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Podcast Episode Summary: The Science of Empathy, with Stanford Professor Jamil Zaki
Podcast Title: Afford Anything Episode Number: 456 Host: Paula Pant Guest: Stanford Professor Jamil Zaki Date: [Date not provided]
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Overview
In this episode, Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki discusses the science of empathy and its critical role in improving relationships across various domains such as business, investing, and personal interactions. With an emphasis on the malleability of empathy, Zaki advocates for developing this skill through intentional practice and understanding.
Key Themes
- Empathy as a Skill: Zaki emphasizes that empathy is not a fixed trait but a skill that can be cultivated.
- Psychological Mobility vs. Fixism: The discussion contrasts two perspectives:
- Fixism: The belief that traits like empathy are unchangeable.
- Psychological Mobility: The understanding that people can grow and develop their capacity for empathy.
- The Role of Mirror Neurons: Zaki highlights how mirror neurons in our brains respond to others' actions, indicating that empathy can have biological underpinnings and can change with experience.
- Moral Engagement vs. Disengagement: The episode explores how individuals can either engage with empathy or choose to disengage, often leading to dehumanization in conflicts.
Detailed Insights
Empathy as a Developable Skill
- Experiments and Research: Zaki discusses studies indicating that regular empathy-enhancing practices, such as loving-kindness meditation, can physically change the brain, enhancing empathy-related functions.
- Empathy and Decision Making: The importance of empathy in professional settings is emphasized as it leads to better relationships and decision-making outcomes.
Understanding Polarization
- Tribalism and Black-and-White Thinking: Zaki identifies how polarization creates divisive attitudes that inhibit empathy.
- Strategies for Overcoming Division:
- Emphasizing commonalities rather than differences.
- Understanding individual narratives rather than reducing people to single traits.
The Manchester United Study
- Tribal Identity and Empathy: The study illustrates how individuals are more likely to help those who share their specific tribal identity (e.g., sports fans) but are less likely to help others outside that identity.
- Broader Identities: Encouraging identification with larger groups can increase empathy across divides.
Practical Applications
- Building Empathy in the Workplace: Zaki provides actionable strategies for fostering empathy in professional environments, such as:
- Encouraging curiosity about colleagues’ experiences.
- Recognizing and addressing competitive mindsets that can inhibit collaboration.
Key Takeaways
- Minds Are Malleable: Empathy is a skill that can be developed, and understanding this opens possibilities for personal growth and improved relationships.
- Overcoming Dehumanization: Recognizing the mechanisms of moral disengagement allows individuals to actively cultivate empathy by considering the complexities of others’ experiences.
- Finding Common Ground: By focusing on broader identities rather than narrow affiliations, individuals can foster empathy and connection among diverse groups.
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Conclusion
This episode of the Afford Anything podcast offers valuable insights into the science of empathy and its applicability in everyday interactions and professional relationships. Jamil Zaki’s research provides evidence that empathy is both a skill and a critical component of effective communication and collaboration in a polarized world.
For more details, visit the [Afford Anything show notes](https://affordanything.com/episode456).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You know, in the world of money and investing, it can be easy to the point of tribal about your beliefs. Either you're part of the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early. Either you're part of it or you hate it, you hate it, you hate it, right? That's an actual quote famously stated by Susie Orman on this show. And likewise, either you embrace credit cards as a route to getting airline rewards and travel hacking, or you follow the Dave Ramsey camp and believe that you shouldn't touch them because if you play with snakes, you might get bit. people have very fervent beliefs about money, and money is an emotionally charged topic, this can sometimes sow the seeds of discord or division.
0:46And if this happens when we're arguing about personal finance philosophy, imagine how much worse it gets in other arenas of life. To discuss this and to discuss how we can develop greater empathy for people who believe differently, think differently. We've invited the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, Jamil Zaki, to join us on today's show. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands that you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make carries a trade-off. So what matters most? And how do you make decisions accordingly? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice.
1:28That's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the show, and I am thrilled today to introduce to you Stanford psychology professor, Jamil Zaki, who shares with us cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab that demonstrate, first, that empathy is not a fixed trait. It's not something that we're born with, but rather a skill that can be strengthened and through effort, and who share stories of how we can increase empathy so that we can have better relationships with colleagues, clients, co-workers, collaborators, with all the people in the world of business and investing whom we need to interact with on a daily basis, but who may have a very different vantage point than ours.
2:22With that said, here he is, Professor Jamil Zaki. Hi, Jamil. Hi, it's great to meet you. Thank you so much. It's great to have you on the show. You write about building empathy in a world that is increasingly fractured. And I think it's easy to see how in broader society we've become hyper-polarized. and that can often bleed into the way that we interact in business, the way that we interact with our tenants, those of us who are landlords, the way that we interact with customers, those of us who are business owners. I wanted to bring you on to talk about how to be a bit more empathic. And let's start with the notion of, is that even possible?
