How Can We Fix Our Empathy Deficit?

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We’ve all been through it these last few years, haven’t we? There are many reports that we have entered our empathy deficit era. Anecdotally, I agree that many people are struggling to summon the patience to see things from someone else’s perspective.

Before I get to the doom and gloom, let me start with a silver lining. One study is not quite so bleak about where we stand in terms of empathy. Chiaro Baiano et al. led a study that used questionnaires to see how young adults’ empathy compared before and after the start of COVID-19. Sixty-nine people completed questionnaires in late 2019 and then again in late 2020 or early 2021.

Baiano and her team broke empathy into three subcategories: affective, cognitive, and social. Affective empathy is the extent to which people “indirectly experience the feelings of another person” or their emotional response to others. Cognitive empathy is related to the psychological concept of perspective-taking or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Social empathy includes soft skills like listening and collaborating.

To measure participants’ empathy levels in these three different subcategories, the questionnaire also included two tests: one to see how well people guess the mental state of subjects in photos and the other to identify faux pas in various fictional social situations.

To oversimplify their complex and nuanced results, Baiano and her team found that social empathy decreased year over year while affective and cognitive empathy increased. Many people have blamed the social isolation inherent in COVID lockdowns for our current empathy deficit, and that may be partially true. The Baiano study provides evidence that our collaborative skills related to empathy may have taken a hit in the first year of the pandemic but leave some hope that we’re still just as good at empathizing emotionally and intellectually.

Now, the bad news. A meta-analysis by Sara Konrath indicates that empathy has declined for decades, well before the social isolation linked with COVID-19. She measured empathy markers between 1979 and 2009 and found that empathic concern and perspective-taking dropped significantly in young people but only since around the year 2000.

The research and anecdotal tales of division and meltdowns point to some kind of empathy problem. We’re still trying to sort out how we got here and why empathy seems to be flagging, but I don’t think it’s too soon to start talking about how we can turn the ship around and build up our empathy stores.

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Improv and Empathy

That’s why I was eager to talk to Melissa Bowler, who designed improv exercises for a study that measured improv’s impact on medical students’ empathy. As a former improviser and current teacher, I’ve always been curious about how facilitators and improv coaches design their applied improv workshops, so I reached out to Bowler to see what her exercises and games had to do with empathy.

Game 1: So This Morning, Right? The first game Bowler chose to boost empathy is called So This Morning, Right? It’s similar to the Yay Game, which is one of my favorites. Participants tell a mundane part of their daily routine after saying, “So this morning, right?” Then, the rest of the group claps and cheers uproariously.

I play the Yay Game with many of my students for similar reasons that Bowler started with So This Morning, Right? It’s a rapport-building game. Often, we get stuck in a critical mode, where we judge people’s ideas, but games like So This Morning, Right? help break this pattern. The rules of the game force you to drop your judgment and effusively support everyone’s ideas. No matter what!

Bowler also explained that So This Morning, Right helps participants think about their intentions versus their impact. Eliminating the range of reactions and forcing everyone to respond positively creates a disconnect between people’s emotions and their responses. If people dislike someone’s story but say “yay” anyway, it feels forced and a little wrong at first.

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Bowler states, “We can also intend to make a connection or a joke and end up offending. I think that understanding how one’s intention does not dictate the impact on the other person is important to empathy because we spend so much time in our heads that we forget that others can and often do have a different perspective.” So This Morning, Right? can help people consider how what they’re saying is landing with others.

Game 2: Yes, And: The second empathy-boosting game Bowler chose was Yes, And. In this activity, one person says a line. Then the other person says “yes,” repeats the line, says “and,” and then adds new information to the scene. Bowler says, “It’s a great tool to lower our judgemental tendencies, which can be a huge inhibitor to getting an accurate patient history.” When people judge other people and the things they say, they can’t be empathizing. Empathy requires us to take on someone else’s perspective, and Yes, And can help people practice this kind of open and supportive dialogue.

Game 3: Scene Painting: The third game was scene painting, where participants took turns adding details to create a location or person. On the surface, this activity doesn’t seem like it would have much to do with empathy-building, but Bowler says it’s actually all about assumptions and biases. If the task is to create a kitchen together, we each expose our bias as we improvise. Placing a giant island in the center of the room or bending low to reach into a mini-fridge reveals biases. Empathy requires us to confront our biases and consider other people’s lived experiences and how they have shaped and informed them.

Game 4: Late for Work: Finally, participants played Late for Work. One person is trying to explain to another (their boss in the scene) why they’re late for work by watching two other people mime behind the boss. I played a version of this game back when I was in Comedysportz, and let me tell you, it’s stressful and a little chaotic. Bowler chose it to emphasize the importance of body language, power, and stress and encourage medical students to think about how those factors impact the patients they’ll be talking to daily.

In short, Bowler put together four improv games that got the medical students up and moving, physically embodying judgment, stress, power, and bias. Seeing something through another’s perspective is easier said than done. That’s why it may not be enough to read about it in a textbook or hear about it from your professor. To boost empathy, we have to live it.

That’s also why it’s no surprise that the four improv games and Bowler’s debriefing after each led to a significant empathy boost for those medical students.

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How You Can Boost Your Empathy

I had to ask Bowler to leave us with her bottom line on empathy. We can’t all do those four improv games each morning, but I was curious what we could do to be more empathetic and understanding. Bowler reminds us to “default to assuming people have good intentions and a poor sense of impact. I find that most people are doing the best they can with the knowledge and resources they have at the time. They may not have all the knowledge or resources they need, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing their best. Also, when I get annoyed with someone, I try to remember that annoyance comes from seeing something done that you won’t let yourself do. Maybe that’s because it’s a factually problematic behavior (screaming in a full stairwell), or maybe it’s something you can let yourself do and can let go of this old rule you probably developed as a kid.”

And what good reminders these are:

• Assume people have good intentions.
• Assume people aren’t considering their impact.
• Remind yourself that most people are doing their best.
• Remember that people may not have what they need to do better.
• Keep in mind that annoyance comes from others doing what you can’t or won’t do.
• Tell yourself that you’re not them.
• Or change your rules. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.