Edwin, Okay, hello everyone. I'm Edwin Rutsch, the director of the empathy Center, and today I'm here with William Ickes for a discussion about empathy. My favorite topic, and Bill is on the phone line. So we're doing this on Zoom, over the phone, over his phone line, and let me just give a little introduction to Bill. This is what I found on Wikipedia. Bill is a personality and social psychologist who is known primarily for his research on unstructured diet tactic interaction, and he's the author of the books everyday mind reading, understanding what other people think and feel and strangers in a strange lab, how personality shapes our initial encounters with others. And he's also the editor of the book, empathic accuracy. And Bill, I'm just going to hold those books up. I have copies of empathic accuracy and everyday bind reading here, so I'm just holding those up for viewers to be able to see. And you're also have done numerous studies and papers on the topic of empathic accuracy. Is there more by way of introduction, you'd like to share?
Well, maybe to point out what could be obvious, and that is that I don't study empathy broad scale. I just study an aspect of it, which is empathic accuracy. How accurate are we when we try to make inferences about what other people are thinking and feeling,
and you've been doing this for quite a while. When did you get started on this topic area study?
I can give you a long answer, which you can edit later, if you like.
But yeah, just tell me the whole story. Okay, listeners
might might like to know that there is a broader story. When I got out of graduate school and took my first academic job at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I made a decision to study people's initial interactions. And one of my colleagues in social psychology there at Wisconsin, who basically was hired at the same time I was was a guy named DW rijeki. He'd been trained as a comparative psychologist. He did studies of social behavior using animals, specifically hatchlings, as his research participants. And as we talked, he told me how in the lab meetings, one of the first things they did was to acknowledge that none of them really knew a whole lot about the behavioral repertoire of newly hatched baby chicks, and so they went to the research literature, and they did some brainstorming in their meetings, and they tried to come up with a list of The various behaviors that baby chicks were capable of. And that impressed me as somebody who had made the decision to study initial human interactions between strangers, and so in my lab meeting, we did basically the same thing. We started with a list of behaviors that we would expect to see in initial interactions between strangers, and we use those behaviors to record what was going on in people's initial interactions. For several years, we were studying how people's personalities affected these interactions, we would mix and match people according to personality type, and when we analyzed the data, we could see in a fairly clear and detailed way how different aspects of personality played out in the form of specific behaviors. I became a little bit manic about the idea of wanting to get everything possible out of these video tapes of the interactions we were recording. And so my next goal was to go beyond the behaviors which show up on the tapes, try to get an idea of what's going on inside the people's heads. And so just as I borrowed from rajecki The idea of cataloging all of the behaviors and then measuring them, I borrowed from researchers at Ohio State, something they. Called the thought listing paradigm, the thought lift listing procedure. And they had developed forums where people simply at points at which an interaction recorded on videotape is paused or stopped, people write down the particular thought or feeling that they had at that point. And if you continue with that pause record kind of procedure, you can eventually get all of the thoughts and feelings that the person had. I realized that we couldn't interrupt live interactions to have people record their own thoughts and feelings as they're also trying to talk to a stranger. So what we did was the next best thing. We We had them sit in separate cubicles immediately after the interaction, and we had them pause the tape of the interaction that they had just been in at each of the points where they remember distinctly having had a particular thought or feeling, meanwhile, their partner sitting in a different cubicle doing the same thing, pausing The tape and writing down their thoughts and feelings. And eventually, it occurred to me, since we were able to record people's retrospective thoughts and feelings with I think, fairly high degree of accuracy, why not take these thought feeling data and then have people view the tape a second time. On this pass through the tape, they don't pause the tape. We do. We pause it at each of the points where their interaction partner had a thought or feeling, and now their job is to write down at each of those points, what they think their partner was thinking or feeling in the form of a sentence. So this was the basis of our method for measuring each partner's empathic accuracy. We now have for each of the individuals an actual thought or feeling reported by one of them, and then we have an inference that the other partner made about what that thought or feeling was. Each of them results in a sentence, and the next step in the process was to develop software where our undergraduate research assistants could compare an actual thought or feeling which one partner had reported with the inferred thought or feeling that the other person came up with. And then they make similarity judgments based on whether they got the gist of the thought or feeling right, whether it was similar but not the same, or whether it was completely different dissimilar. And when we assign numerical codes to each of those, we can then create a sum to measure across an entire interaction period of how many accuracy points each person got, how successful overall they were at inferring their partners, thoughts or feelings. So the longer version of this story, which I've been giving you is that we started out wanting to study social interaction. We were essentially looking at things that could be seen and recorded off videotape, like smiles and laughter, times when people spoke, when they turned their head to look at each other, how close or far they sat from each other and so on. But eventually we tried to take the research in the direction of what's going on in the two people's heads, and that's when we began to study their actual thoughts and feelings. And then the next logical step, which was 10 years from when I first started doing this research, trying to study how accurately each partner could infer the other person's thoughts and feelings. So what we were studying at that point, we decided to label empathic accuracy, because we were, after all, able to get numerical estimates of how accurate each person was in coming up with a thought feeling inference that matched the actual thought or feeling reported by their partner.