3:11You write about psychological mobility. Can you describe what that is? Yeah, thanks, Paula. I think it's a really great place to begin because I think that so many people in business and in really the rest of life have noticed that it feels harder to connect with people than it used to for lots of reasons that we maybe can get into from polarization to loneliness to stress and anxiety. And so a question becomes, is there any way for us to reconnect, to regain the lost art of empathy? Are we in control of how much we empathize or not? And for the longest time, people thought, well, no, you can't really change how empathic you are, because it's just an inborn, immutable characteristic.
3:57Some people are born with empathy, some people are less lucky, and that's kind of the way it is. And in fact, I've surveyed lots of people in my research and I ask them, do you think that empathy is an immutable trait or something that you can change? And about 50%, about half the population, thinks that it's unchangeable. And that's what we could call a fixist perspective, right? The idea that what matters about us kind of doesn't change. And there's sort of a reassurance in that because you can kind of say, well, I know who I am and who I always will be. And I know who you are and who you always will be.
4:32But it turns out that if you look at the data, things are different. In fact, people change a lot more than we realize. And part of the reason that we don't realize that change is happening is because it's slow. You know, I have small children and to me, they're the same size every day. But when my parents see them, they say, my goodness, you're like twice as tall as you were the last time I saw you. That change is happening slowly. When I see my kids, they seem the same because I see them all the time. When you have a longer time horizon, you can see that change. Well, we don't see anybody as frequently as ourselves.
5:07And so change in ourselves is almost invisible because it happens at a time landscape that we can't see. And yet it does happen. So we change in terms of our intelligence, in terms of our personalities over the course of our lives, and we change in terms of how empathic we are. And that's what I call a mobilist view of empathy. The idea that, in fact, these deep parts about who we are, including our ability to connect with others, can change and that we can control that change and try to become more effective at empathizing when we want to. You write about how there are mirror neurons that fire in the brain.
5:48And this happens not just in humans, but in other primates as well. That's evidence of empathic responses in primate studies. And you can describe this far better than I can. If we observe somebody else eating, the same neurons will fire in our brain because we can relate to that other person that we are observing or that other primate that we are observing. How does that play into the fixists versus mobilists framework? Does our brain chemistry actually change as we become more empathic? It does. Yes. And this is a really great place to go in this conversation because I do think that there's a stereotype that we have culturally that if something happens in our brain, that means it's quote unquote hardwired.
6:39That is a phrase, I don't know, Paula, have you heard that description before? We're hardwired to be this way or that way. If there's anything that I hope your listeners could take away from this conversation right off the bat, it's to remove the word hardwired from your vocabulary because the brain is an incredibly adaptive organ. It changes in response to our experience. So for instance, if you play guitar for 10 years, the part of your brain that controls your fret hand, the hand that's sort of figuring out what chords you're going to play, will grow in volume compared to somebody who doesn't play the guitar, right?
7:17So we have this stereotype that if something happens in the brain, and especially if, as you rightly say, non-human animals show a particular brain function, well, it must be just an immutable, again, an unchangeable part of who we are. Actually, the opposite is true, right? Everything happens in our brain, and yet we change. And when we change, our brain does as well. So there's one study that I love that came out of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They had people engage in different types of meditation that are supposed to, according to ancient traditions in Buddhism, enhance our capacity for empathy.
7:57This is what's known as meta or loving kindness meditation. People have been doing this for thousands of years. So it's not like monks need neuroscientists to tell them that it works. But these neuroscientists nonetheless had people engage in loving kindness meditation every day for a nine month period of time. And they scanned their brains both before and after they did this meditation program. And they found that indeed people who did meta for a period of nine months became more empathic in all these measurable ways. They gave more money to other people. They understood other people's emotions more accurately, and they expressed more care for other people.
8:39But the really powerful finding is that these people's brains also changed. Parts of their brain that are engaged in this kind of mirroring process and parts of the brain associated in our capacity to understand what's happening with others, those regions of the brain grew in thickness, cortical thickness, after people had meditated. And individuals who had the greatest change in their brain also had the greatest change in their capacity for empathy. So again, the ways that we change at a human level mirror the ways that we change at a biological level. Moral disengagement and dehumanization seems like the path that a person can take if they intentionally want to not be empathic towards somebody else.
9:28So for example, if you are suing somebody and you know that you need to go on the war path, you might adopt a thought pattern of dehumanizing your opponent, dehumanizing the person that you're suing so that you can be brutal in the courtroom. I've had that happen. What is the opposite of that? What is moral engagement? How does a person become actively develop a thought pattern in which they become more empathic other than loving kindness meditation, which I think most people are not realistically going to do? No, it's a great point. Most of us are not going to do hours and hours of meditation for a year, right?
10:08I love that question because you point to something really profound. Empathy is under our control and it can change. That doesn't mean that we change always to be more empathic. There are experiences that can atrophy or weaken our empathy, or there are cases in which we might actually want to turn it down on purpose, right? As you're talking about in a lawsuit, you might not want to be that empathic. A linebacker in a football game doesn't want to feel the pain of somebody that they're tackling or else they'd never be able to do their job. You know, think about a surgeon. If they felt the pain of somebody, you know, or they imagined pain that somebody could feel when they were incising, that would get in the way of their job as well.
