For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the innovative efforts to grow our capacity for empathy.
For an academic psychologist, surveying the state of the study of empathy can be a depressing business. There was the 2011 meta-analysis by the University of Michigan’s Sara Konrath that suggested that today’s college students report themselves to be much less empathetic than did their predecessors a generation or two before. Numerous studies examine how people experience “compassion fatigue” in the face of mass suffering, choosing self-protective apathy over engaging with the suffering of others. In 2016, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom published Against Empathy, suggesting that since empathy is a biased emotion, it is at best unreliable and at worst downright harmful because it steers us towards caring most about those in our in-groups. If empathy is indeed a fixed or even declining resource, it might make sense to disregard it entirely.
C. Daryl Cameron, an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State, is part of a group of researchers who argue that there’s still a good case to be made both for valuing empathy and for seeing it as a renewable resource — something that, with the right kind of motivated effort, can even increase. Cameron is currently leading a three-year project designed to test whether simple experimental manipulations can change people’s levels of empathy. The goal is to move towards a proven set of interventions to help people develop greater skill and capacity for empathy.