Well, the a lot of the work that I do is based on the work. Of Carl Rogers, who did a lot of, you know, work exploring the the nature of empathy within a client therapist relationship. And I saw that you had mentioned him in some of your writings. You had mentioned him. Was he an influence at all, on on that interest in empathic accuracy. Or where did that kind of that shift come from studying personalities to getting interested in empathic accuracy?
Well, once, once, our focus had shifted from only beginning being able to to extract interaction behaviors that were observable from our video tapes to being curious about what was going on in the partners heads, what their thoughts and feelings were. Then the method sort of drove our research interest in empathic accuracy, the fact that we could assess empathic accuracy with the procedures we've been developing, made it something that we decided we really wanted to do. And when we searched for precedents in the literature, we didn't really find anybody else doing this. However, we did find that Carl Rogers in the 1950s had talked about not empathic accuracy, but accurate empathy. He had those two terms reversed from the way we were thinking of them. We were we were emphasizing the accuracy part of it, he was focusing on what the therapist is capable of, and so he used the term accurate empathy. And it turned out that his view of what that was was very similar, if not identical, to what we were calling empathic accuracy. He said that the ideal therapist can track moment by moment, what seems to be going on in the mind, the consciousness of the patient and therapists, presumably, should get better at this over time. But although individual differences in the ability to do this may vary. It's the obligation of the therapist to do the best they can, to try to track what's going on with the other person, but we have a way to do that now, with the methods we developed and so Rogers term accurate empathy was indeed an important precedent for us, even though we had a method that was something that I think he probably would have aspired to back in the 1950s but wasn't doing back then.
Yeah, the as I was mentioning, our work is based on his active listening process. So he just give a little picture of how he did his listening. He as a therapist, he would listen to his clients. The clients would speak about whatever is going on in their lives, and he is a therapist, would reflect back his understanding of what they were saying, and they would either agree with them, I'll say, yeah, you they sort of feel like they were heard or understood, or if they didn't feel heard, you know, accurately, people tend to correct and say how they really were feeling like, Oh, you're feeling angry. They said, No, I'm just upset, for example, you know, to get kind of closer to the actual experience of the speaker. And we've, we've taken that structure and put it into small groups. So we'll have maybe four people in a small group, and we have a topic, and one person is the speaker, and they speak, they select their listener, and that listener does the active listening, reflecting back their understanding of what the speaker is saying. And then we have time limits, maybe, you know, five minute per turn. And then when that time is up, the listener becomes the speaker, and they speak. Select someone in the group to speak to, and that this conversation like this, goes on, you know, for the time allotted. So that's sort of one way of getting to empathic accuracy, is that you the person that you're speaking to, you reflect, reflecting back your understanding of what they're saying, and then they sort of guide you, as you know, if they're heard, if they're understood or not. And yeah, so we've done doing a lot of work with, you know, holding these kind of empathy circles, you know, out in the public, and use it for conflict mediation and other and a lot of other, you know, different ways. And so what you have is another approach to determining empathic accuracy, where you're actually recording those interact, just normal interactions, and then people, after the fact, share what it is that they were feeling, and others are sort of guessing or saying what they feel that the other person is saying or experiencing and then you're sort of matching those together to get a sort of a determination of how accurate they are. Is that sort of,
yeah, and I think that, apart from Rogers preferred term of mirroring another way to try to get at the gist of what he was doing is to think about it in terms of soliciting feedback, and getting the feedback from the person who had the thought or feeling and using That to correct your inference making in the future, I