10:49And there are all sorts of cases in which you get this disengagement when people have to do a job or have to do something, and in the course of their actions, they have to cause suffering, or they feel like they have to cause suffering to another person. And in those cases, we can try to downshift our empathy, or we can even reverse it. Poker players, competitive athletes, often try to psych each other out, try to create distress in another person as a strategic approach to winning the game. Now, you asked, well, what's the opposite of that? Well, I think that it's a great exercise to consider all the things you do when you have to shut down your empathy.
11:31So like in a lawsuit, for instance, and then imagine what the opposite of that would be. So to turn it around to you, Paula, you mentioned that you had had a situation where you sort of had to turn down your empathy. What did you do in order to turn down your empathy? Oh, no, no. It was the opposite. I could tell that the other person had developed this attitude towards me. He was the plaintiff. And the way that I could tell that that was happening is that he had constructed a narrative. It was a very black and white narrative in which he had cast himself as a saint. And he had cast me as a complete villain.
12:10He built this narrative. And by virtue of being able to villainize me, he then felt absolutely no empathy. In fact, he felt justified, righteous in trying to squeeze as much as he possibly could, because it should all be his. Yes. Well, first of all, I'm sorry that you went through that. That sounds really stressful. Second, let's take what this person did and reverse it because this person was following a recipe for dehumanization. This is a recipe that people have followed, for instance, propagandists for a really long time. If you want to generate hatred, if you want to shut off empathy, there are a couple of things you can do.
12:51One, think in very black and white terms, good and evil, right and wrong. Second, reduce people to just one part of their identity, right? Somebody who's in the out group or somebody who's on the other side of a conflict, they're not anything except the villain in that story, right? So black and white thinking, and then reducing people's identity. Those are two really powerful ways to shut off empathy. Now, what would it look like if we did the opposite? Well, I guess we would be thinking in shades of gray, right? We would be thinking instead not about one person's right and the other's wrong, but how did this situation arise?
13:30What role did each person play? What motives does each person have? And why did they act the way that they did, right? Not just thinking about the outcome, but thinking about how somebody got there, trying to get inside their mind. That would be one step towards reversing what happened with this plaintiff and what happens with all sorts of people who disengage emotionally and morally. A second step would be to refuse to reduce a person to one part of their identity. We see this all the time in intergroup conflict. If somebody is a different race from ourselves, a different generation from ourselves, or a different ideology from ourselves, it's so easy to just say, that person is, you know, add insert label here, And that's all that they are.
14:17When instead we say, well, who are they really? Maybe they're also a Mormon and a tuba player and an Ohio State football fan. When you add complexity to somebody's story, when you try to get to know their idiosyncrasies, category style thinking falls apart. You recognize that nobody can be reduced to just one part of who they are. And when we start seeing each other in rich, individualized terms, that type of disengagement becomes almost impossible and empathy becomes more natural. What would you say to someone? And I see this comment on social media from time to time to someone who says, essentially, I don't want to not be reductive because the fact that this person believes X and just to use an apolitical, the fact that this person believes that crunchy peanut butter is better than creamy peanut butter.
15:15And that is so against my value system that I simply cannot look past that and I cannot support anybody who believes in crunchy peanut butter over creamy. Well, I would say as a fan of crunchy peanut butter that I don't want to engage with this person either, this hypothetical person. It reminds me of, isn't there a, I can't remember if it's a Dr. Seuss book or what, it's like, it's a war between two groups of people, one of whom butters their toast on one side. Do you remember that book? I think so. It sounds vaguely familiar. I can't quite place it, but yes. These two communities that they literally go to war because they can't decide which side is better to butter toast on.
15:58But anyways, I think that there are many cases in which people make the conscious choice to shut off their empathy in the face of conflict. Maybe because they say, well, I don't feel safe around a crunchy peanut butter fan. Or maybe because they say, I don't respect and can never engage with a crunchy peanut butter fan. It's just a total waste of time. And to that, I would say everyone's autonomous and can make those choices. Nobody owes empathy to anybody else. That said, I have found over and over again, both in research and in stories that my readers tell me and in the world of personal life and business, that when we try to challenge ourselves a little bit more, try to be curious about somebody, even if it's not our first instinct, we can be astonished by what comes of that.
16:54We can be astonished by the person we find underneath this divide, right? We can be astonished by all we have in common. We can be astonished by the opportunities that we find. I mean, one example of this is the great musician and activist, Daryl Davis, a blues musician from the South, a black man who has befriended hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members and gotten them to renounce white supremacy. How does he do it? Just by making that personal connection. And again, no one owes people that, right? There are many people in Daryl Davis's situation who would not want to engage with folks from that group, but it's just astonishing what he's accomplished.
