It turns out we can learn to be kinder people
Get to know a person whose politics you abhor, Steven Petrow says. You may be surprised.
You can become kinder. Even in this angry era. Yes, really.
Consider 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 is Jamil Zaki, 39, a Stanford psychology professor whose aim is to help us become our better selves. He’s developing the tools to foster what he calls a “kindness revolution.”
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.” In that same vein, Zaki’s research shows you can cultivate kindness and empathy.
At Stanford, he leads a class called Becoming Kinder. It helps people overcome the trend to polarization and disconnection. We’ve all seen evidence of it across the political divide and among all age groups, but Zaki finds it especially notable among college and university students.
Zaki also wrote a book titled The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Penguin Random House).
Frankly, I’ve always thought empathy is hardwired, so I was skeptical. To riff off Lady Gaga, you’re born that way or not. Zaki says that’s only partly 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 hardwired, 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. 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.
Zaki says the more someone practises kindness toward others, the more likely they are to build empathy.
He offers five “kindness challenges” (found on his web page). “These exercises are meant to stretch us beyond our comfort zone: first recognizing, then bypassing our instincts to empathize only with friends, family and people who look or think like us,” he says in a video.
Or you could take his class.
That’s what Natalie Stiner did. For the Michigan native, the best parts of the class were the kindness challenges, 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 appreciating enough.
“The improvements (in my interactions) were so huge,” she said. “I think empathy can definitely be worked on and improved at all points in your life.”
Julio Ballista, a second-year Stanford student, saw the course’s relevance to our current challenging times. “I feel like there’s a lot of contention between different (political) parties, different people,” he said. “If I could find ways to become kinder, then I could give that to a bunch of other people who may also need it.”
Zaki calls this contagion and it’s a core part of his understanding of kindness and empathy.
“An individual’s kindness can trigger people to spread positivity in other ways,” he said.
“There’s really something in it for individuals by practising it. (Research suggests) empathetic people are going to finish first, they’re going to be happier and they’re going to have greater professional success.”
I think the toughest of Zaki’s challenges is learning how to “disagree better.” As he explained, it’s crucial “to move beyond the first assessment of what someone believes and why we hate it and into a deeper exploration of that (person) as a human being.”
He tells students to find someone they disagree with and “assert those disagreements but instead of debating the point or sniping at each other, try and ask them to cultivate curiosity about how they came to have that opinion in the first place.”
I did this recently with a new acquaintance whose political views are 180 degrees different from mine. I learned a great deal about his background, his feelings of disenfranchisement and hopelessness. It was impossible for me not to feel empathetic even though we didn’t share any common political ground.
Zaki hopes people will begin to practise “empathetic habits,” including making contact with people who are different from ourselves. “I mean making oneon-one individualized contact with a diverse group of (people),” he emphasized. In a world roiled by disputes and anger, there’s no better time to take the professor’s advice.