What's important is not just any kind of feedback. It's vertical feedback. What makes that technique work in Rogers original use of it, what makes it work in our empathic accuracy research is getting accurate vertical feedback from the other person, right? We decided that that was important and was something that we wanted to look at. We had to figure out how to do it within the context of our research procedure, and so in an early study we did, we had people listen to tapes that might have been recorded by Carl Rogers. They were tapes in which a client centered therapist like him was having simulated, but in most respects, very realistic, a therapy session with a female client. These women were told that they would be in an involved in a 50 minute therapy session they could talk about a problem in their life that they wanted to discuss. Guy was a real therapist trained in that tradition. They knew that the session would be recorded on videotape, so we did as much as we could to make these tapes resemble actual therapy sessions. I questions at the end of the session, we did what we did with the strangers who interacted in our lab. We took the female clients to a cubicle where they sat down and reviewed the copy of the video tape of the session they were just in. They paused the tape at each of the points where they had a clearly remembered thought or feeling, they made a complete list of all those thoughts and feelings. We emphasized how important it was that they report their thoughts and feelings accurately, that they didn't put down ones that they think they might have had and had to be ones they were sure about. So now we not only have a list of their thoughts and feelings, but we have reason to believe that if they were asked to provide feedback, this is as close as they can get to being accurate in describing the actual thoughts and feelings they had then we did a study where we had our undergraduates essentially play amateur psychotherapist. We showed the undergraduates these 50 minute therapy sessions. We paused the tape in each therapy session at all of the points where the client had actually reported the thought or feeling, and we asked our undergraduates okay to pretend like you're a therapist here, what did the client at this point tell us that she was thinking or she was feeling, and they wrote down their inferences. In one condition, we wanted to provide them with feedback about what the client was actually thinking and feeling. And so for those people on a number of the the trials, so to speak, each time they wrote down their inference about what the client was thinking or feeling, what appeared on the screen Next was not an immediate continuation of the therapy session. What appeared instead was the client's actual thought or feeling. So. And this was the way that we could provide our research participants with immediate and accurate, vertical feedback about the clients or feeling so some some people got this feedback, and it was corrective, I'm sure, in the same way that it was when Rogers solicited this feedback in his clinical work, people in a different condition did not get the feedback trials. They made their inference about what the client was thinking or feeling, and then they just went on and continued with viewing the interaction, the therapy session, and made additional inferences as the occasion occurred. And our question was just getting this accurate feedback about what the client's real thought or feeling was immediately after you've already made your guess. Does that improve the accuracy of your future guesses, of your future inferences? And we found that it did. We found that we could, in effect, train people's empathic accuracy over the course of these three therapy sessions, which was really kind of amazing. We estimated that this is participating in the feedback condition and hearing the actual thoughts and feelings of the three female clients immediately after you've guessed what each of their thoughts and feelings were, could boost the average participants empathic accuracy around 10% compared to the people who did not get the immediate feedback. So Rogers was clearly on to something, and his technique for eliciting feedback basically just, here's what I think you just said, or here's what I think you were telling me about your current feelings. Is that right? That's That's perfectly good, and the valid, valid way to to get the kind of feedback that we only usually get with pretty close friends. We don't enter most conversations with a mental set that I'm going to pause this conversation every time I'm not quite sure I understood you. That would be tedious and probably annoying in the context of a therapy session, though, it makes perfect sense that we would stop and do that correcting and and get repeated feedback. Make sure that I'm tracking your thoughts and feelings accurately.
Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just saying so your your research is showing that getting that reflection, I mean getting that confirmation of how well you heard someone and understood them, actually increases that the listeners level of empathy by 10% about so it's it's one way to improve your empathy.
Yeah, one way to think about it is that you know you make small corrections in your inference making, or you may even make larger ones, there may be course corrections where you thought that one issue was the patient's primary concern and reason for being there. And it turns out that when you see the patient's actual thought or feeling and compare it with your inferred thought or feeling, you realize, well, no, I'm, I'm sort of going off in the wrong direction here. I need to be focused on this. And you know, issue a instead of issue B. And some of these course corrections based on the feedback may be small, but others may be sizable.
And but the the the the participants who are trying to read these, these emotions, feelings, thoughts, they're seeing a video, is that correct? So they're actually seeing a recording of this person versus the person themselves, and then they're being told by someone who's there, if they're accurate or not, is that?