17:39And that's a very extreme example, but there are so many cases in which just connecting, just making the choice to be curious, opens all sorts of doors that remain invisible to us otherwise. Right. And that reminds me, can you describe Gordon Allport and the contact theory? Yeah. Allport is one of the great psychologists of the 20th century. And he wrote a book called The Psychology of Prejudice. And he was wondering, you know, again, sort of like what we're talking about now, why do people write each other off so easily? Why do we have so much prejudice in our hearts. And he came up with a very simple and profound idea, which is maybe we just don't know each other well enough.
18:16Maybe if we got to know people who are different from us, then we would naturally open up and our prejudice would fall away. And he studied this in members of the military, soldiers in the army. This was back in sort of around the era of World War II. And there were some platoons that were integrated where black and white soldiers served alongside one another. And some white soldiers were part of those integrated platoons and some were not. It wasn't their choice. It was kind of like an experiment that the army conducted without knowing that they were conducting an experiment. And so Alport said, well, let me take advantage of that.
18:51And he asked these white soldiers, how do you feel about integration? Do you think that black and white people should work together, should serve together? And white soldiers who had only been in white platoons basically said, no, I don't think there should be integration. But white soldiers who had been part of integrated platoons said, overwhelmingly, I think it was 90 % of them said, yes, I support integration in the army and beyond. So it was just getting to know people who are different from themselves that reduce their prejudice in this profound way. And it turns out that one of the reasons for that is empathy, is that when we connect with one person, form a real deep relationship with somebody who's from a different group than ourselves.
19:36Again, whether it's race or generation or ideology, whatever group you want to, or peanut butter preference, whatever you want to say, that when you make that connection, you feel empathy for that person. And the empathy that you feel for that person is like a keyhole that then opens the door for empathy and understanding of their entire group. and then that opens you up to having less prejudice towards others who are different from yourself. Right. Can you explain, what is the Roddenberry hypothesis? Well, so you're outing me now, Paula, as a giant nerd, which is, I mean, I guess that's probably already evident to your listeners, but I love Star Trek and in particular Star Trek The Next Generation.
20:23It gets back to this question that you had about fixism and mobilism. The idea that empathy is a fixed characteristic to me, even before I knew what empathy was when I was a kid watching Star Trek, there were two characters on that show, one of whom Deanna Troi was this like Betazoid, I think was the planet that she came from. And she was completely empathic and couldn't shut it off. She was just utterly empathic and it was in her genes to be so. And there was this other character, Data, who is an android, who was far less empathic because he just didn't have it in his programming. And that was the idea that we're hardwired either by genes or in Data's case, literally are wiring to be empathic or not.
21:07And that's the hypothesis that I had when I was a kid from being a sci-fi fan and one that I've had a lot of fun rejecting now that I know a lot more about the science. Got it. So again, it goes back to it's not hardwired. And then if we take on Allport's contact theory, the more exposure that we have to people with different viewpoints, different ideologies, you know, in among the listeners to this podcast, the more exposure we have to people who like actively managed mutual funds instead of passively managed index funds. Maybe we'll always disagree, but we will eventually come around to seeing actively managed mutual fund managers as people too.
21:46But isn't that also a little bit of a trope? There's that trope of like, I have no problem with crunchy peanut butter eaters. Some of my best friends are crunchy. It's a bit of a cultural trope, right? Of a person hasn't actually worked on that. They just have their token crunchy peanut butter eating friend. That's true. That's actually a really good point. And there are many cases in which contact doesn't work the way that Alport thought that it should. There's no single technique that will open people up and make them more empathic in every case. And there are lots of cases in which, especially in these intergroup contexts, instead of a connection with one crunchy peanut butter fan opening me up to the entire group, I do what's called exemptions.
22:33I basically say, this person, because I like them, I'm actually removing them from the category in my mind. I'm saying they're one of the good crunchy fans, right? But all the rest of them, I can still hold my stereotypes about. So that's absolutely a risk. And again, why there's not one magic way to increase empathy. But I think that if in addition to that external work of forming friendships and connecting with people, we also combine that with inner work and kind of saying, okay, let me be curious about this individual. And what is that curiosity teaching me? You know, are my stereotypes really, do they hold water when I put them under a stress test of getting to know real people?
23:16Or maybe do I have to think harder about what people are like? Right. I'm thinking right now about the workplace and about divisions in the workplace that can occur among different groups or factions of people. particularly in an increasingly polarized world, divisions that start to form based around ideology, based around shared group characteristics, in-group and out-group characteristics, right? It can happen among colleagues who share the same workplace setting. It can happen among people who are employed by different agencies, but who work together on a joint project that is done by different companies.
24:03Within that context, how do we start to apply? I mean, we can do the internalized work of applying this. How do we encourage others to also take on the same? Yeah, it's such an important question. And I do a lot of training and coaching with organizations to build their empathy. And I find there to be two really critical steps here. One is to establish the business case for empathy. I think a lot of what we've been talking about so far, growing our empathy, growing our care, connecting better with people. I think that folks understand that that's a great goal in their personal lives. But I think a lot of folks have stereotypes that, well, maybe at work, that's not as useful, right?
