The 3 types of empathy that move the world

empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, It is the foundation of interpersonal relationships. It is key for personal well-being and for the common good.

empathy allows us to intuit what the other feels and thinks, feel and think about it ourselves and respond in solidarity.

Acting with empathy is…

Look to the person: their eyes, their gestures. Don’t just stay on what your words say. Truly hear them, listening to the feeling that beats behind them. The key to emotional empathy is delving into the other person’s feelings and motivations.Share a sincere interest in what it transmits. Falsehood is easy to spot. Whoever tries to show empathy without really feeling it can end up having the opposite effect: making the person feel cheated.Reaffirm what the other person has said, trying to be as faithful as possible, helps them feel heard (“I think you’re saying that…”, “if I’m not mistaken, I think you feel that…”).

You will also feel heard if we ask you to clarify any point that we do not fully understand.

To be aware of their own feelings and opinions, without confusing them with theirs. If you have to share different opinions, express them after you have tried to understand the other person.Remember that if you are with people with physical or emotional health problems, the greater the empathy they feel, the greater their ability to get ahead.

There are different types of empathy

A North American Indian proverb said: “don’t judge a person without having walked several miles in their moccasins.” Loafers should not be taken literally, but it is clear that we cannot understand others without participating in their experience in some way. And the better we understand their experience the more clarity we have about ours. To understand what others feel, we first need to understand what we feel.

We can distinguish three types of empathy, as the psychologist Daniel Goleman does in his work, focus (Kairos).

The cognitive empathy allows us to understand the mental state of another person, to contemplate the world from the frame of his window. emotional empathy, for its part, it allows us to feel in our own body an echo of the emotions that another person feels. It is already highly developed in babies, who easily cry when they hear others cry, or smile when we smile at them.

“Our nervous system is designed to experience other people’s happiness or sadness,” Goleman writes.

Both cognitive empathy and emotional empathy bear fruit in the true social virtue of empathy, when we use it for the benefit of those around us. This is what we can more precisely call empathic solidarity (Goleman calls it empathic concern.)

Is it good to be empathic?

There is no ethics without empathy, but cognitive empathy and emotional empathy can have non-virtuous uses if empathic solidarity is absent. In their own way, there are criminals who use empathy to better manipulate their victims, just as advertisers use it to better manipulate the victims of their ads.

Besides, good surgeons block their emotional empathy (it is not necessary that they feel the pain that the patient feels) for the benefit of the empathic solidarity that is at the bottom of all medical practice.

The cultivation of empathy, by the way, should be more present in medical schools.

One of the most rising complaints among patients is the lack of empathy from doctors. We will all have gone through the unpleasant experience of being in front of a doctor who constantly looks at the computer screen and barely meets our eyes.

Physicians who are empathically interested in what their patients are feeling have been shown to make more accurate and effective diagnoses. In fact, empathy with patients is for many doctors the most rewarding part of their job.

“Greed is down; empathy, on the rise ”. this is how the book begins The age of empathy (Tusquets), by primatologist Frans de Waal, who has shown how empathy is part of the habitual behavior of many primates.

Greed seems to have reached its maximum expansion, but until a few years ago it was seen as something natural, even healthy. Not now. It has lost its prestige, and more and more voices remind us that individual benefit is meaningless if it does not simultaneously benefit society and the planet.

Towards an empathic society

We have more and more scientific evidence on how empathy and trust they play a key role in all kinds of social animals, us included.

Our ethical capacity, far from being a contrivance from heaven, is a continuation of the social instincts we share with other primates, as well as with dolphins and elephants. However, Frans de Waal affirms that the human being is a “bipolar ape”, because we are capable of being more altruistic than any other animal, but we are also capable of being much more cruel. We have, as people, a potential for the best and for the worst. And at the current crossroads, our society can also evolve for the better or regress for the worse.

As trend analyst Jeremy Rifkin points out, we need a new kind of civilization, an “empathetic civilization.”

In fact, there are remarkable indications that human empathy has been spreading through the centuries. Thus, what we could call our ethical horizon: the one that encompasses all those we identify as our peers.

Rights have been extended. In ancient Athens, the ethical horizon only encompassed free men born there: women, slaves, and outsiders were not full citizens. Rights have been extended to all citizens, and in recent decades initiatives have gained strength that aspire to broaden the ethical horizon beyond what is human, affirming our responsibility towards animals, ecosystems or the entire earth.Violence has been decreasing throughout history. Atrocities such as torture and slavery still exist, but before they were considered normal and today no one in their right mind is capable of justifying them in public. Attitudes have changed.Greed is frowned upon. In 1922, Leo Tolstoy was convinced that the human being of the future “will be an extremely interesting and attractive creature, and that his psychology will be very different from ours.” Even a celebrated economist like John Maynard Keynes envisioned a future in which profit-seeking and greed would be considered “semi-pathological inclinations.”

become the homo empathicus

Our best chance to build a better world is to become what Rifkin calls homo empathicus, extending our natural empathy to the whole of humanity and the biosphere.

As Erich Fromm pointed out half a century ago, “for the first time in history, the physical survival of the human species depends on a radical change in the human heart.” A new society, empathetic, wise and supportive, struggles to be born. The greatest transformation of our time is the one that has to take place in the human heart, the greatest known source of clean and renewable energy.

Empathy makes us feel bad about the suffering of others and we try to alleviate it. From that natural force is born the power of love.

Adapting an example given a century ago by the Finnish scientist Edvard Westermarck, just as we can’t help but feel pain if fire burns us, we can’t help but feel empathic solidarity for what our friends feel. And not because our “selfish genes” invent intricate tricks (as complicated materialistic explanations would like), but because human kindness is something spontaneous.