So they're what they're doing is they're seeing the therapy session. If you can imagine where the cameras positioned, it would be behind the male therapist head, so they would see in this center of the image, they would see the female client sitting in her chair on the other side of the desk from the male therapist. The camera would be focused on her. It would pick up her nonverbal behavior. Obviously, they could see her live. Moving hear what she's saying. They would only hear as a kind of voice over the male therapist part of the conversation, everything he said, they would hear, but they wouldn't. They wouldn't be focused on looking at him. It would be sort of shot over his shoulder, so to speak. And then they would hit a point where the female client had paused the tape and had reported the thought or feeling. We would pause the tape for the research participant at that point, and they would try to infer by writing in the form of a sentence, what the female clients thought or feeling was, and people in the feedback condition, instead of seeing the interaction continue, from that point, would first see appear on the video tape with they would see the client's actual reported thought or feeling. This is immediately after they've reported their inferred thought or feeling, and now they're getting corrective feedback, it may indicate to him, Well, that's exactly what I thought she was thinking or feeling. I'm not surprised a bit or that's similar to what I was thinking, but it's interesting, because it's different in this way, or, wait, that's completely different from what I thought was going on with her. So it's it's like what Rogers was doing in therapy, but it's less intrusive, and obviously there's no changing that videotaped interaction. It is what it is, but what we are changing by giving the perceivers, the undergraduates who are playing amateur psychotherapists, what we are giving them is a chance to see what the actual thought or feeling was each time one was reported, and use that information ideally to correct their subsequent inferences and make them better. And what that that meant we we predicted, was that people would tend to do better at the end of the tape, the last set of thoughts and feelings that they had to infer, then at the beginning, because if they were in that feedback condition, they would have had the corrective feedback all through the tape. And that's what we found, that the people in the feedback condition did do better in those last set of those final set of inferences than the people who were in the no fate. But in fact, no feedback condition didn't have a chance, or as much of a chance, to correct their perceptions of what the client was thinking and feeling. You're
thinking the improvement or the improvement there was because they were getting that feedback. So it's the that feedback is what's improving. It towards the end,
there's two things. One is that even without feedback, as you continue to listen to the person talk and express their concerns, what they talk about and how they talk about it, and how they relate it to what they talked about earlier. That provides another form of feedback. It's they're providing their own further clarification, correction, additional insight, context. So that's that's something that occurs. Even if you're not in the feedback condition, you are probably benefiting from this accumulating knowledge of what the person is saying and using that to improve the accuracy of your subsequent inferences. But if you're in the feedback condition, not only do you get that cumulative effect of getting to know the person better, but you also get an immediate feedback on particular inferences that you made early on and whether they were accurate or not, and in what ways you were inaccurate. So Rogers was on to something really important, the whole concept of of accurate empathy, and then attempting to try to improve the therapist accurate empathy through seeking direct feedback after after virtually every exchange with the client, and making that a very public event. That's that's a wonderful technique. We just had to find a way to do that without having to essentially interrupt the flow of the of the therapy session.
Well, as I was mentioning, we're building on that and taking it out of the therapeutic and bringing it into the relational just people, you know, non therapists. Non just taking it out of the therapeutic context and bringing it into just human interaction. So we'll have something called empathy cafes, which is, we'll have any number of people, you know, join. There could be like 30 or 40 people. We give an explanation of how the empathy circle works. And then we divide people into smaller groups of four or five. And then we do the empathy, you know, the active listening in small groups like that. So we're trying to, we're trying to mainstream it, you know, take, take that practice and make we'd like to train everyone in the world how to take part in an empathy circle. Because I think it would, it really helps raise the level of of empathy, and we've done it, you know, with the political left political right, bring him into an empathy circle, have them listen to each other and reflect back their understandings and the this was mentioned just, I don't know if you saw that article in the Scientific America that they talked about our work, where we would have this empathy tent that would go out to where these demonstrations are, where the political left and right are sort of battling it out. They're screaming and yelling at each other. We'd bring someone from one person from each side into the tent, and I would mediate with them, or do an empathy circle. And at the end, they would hug each other. So, and it's in a documentary called Trump phobia, what both sides fear, they showed that. So this accurate empathy, and core, you know, this empathic processes, I think, is just has huge benefits for social interaction is something we really need in the world right now.