24:46Because it's a dog-eat-dog world and I have to make a choice. Am I going to go in and try to get what's mine? Or am I going to roll over and let everybody else take what they want? There's this almost intrinsically competitive mindset that we often take in the workplace, ironically, not just against our competitors in a market, but sometimes against our co-workers, right? As you're saying, if our company has different divisions or even on a team, if managers are engaged in an incentive structure, like rank and yank, where some people are rewarded and others are punished and they're all directly compared against each other, there are all sorts of cases where people start to feel like their workplace is zero-sum.
25:31And if you think that you're locked in zero-sum competition with either your client or your co-worker, well, then empathy turns into a fool's errand in a way. Unfortunately, that's, well, I don't know whether it's unfortunate. Fortunately, that's completely backwards, It turns out that there's all sorts of evidence that a lack of empathy, an overly competitive mindset in the workplace, actually is not just bad for things that you would imagine is bad for mental health, loyalty, engagement in the workplace. It's also bad for productivity and innovation. so when you have people either in teams or across divisions taking on an unempathic competitive mindset they do things like knowledge hoarding not sharing information or skills with other people even people on their own teams because they don't want to lose out in the competition they end up in what's known as lose-lose negotiations where they assume the worst about their interaction partner about their negotiation partner so they both end up with an outcome that neither one would want.
26:42And when you get a disengaged, sort of burnt out workforce, you also lose productivity. So there's all sorts of ways that that competitive mindset has failed workplaces. And there are all sorts of ways that building an empathic mindset is a win-win. So I think that the first point for leaders and for workplaces is just to establish that. And then And the second comes to how do we build those skills? There are all sorts of little nudges that I've tried out successfully in workplaces. So little exercises like taking a conversation that you know is coming up. And before you have that conversation, write down three things about the other person that you're curious about that you wanna learn.
27:24How's their week going? Where are they at right now emotionally? What are their motivations for the project that you're working on? What do they care most about? And what could they use help with? Just write down three questions that you want the answers to and make that curiosity the foundation for your conversations. I found that in workplaces all over the world, actually, companies I've worked with, just these little nudges and prompts to engage with curiosity can revolutionize our interactions in the workplace.
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32:30You've written and studied tribalism and how that in some ways is quote unquote natural to humans, right? the more that we are inclined to protect our own. And that necessarily means seeing a division between us and them. And you've actually also talked about a Good Samaritan study based around sports jerseys, which I would love for you to describe. Yeah, this is one of my favorite studies of all time. So in the study that you're talking about, which is about tribalism of a sort, researchers recruited gigantic, rabid fans of the team Manchester United. soccer team in the UK. And they asked them to write about why they loved Manchester United so much.
33:15And then they told them, great, thanks for doing that. We're going to now have you walk across campus. This was on a college campus. And you're going to watch some footage of Manchester United playing. They thought, great, cool. They started walking. And as they were walking, they saw a jogger apparently twist their ankle and fall to the ground, writhing in pain. The jogger, in fact, was an actor. And the experimenters had planted the actor there to see how this Manchester United fan would react to them. Would they help or not? The trick was that sometimes the jogger wore a Manchester United jersey, and other times the jogger was wearing a Liverpool jersey, Liverpool being, at that time, the hated rival of Manchester United.
33:57And these researchers found that Manchester United fans rushed in to help. the jogger if the person was wearing the Man U jersey. But if the person was wearing the Liverpool jersey, I think it was only 20 % of them helped, meaning that 80 % of them basically stepped over this poor jogger as he lay in the fetal position on the ground. And that's classic tribalism, that when we, again, see each other through the lens of categories, then it's very easy to shut down our humanity and ignore other people's humanity. The thing that I really love about that study is that they ran it again. But this time, they brought new Manchester United fans in.
34:38And instead of asking them to write about why they like Manchester United, they said, write about why you like soccer so much, why it's such a beautiful game. And they found that people who wrote about themselves, not as Manchester United fans, but as soccer fans, were more willing to help not only Man U fans, but also Liverpool fans. So we all belong to different tribes, but some of those tribes are bigger than others. So when we can think of ourselves as belonging to a bigger tribe, you know, like I could be, I could think of myself as a Stanford person, you know, UC Berkeley is my big enemy.
35:14But if I think of myself as a Californian or an American, as we think of ourselves through broader identities, more people enter our tribe and more people can receive our empathy. How do you square that with the fact that people naturally, very overtly and very consciously say, hey, I want to help people in my own community. So I want to help other Ohioans, or I want to help people from Lithuania, or I want to help other Christians. People very consciously make the choice that they want to target their aid or their efforts at members of their own group. That strikes me as fine, but how do you balance the two?
