Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
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Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#2For those interested in a lighter form of this kind of content I recommend these 2 classes which go over the literature on empathy from a neurobiological perspective as well as a psychometric one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1eHJ9DdoEA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqkFg1pvNDw&list=PL22J3VaeAB...
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#3This article is like a biological description of how muscles grow. People interested in getting stronger will benefit more from an exercise plan. They still have to exercise, but at least they'll know what to do.
If your interest is developing your empathy and other social skills, the answer is through practice, as with any other performance-based skills. You can develop empathy with practice, just like charisma, patience, listening, and so on.
I teach and coach leadership, having had to learn it from scratch after a PhD (physics) and MBA, only taught me theory, not practice, and starting several companies showed me the value of leadership skills, not how to lead. I wrote a book version of the course that gives the exercises to learn the social skills relevant for leading oneself and others. The preface is on my page: https://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step, which develops this concept more. As usual posting about my books here, if anyone is interested in reading it or doing its exercises but money gets in the way, contact me and we'll work something out.
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#4What I'm most interested in is to to what degree the lack of "facial expressions", "speech melody" and the like in internet communication impedes the development of empathy.
We can communicate with more people than ever before, but our ability to empathize with those people is poor.
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#5IMO, for most people empathy is already there. In my own experience what I had to learn about empathy is how to handle it, not how to have it; I already have it, it's automatic.
The only thing that needs practice is extending it to strangers and enemies/rivals.
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#6IMO, for most people empathy is already there. In my own experience what I had to learn about empathy is how to handle it, not how to have it; I already have it, it's automatic. The only thing that needs practice is extending it to strangers and enemies/rivals.
That is an interesting first part of your comment, "how to handle empathy".
I too find it quite easy to relate to others by taking their perspective as well as easily being able to imagine how they may be feeling. To the point that my point of view and emotions become influenced by others in a sort of sympathetic reaction. EDIT My limited vocabulary skills made me unaware of the fact that this is known as "compassion" Very similar to how when someone yawns I find myself wanting to and normally yawning also.
In most cases I feel this is to my social benifit but at certain times it has been to my detriment. Typically where I have assumed the wrong perspective and feelings, or possibly my own ego has projected my perspective upon others in a sort of pseudo empathy. In my own experience this has been particularly damaging when entering personal relations with sociapathic type individuals.
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#7I'm wondering why empathy is such a hot topic... , I don't think our goal is to empathize more with other people.
Really liked the point Paul Bloom made with his book about Rational Compasion:
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
We should be able to understand how smb feels, not feel the same.
Personally, I'm quite interested in why/when people are synchronizing their movements. Shameless self plug: http://kaikunze.de/papers/pdf/gupta2019blink.pdf Don't know why it happens yet our eye blinks and head nods are synchronizing when we talk face-to-face (versus back to back).
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#8What I'm most interested in is to to what degree the lack of "facial expressions", "speech melody" and the like in internet communication impedes the development of empathy. We can communicate with more people than ever before, but our ability to empathize with those people is poor.
Someone should develop an AI to automatically add emojis to our communications ;)
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#9IMO, for most people empathy is already there. In my own experience what I had to learn about empathy is how to handle it, not how to have it; I already have it, it's automatic. The only thing that needs practice is extending it to strangers and enemies/rivals.
Empathy is not automatic for everyone. My emotions are so unreliable and unpredictable that they are useless for understanding other people.
All of my social skills are based on logical analysis and a lot of trial and error.
I enter every conversation with a goal of what I wish to communicate and how I want the other person to feel. I then attempt to do the proper things to make that happen.
Society tells us that this way of handling interpersonal interaction is manipulative and evil. For many people, this is the only way we can function in a society that doesn’t think the way we do.
Re: Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
#10I'm wondering why empathy is such a hot topic... , I don't think our goal is to empathize more with other people. Really liked the point Paul Bloom made with his book about Rational Compasion: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass... We should be able to understand how smb feels, not feel the same. Personally, I'm quite interested in why/when people are synchronizing their movements. Shameless…
But understanding has an emotional part, and memory relies a lot on emotions.
Trying to get rid of emotions might be harmful.