I think you're right, and I also think that it invites the question, well, why haven't human interaction patterns evolved to bring this into everyday interactions all the time. Why aren't we all doing it all the time? It's unusual behavior, as I mentioned earlier, apart from very close friends or people who you know you work with and feel you can trust, we don't frequently say, Well, you know, I think you're feeling this way, or am I right, or am I wrong? It's considered, I think, disruptive and impolite to keep interrupting people and and asking if you inferred them correctly, and it may even suggest that you're not paying attention if you have to keep doing that. But it's a remarkably effective technique, as Rogers found, as we found, as you found. So maybe we ought to legitimize this, that it's perfectly okay for even strangers to question each other, to try to get clarity on what the other person's thinking and feeling, given the amazing benefits that it has to offer, you,
have any thoughts on how we can popularize it? How do we get it out there to I thought, if, you know, during the elections, if, like Trump and Harris had done an empathy circle instead of a debate, you know, and modeled it, you know, if you had high profile people like that modeling or in Congress, if Congress, the Democrats and Republicans, had to have empathy circles, you know, once a month, or something between each other, and people could observe it and sort of mainstream it, make it sort of the A common way of being, yeah.
Well, I think that, if you you know, I think that's a great idea, but I think there'd be a lot of self selection. It was only people who are pretty open to others who'd be willing to participate in those empathy circles in the context of a political campaign or election. But if I were to take your technique and try to make it part of people's everyday behavior, I would argue that you ought to try to figure out how to get it into the public schools at the elementary school level, have kids do your empathy circle exercises and get used to it. They will naturally, I expect generalize it outside of the formal empathy circle, they'll begin to talk to each other in the halls, you know, in the lunchroom, questioning each other's thoughts and feelings, asking, here's what I think is going on with you. Here's what I think you're feeling. Am I right? And if it becomes legitimized at that level, so that people not only feel like it's valuable and useful, but that they're encouraged to do it in everyday life, and they grow up with that, I think that we could potentially create another generation of people who are. Uh, benefit from this more than previous ones have.
Yeah, that's really our goal, is to bring it into all, you know, aspects of society, including the schools. You know, we're looking at, how do we get it into the schools like that? That it, you know, it first, it's a very structured process where you have to sort of follow the rules turn taking what I find it's sort of it become, it's really a mindset as well. And once you've done it for a while, you sort of internalize that mindset. So you're sort of when you even when you're just listening to someone, you're sort of reflecting back your understanding to what they're saying, you know, staying present, not non judgmental, and all the things that sort of block that empathy, like judgment and detachment or not paying attention or not being present, but you start internalizing it. So it just sort of becomes part of your personality, which is, I guess, what you were sort of studying to begin with, was people's sort of personalities, and how that related to how they interacted with each other, is that that was like your original sort of what you were looking
back when we first started doing it, we were just looking at, how does my personality affect, how Much I talk, smile, gesture, and how does your personality contribute? So we would do things like create pairs of people where they were both extroverts, or they were both introverts, or one was an introvert and one was an extrovert. In the studies where we only looked at strangers, we wanted to try to put these people in a waiting room situation and just capture their initial interaction, where the thing that was most likely to influence how the interaction progressed was the personality of the two individuals. They didn't know why they were there. They hadn't they were waiting for the experiment to begin. Hadn't been told really anything about it, if we just leave them together, waiting for the experimenter to come in, but unobtrusively record on videotape and on sound their interaction, There's reason I thought to expect that different combinations would have different kinds of interactions. And so to give one example in one rather large study, we did set it up so that we had people who, based on information they'd given us earlier, were determined to be introverts or extroverts, and we created the different combinations that I just mentioned, two introverts together, two extroverts together, or an introvert paired with an extrovert. In a similar study, we looked at the personality dimension of agreeableness, we had either two agreeable people who were interacting, or two disagreeable people, or an agreeable person paired with a disagreeable one. And basically what we found in that study was that two disagree two disagreeable people don't get along. Two agreeable people do. But an agreeable person gets along fine with a disagreeable one. It's that agreeable person's personality that seems to set the tone for the interaction. It isn't spoiled by the fact that the agreeable person has a disagreeable partner. But the real problem type was when they were both disagreeable, they found ways to sour what is normally, you know, expected to be in a pleasant initial interaction.