36:01Yeah, what you're talking about, I think the philosopher Peter Singer would call circles of care or circles of concern. We each have different circles, some of which are small, where a lot of our care goes, right? So our immediate family members, we probably care more about our immediate family members than we do about total strangers. And again, I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. Then you have a second circle, maybe your extended family, then your friends and neighbors. And you kind of have these different circles sort of emanating out. Singer says if you want to extend your circle of care, there are also things that you can do.
36:38when there's a disaster that gets covered a lot in the news. Even if you're thousands of miles away from where that disaster occurs, you might be moved to care more about those folks than you would otherwise. And in general, attention is a great form of love and is a great pathway to empathy. So when we tap in to the experiences of others, we find that we have a lot in common with them and our circle grows to include them. I don't think there's a right way to do this. With some issues, we might want to have a greater circle of care. We might want to invite strangers into that circle. And with others, we might not.
37:20But I want your listeners to know that it's kind of up to us. It is under our control. And so if you want to extend or shrink your circle, then that's kind of a choice you can make. What I hear in the Manchester United versus Liverpool study is that the way that that circle was expanded was people found what they shared, what they had in common, both Manchester United and Liverpool fans, what they share in common is a love for soccer. Yes. Or as they call it, football. Exactly. And I think that's one of the things that we can do in lots of cases. If there's somebody who you feel really different from at work, in your friendships, in your life, one of the things that you can do is say, well, what's something that we have in common?
38:03What's something that we share? As opposed to only focusing on what is different about us. Can you talk about untethering, the concept of engaging in fantasy, reading fiction, you know, using your imagination a little bit more? How does that help in these exercises? Yeah, I mean, I think it gets back to this idea that empathy is in part this mirroring that you talked about, Paula, right? That it's this kind of brain-based, wow, you're in pain. I feel that. Part of empathy is this emotional resonance with other people. But there's another part of empathy, which is imagination, our ability to travel into what reality might feel like to somebody else.
38:51And that includes people whose lives are totally different from ours. And that type of imagination is also something that we can work on and develop. And it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to do that is through engagement with storytelling. One of the most ancient things that people have done as a species is sit around a fire telling stories, whether they were epic poems in the days of the ancient Greeks or now that we tell each other stories. We are just a storytelling species. And that side of us, whether those stories are fictional or non-fictional, often is relegated to the margins, right?
39:26We sometimes say, oh, that's for fun. That's a form of entertainment. I don't think we realize how much that's actually training for the most fundamental skills that we need in all parts of our lives, which is tapping in to other people's experiences. So in my lab, for instance, we've studied the effects of attending theater on people's empathy. And we find that after people attend a play versus before, they experience what psychologists would call narrative transportation. The story is so immersive that it actually takes them mentally to a place they haven't been before. And to the extent that they feel this narrative transportation, they also feel great empathy for real people who have something in common with the folks who are in the play.
40:13So if it's a play about people in Detroit who are suffering from economic fallout, if you see a play about that, well, your narrative transportation, your immersion in that story increases your empathy for real Detroiters who are struggling economically and makes it more likely that you want to help them. Right, right. And even if it's pure fiction or pure fantasy, I mean, I think Game of Thrones is a great example of feeling like you can relate to these characters who live in an imaginary world in the closest analog that we have to it would have been a time of hundreds of years ago. And it sort of, to use that cliche, brings that history to life a little bit.
40:57Yeah. And one of the powerful things about that is that here's a narrative that has so little to do with our lives on the surface, right? I don't know about you. I don't have any dragons. I would love one, but I don't have one. I don't live in that time or in that place. It really has nothing to do with me. And yet, I think that you encounter human universals in those stories. Fear, greed, competition, love, sacrifice, honor, right? These are things that exist in all of us. And it's almost more powerful seeing it in a context that has very little to do with your day-to-day life, because you can access just how universal those experiences are.
41:44Right. Right. You wrote a sentence that I found to be very powerful. I actually, I wanted to read it out loud. It speaks to kind of the outrage bait that we often see. You said, quote, among angsty adolescents, it's easy for bullies, social climbers and mean girls to dominate conversations. Like hard-drinking college freshmen or cable news anchors, these extreme voices can crowd out the majority. And as soon as I read that, I started thinking about some just engagement bait posts that I've been seeing on social media lately. Stuff that's so outrageous that I look at it and I think, I don't think they even actually believe this.
42:30I think it's just engagement bait. How, in a world where the algorithm favors outrage, do we swim upstream? It's a very timely question. We do have to swim upstream. I want to be really clear that since my book came out in 2019, things have gotten a lot worse in that regard. There's more acceleration of outrage and engagement baiting, as you rightly put it, online. And algorithms favor that type of content even more than they used to and in even more precise ways than they used to. There's a psychologist at Northwestern, William Brady, who's been studying Twitter a lot. And he finds that people are rewarded on Twitter for tweeting in outrage, especially against people who are different from themselves.
