In this stressed-out world, we can learn to be kinder

STANFORD PROFESSOR’S RESEARCH SHOWS THAT YOU CAN CULTIVATE KINDNESS AND EMPATHY

You can become a kinder person. Even in this angry, stressed-out era. Yes, really. Many organisations are focused on doing just that. Take Bridge the Divide, which facilitates “respectful face-to-face” conversations among millennials, and one of my favourites, Better Angels, a non-profit group seeking to break down the barriers “among people of every political persuasion and ideology.”

Among the warriors for civility — aka kindness — is Jamil Zaki, 39, a Stanford University psychology professor whose lifework is focused on helping us become our better selves. For the past three years, he has been developing the tools to foster what he calls a “kindness revolution”. I know that’s an oxymoron — revolutions are most associated with overthrowing despots and are often very unkind. But this is a different kind of insurrection, and he begins with a startling premise: Empathy is not unalterable. It can be cultivated, or tamped down.

Some may remember these lyrics from ‘South Pacific’: ‘You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear’. Well, in that same vein, Zaki’s research shows that you can cultivate kindness and empathy. Or that we can be taught to love and care.

Much of his work has taken place on the Stanford campus, where he leads a class called ‘Becoming Kinder’. It is designed to address the crisis of empathy and help people fight back against the increasing trend of polarisation and disconnection. We have all seen evidence of it across the political divide, and among all age groups, but Zaki finds it especially notable among college students.

Zaki also wrote a new book titled ‘The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.’ “In the three years I spent writing [my book],” Zaki said, “I discovered more and more evidence that empathy is indeed a skill that we can build, and that doing so is a crucial project for us, both as individuals and as a culture. … I wanted to put the book’s principles into practice.”

Frankly, I’ve always thought that empathy is hardwired, so I was sceptical. To riff off Lady Gaga, you’re born that way — or not. Zaki said that’s only partially true. “There’s absolutely a genetic component to empathy and kindness,” he said. “When we hear something is genetic we immediately go to the idea that it’s 100 per cent hard-wired — that there’s nothing you can do to shift where you are on the spectrum.” But his research has shown “there’s lots of evidence that our experiences, our choices, our habits, our practices go a long way to predict how empathetic we become.” So we can rewire our brains to become more empathetic.

In today’s fractured landscape, I find that idea promising indeed.

One of the ways to measure empathy is with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (the “empathy questionnaire”), which I filled out and sent to Zaki.

I maxed out on “empathetic concern,” which Zaki said “is most associated with kindness towards others and well-being in one’s self.” But I fared much less well when it came to two other metrics — my ability to see things through someone else’s eyes or to become distressed by their suffering. This was disheartening.

When we hear something is genetic we immediately go to the idea that it’s 100 per cent hard-wired — that there’s nothing you can do to shift where you are on the spectrum.

Zaki says the more someone practices kindness toward others, the more likely they are to build long-term empathy.

So how does one practice kindness? Zaki offers five “kindness challenges” (found on his web page), which I undertook. “True to their name, these exercises are meant to stretch us beyond our comfort zone: first recognising, then bypassing our instincts to empathise only with friends, family and people who look or think like us,” he says in a video on the site.

Or if you happen to be a Stanford undergrad, you could take his class. That is what then-first-year student Natalie Stiner did last winter.

Stiner and her 15 classmates completed a lot of reading about “what it meant to be kind, what empathy was, how empathy worked.” But, for the Michigan native, the best parts of the class were the kindness challenges, with the first being her favourite because it required examining a personal failure.

She chose to work on her relationship with her older sister Sarah after yelling at her for no good reason.

“That was a failure of mine,” she says. “I wasn’t kind in this moment.”

This small act of self-reflection became her focus during the weeklong challenge. Suddenly, Stiner had an “aha” moment: “I was kinder to strangers than to my friends [and family].” With this awareness, she “tried to acknowledge when they were kind to me, when they were doing things for me that I wasn’t appreciat

I feel like there’s a lot of contention between different [political] parties, different people. If I could find ways to become kinder myself, then I could give that to a bunch of other people who may also need it.”