations of racial discrimination.

Unlike the pundits quick to point fingers, the journalists who wrote such stories – and their many readers – were experiencing social empathy.

The key message here is: Social empathy looks at a situation’s wider context.

Empathy plays a part in all levels of social interaction. Interpersonal empathy happens between individuals, and it’s what we usually mean when we talk about empathy in everyday life. We have it in mind when we say things like, “I feel your pain.” Interpersonal empathy includes sharing the other person’s feelings, taking their perspective, and, at the same time, understanding that it’s happening to them, not you.

But empathy is more than just concern with one person’s feelings. You can take a broader view and consider the experiences of entire communities.

That’s where social empathy comes in.

It’s the ability to understand social groups by becoming aware of their everyday lives and historical context.

It comes down to perspective-taking. In a nutshell, it’s what we mean by walking a mile in another’s shoes. But all too often, instead of imagining what it would be like for another person in different circumstances, we simply imagine what the experience would mean to us as we are. That’s why some people say they’d never resort to looting - they haven’t taken the complete mental leap of placing themselves in the middle of a disaster, but are only thinking about what they would do in their current comfortable situation.

Social empathy helps us overcome this.

With social empathy, we look at context so that we can understand the experiences of other groups. Context includes historical events as well as the challenges and obstacles the group experiences. From a socially empathetic perspective, walking in another’s shoes means fully understanding what came before and led to the experiences the community is having now. For example, it includes thinking about how slavery has shaped the experiences that African Americans have today.

Empathy promotes positive behavior and makes us happier.

Ever had to work on a group project? If so, you’ve probably experienced a situation where one person hardly ever shows up to meetings and does less work than everyone else. Pretty annoying, right? No one could blame the other group members for getting resentful.

But what if you found out that he’s been absent because he has a sick child? If you’re like most people, you’d be more inclined to cut him some slack and be more supportive. That’s empathy in action.

Seeing people as other blocks empathy.

When AIDS became an epidemic in the United States in the 1980s, the government was remarkably slow to respond. In fact, the Reagan administration made it a policy not to mention AIDS at all. The reason? The largest affected groups, gay men and intravenous drug users, had a lot of social stigma attached, especially at the time. It wasn’t until national attention focused on the story of a young boy who contracted the illness through a blood transfusion that the government started to put in place policies aimed at helping sufferers.

Why the difference in response? It comes down to one human tendency: fear of otherness. The more we perceive someone as other, the weaker the empathetic connection.

Power reduces empathy.

Before Barack Obama became president of the United States, he wrote a book called The Audacity of Hope. There, he explained how empathy was at the core of his moral values – and expressed his conviction that it should be central to decision-making. He’s one example of a powerful person firmly on the side of empathy.

Unfortunately, he’s quite rare among the powerful. Much more common is the view expressed by the current president Donald Trump, who was already a powerful man in 2012 when he said at the National Achievers Conference that when someone attacks you, you have to hit them back twice as hard. Not much room for empathy in this approach.

Stress affects empathy.

Imagine it’s the last day before the deadline for a big project. Do you feel a rush of adrenaline and a sense of heightened focus as you sit down at your desk and get down to work? Chances are, the answer is yes – it’s your brain releasing hormones to give you the energy to get it done. That’s how our body deals with stress.

But what if you stayed up worrying about the deadline for weeks? If the situation is not resolved quickly, the body also releases cortisol, another hormone. It helps produce more resources – and, crucially, shuts down the functions that are not essential for survival. Instead of a burst of energy and focus, you get brain fog and exhaustion – and a reduced capacity for empathy.

In order to be empathetic, religions must include tolerance.

Take a close look at any of the world’s major religions, and you’ll come across some version of the Golden Rule. It’s the one that tells you to treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism all espouse some version of it in their teachings.

For many people, the encouragement to care for people and help others is one of the most positive aspects of religion.

Technology can help us be more empathetic.

If you’ve ever taken part in a discussion on the internet, you might have come across a troll. Internet trolls are people who post things online just to cause disruption and offense. Reading those posts, you’ve probably noticed how upsetting they are, often going after people already suffering from social inequalities – for example, attacking people of color, women, and LGBTQ folks.

Trolling is a clear example of a lack of empathy – and it’s the anonymity of the internet that enables the trolls to do their nasty work. It’s one of the downsides of technology where empathy is concerned – it amplifies its absence in our society.

Social empathy helps create a better world.

In 2016, a shocking video of a five-year-old boy being rescued from a bombed building in Aleppo, Syria, went viral. It was viewed by millions and gave rise to strong feelings. For a lot of people, those feelings included pain and fear for the boy and imagining what it must be like for him.

But for many others, the concern went further. They might have wondered what life was like for a child in a city ravaged by war, how all the other groups were experiencing it, and the social and political reasons for the violence.

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Worum geht es in Social Empathy?

Social Empathy (2018) shows how we can widen our sense of empathy and extend it not just to individuals who are different from us, but to entire social and cultural groups. It explains the ways we’re able to not just imagine what it’s like to be another person, but also consider the historical and political factors that have made them who they are, which increases our ability to be more empathetic. It also explores the barriers that block empathy – like stress and fear of otherness – and the steps we can take to overcome them.

Wer Social Empathy lesen sollte

Compassionate people who’d like to become more empathetic
Psychology enthusiasts curious about how empathy works
Fighters for social justice interested in understanding the role of empathy in social change

Über den Autor

Elizabeth A. Segal is a professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University. She is the author of Social Welfare Policy and Social Programs: A Values Perspective and coauthor of Assessing Empathy.

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