43:19and they're rewarded with likes and retweets from people who already agree with them. And to the extent that people receive this reward and reinforcement, they're more likely to act even more outraged in subsequent posts. William has also surveyed people right after they tweet, and he asks them, how much outrage do you feel right now? And then looks at their tweets and asks people who read them, how much outrage do you think this person feels? To your point, Paul, you were saying that you wonder, does this person even feel what they're saying? The answer is no. People tweet in ways that are so emotional, even when, and then when you ask them, how do you feel?
43:58They're like, I'm fine. You know, but they're doing this because it's performative in a way often. And yet it's stirring up this false, what I call a phantom norm, a social norm that feels like it's all around us, but actually isn't. So people are pretending to be outraged when they're not. Well, guess what? Viewers of all those tweets or posts now think the world is a cauldron of outrage. And if they want to fit in, they have to take part, that that's the only way to engage or get engagement, as you were noting. And honestly, on some platforms, they might be right. And that's really tragic. I think it's just so important for us to do a couple of different things.
44:41One is, as we're engaging online, as we're experiencing life online, to really do an internal audit of ourselves. Is this experience what I want to be having? Is this fulfilling? Am I getting value out of this? And also, when you see somebody's post, ask, why is this person doing this? Do they really believe this? Or is this just what the algorithm is sort of stirring up in all of us? And then I think we can be really mindful about how we show up online, that algorithms favor and sort of stand in resistance to it by engaging in other ways. I'm not saying that that will fix the algorithms, but we don't have to succumb to them either.
45:25You've written about how VR can help you literally step inside somebody else's reality, you know, and VR and AR, especially with Apple's little augmented reality headwear. As these technologies emerge, how will these technologies or will these technologies help diminish polarization, help us empathize more with our colleagues, with our clients, with our tenants, with our communities. Yeah, I think these technologies can be very powerful to understand what it's like to be on the other side. You can imagine all sorts of VR simulations where if you're on one team and somebody is on another, you sort of get the picture of what it's like to be them.
46:09So I think that these technologies can be powerful tools when people want to empathize, right? If you already have the motivation to understand somebody else, technology can help. I think that one thing that I want to be really clear on is that technology isn't a replacement for that motivation. I mean, imagine having a VR simulation where you could understand what your tenant is going through. Do you think that every landlord would want to put that headset on? I don't know. Maybe some would and maybe some wouldn't. So there's two steps, really. One is to understand that you want to feel empathy.
46:46And then the other is to get the data and information that can help you have that fuller experience of empathy. So I think that technology can help with the second step, but can't replace the first. And that's why I think it's so powerful and important to tell people how beneficial empathy can be in their lives, to create that motivation, that push to get them to do whatever it takes, whether it's forming new friendships, becoming curious, asking better questions, or using technology that actually helps them enhance and grow that empathy. Do you think will the availability and ease of those types of technologies and just enhanced communication in general, will that availability fuel motivation at an aggregate level?
47:33I don't know. People used to say that about social media. That was supposed to be the technology that was going to save us all and connect us in a global community of care. And I think that one could argue that those technologies have done the opposite, right? I think that technology, I'm pretty agnostic on the sort of moral valence of technology and on its role in our psychological lives. I think that it can do great good and enormous harm as well. And it's really about the way that people use it and the way that those platforms are created. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Is there anything that I haven't asked that you'd like to emphasize.
48:12There's one thing on the kind of social media, angsty, outraged communication that I want to add. I told you that William Brady found that people often act more outraged than they really are. I think that there is something positive hidden underneath that. I often ask people two questions. One, how much do you value empathy? And then how much do you think the average person in your community values empathy, again, whether it's a school or a hospital or a workplace. And almost irrespective of where I do this, I find the same pattern. Individuals say, I value empathy enormously. And then they think that the average person in their workplace, for instance, values it a lot less.
48:58Now, the true answer is what people are saying about themselves. The phantom norm is what they think the average person there believes. So I often show people at companies, I say, on average, look around you, the people in your workplace really want this to be an empathic organization. And the people here don't realize that everybody else feels the same way. I think that there's this hidden hunger for care. I think that people feel sometimes that in a polarized, stressed out world, that they're the only ones who want to empathize and everybody else is sick of it or doesn't have time. I think that a lot of good could come from us seeing each other more clearly and understanding how much the people around us actually want to connect.
49:48Well, thank you for sharing that. Where can people find you if they'd like to hear more of your ideas? Well, my book is called The War for Kindness and can get it anywhere. My lab is the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. And I'm working on a new book right now on finding hope in cynical times. That book will be out next year. And I have a TED Talk on the same topic that came out recently as well. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Paula.
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53:09Thank you, Professor Zaki. What are three key takeaways that we got from this interview? Number one, minds are malleable. Half of the population thinks that the ability to empathize is unchangeable, that it's fixed. But that's not the case. People can change. But it turns out that if you look at the data, things are different. In fact, people change a lot more than we realize. And part of the reason that we don't realize that change is happening is because it's slow. I have small children, and to me, they're the same size every day. But when my parents see them, they say, my goodness, you're like twice as tall as you were the last time I saw you, right?
53:50That change is happening slowly. When I see my kids, they seem the same because I see them all the time. When you have a longer time horizon, you can see that change. Well, we don't see anybody as frequently as ourselves. And so change in ourselves is almost invisible because it happens at a time landscape that we can't see, and yet it does happen. There are two types of mindsets. A fixed mindset in which you believe that traits, attributes are fixed. You are who you are, you have what you have. And then there's a growth mindset in which you believe that with sufficient effort, anything, including what we believe to be our own nature, is changeable.
54:36that the power of being human is that we get to decide how we think, how we feel, how we react. The research shows that empathy is a skill and it can be developed. And those who do develop it are likely to have healthier, more harmonious relationships across all arenas of life, including at work, in the business that you're starting, in your side hustle, in the investment property portfolio that you're growing, in everything that we do. So that's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, Dr. Zaki outlines how we become more divisive and how we dehumanize. And once we learn that, once we know how it is that we become that reactive, we can choose to do the opposite.
55:26Black and white thinking and then reducing people's identity. Those are two really powerful ways to shut off empathy. Now, what would it look like if we did the opposite? Well, I guess we would be thinking in shades of gray, right? We would be thinking instead not about one person's right and the other's wrong, but how did this situation arise? What role did each person play? What motives does each person have? And why did they act the way that they did? Not just thinking about the outcome, but thinking about how somebody got there, trying to get inside their mind. That would be one step towards reversing what happened with this plaintiff and what happens with all sorts of people who disengage emotionally and morally.
56:09A second step would be to refuse to reduce a person to one part of their identity. We see this all the time in intergroup conflict. If somebody is a different race from ourselves, a different generation from ourselves, or a different ideology from ourselves, it's so easy to just say, that person is, add insert label here. I often hear friends conversationally reduce a person to one part of their identity, that reductive thinking. Oh, I don't like so-and-so because they believe in X. And that thing that they believe in, that variable X, is so abhorrent to me that I cannot see past that. And that merely exacerbates intergroup conflict, which is a detriment to everyone.
57:02And if there are relationships that you need to build, that reductive thinking is harmful. Dr. Zaki outlines how it is that we dehumanize others. And by clarifying that, we then know how to do the opposite. So that is key takeaway number two. Finally, key takeaway number three. The Manchester United study showed that people find it easier to unite over large categories of identity, like being soccer fans. But when focused on smaller facets of identity, like Man U versus Liverpool, more tribal and divisive behaviors take place. And that goes beyond mere sports fan trash talking. That actually extends into whether or not you would help an injured person, a physically injured person.
57:57That extends into good Samaritan behavior. These researchers found that Manchester United fans were rushed in to help the jogger if the person was wearing the Man U jersey. But if the person was wearing the Liverpool jersey, I think it was only 20 % of them helped, meaning that 80 % of them basically stepped over this poor jogger as he lay in the fetal position on the ground. And that's classic tribalism, right? That when we, again, see each other through the lens of categories, then it's very easy to shut down our humanity and ignore other people's humanity. The thing that I really love about that study is that they ran it again.
58:40But this time, They brought new Manchester United fans in, and instead of asking them to write about why they like Manchester United, they said, write about why you like soccer so much, why it's such a beautiful game. And they found that people who wrote about themselves, not as Manchester United fans, but as soccer fans, were more willing to help not only Man U fans, but also Liverpool fans. So we all belong to different tribes, but some of those tribes are bigger than others. As we think of ourselves through broader identities, more people enter our tribe and more people can receive our empathy.
59:19The significance of this study is that it demonstrates how finding commonalities is an effective path to increasing empathy, as well as increasing belonging and community. And so when you find yourself virulently disliking someone because they're cheering for Liverpool instead of for Manchester United, or vice versa, remember that at the end of the day, we're all soccer fans, or as they call it, football. And so those are three takeaways from this conversation with Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki, the director of Stanford's Social Neuroscience Laboratory and the author of The War for Kindness.
1:00:03Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I hope it made you think. I hope it shed some insight. If you liked it, please share it with a friend, a neighbor, a colleague. sharing this podcast is the single most important thing that you can do to help spread the message of good financial health. You can subscribe to our show notes at affordanything.com slash show notes. And we have a course on rental property investing. It's called Your First Rental Property. That course will be open for enrollment September 5, September 5, 2023. If you are interested in learning more, go to affordanything.com slash VIP list.
1:00:43affordanything.com slash VIP list. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode.
From the publisher
#456: Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki shares his research and findings around the science of empathy – and how we can apply this to improving our relationships with colleagues, clients, customers, co-founders, and business and investing cohorts.
Zaki is the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and the author of “The War For Kindness.”
We'll break down the science. We talk about why empathy matters in business, investments, and in career growth, and we’ll discuss its digital age dynamics. How does AI impact the way in which we relate to others?
If you want to learn the science of emotional intelligence, and how to apply this to your career and business interactions, you’ll learn a lot from today’s episode.
Enjoy!
For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode456
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