Yeah, they compare that with had to see if someone is, if you had someone who or a group who had done like the empathy circle practice, you know, for a while, and then they got together with in those sort of context to see what effect that would have if you've taken part in an empathy circle, how does that sort of affect your interactions? I'm just thinking of someone in our group. She just mentioned recently, you know, she's been doing the empathy circle and our training, and then she was driving with her son, and her son brought up some issue of the with the family. And then she got sort of defensive and started, you know, saying, Oh well, I don't think that was true, or just got defensive about it. And then he told her say, Oh yeah, whatever you, whatever you You're right, whatever you want, you're just sort of dismissing it and kind of ending the conversation. And then she thought, Well, I'm doing this empathy. Listening. Maybe I should try it. And then she just sort of reflected back what he was saying, and he talked some more and some more, and she said it just turned out into a really great conversation, and a day, really positive day came out of it. So it was just the learning how to do that empathic listening, and he didn't do it in return. He didn't even know that she was really doing it, just her willingness to listen sort of reflect back her understanding of what he was saying, kind of just changed their whole, you know, relationship for the for the day.
That's, I think, a very encouraging finding, because you might, in the absence of findings like that, think, well, maybe both part both of the participants in the interaction, it may be necessary for both of them to have had that empathy circle training for it to work. But what that suggests is that, no, it's sufficient that one of them knows how to use the technique. It's sort of analogous to an agreeable person being able to have a pleasant interaction with a disagreeable person. What the agreeable person is doing works so well to keep the interaction at a pleasant, upbeat level that it's almost as if the personality the disagreeable person is essentially undermined, or maybe it's more appropriate to say overwhelmed by The positive things that the agreeable person is doing. I think it's a very encouraging direction to study whether a person who's been trained in your empathy circle technique can essentially produce a socially engineered desirable effect interacting with all kinds of other people, even highly defensive ones, are ones that have a completely opposite initial mindset.
There's there's another aspect that just came to mind is that it seems like we as human beings have a need to be heard and seen. So in those situations, I mean, I hear this often, you know, people are the ones that do the listening in their family. So they listen to their members of their family, but the family members don't listen in return. And then they once, then they start getting frustrated, like, Oh, I'm doing all the listening, but the others aren't listening to me, and what I found is that there's sort of this need, it's almost like an empathy battery, that we need to have our be heard, and that that sort of charges us, sort of and that if you go to an empathy circle with other people, where you're heard, that when you go back to those environments that don't listen to you, you have sort of more capacity to listen to people even when they're not listening to you. So just, I just Just a thought that they came to mind, how, how it and I find the same thing that, you know, I go into these environments to do mediation, people aren't really listening to me, and it's very stressful. But by having a group where I'm heard and and have a chance to sort of vent and, you know, share any anxieties in an empathic space, sort of gives me capacity to go into these environments, which are, I would say, low empathy environments, and give me the sort of the resources to be able to listen to others who are maybe not listening back.
Well, I hope that's true. I do hope it's true. I get the sense from the example you use that sometimes people like in their own family situation, if they have the capacity to listen, but family members don't. I've seen those kinds of exchanges and been a part of them on more than one occasion, and often they take the form of one person protests and says, You're not listening, and the other person seems to have already made up their mind about what the first person was thinking or feeling, and there's really no no justification for making me devote additional effort to listening when I already know who you are and what you're about. Of course, that's that's got to be really frustrating for the person who hasn't been listened to and tries to get listened to, and the partner just kind of dismisses it like I already know you. Why are you trying to change my mind about who you are? I know you already
Yes, you had a lot of other findings that you had about different about empathy within friends. In relationships. So want to share some of the other findings that you came around we
we had this method for measuring empathic accuracy. It was like a tool we could use to open up avenues or research. And what questions do you start with? Well, like a lot of people, we started with simple, basic questions. Developed hypotheses that we felt almost had to be true, but until we'd done an empathic accuracy study and found that they were indeed true, it would remain an open question whether the method for assessing empathic accuracy could pick up the differences we were predicting. So yeah, we predicted on the basis of common sense that close friends to be more empathically accurate than strangers. So we did a study where we had pairs of same sex strangers, college age, two young women, two young men. We brought them to the lab. In half the cases, they were friends who had known each other for at least a year and considered themselves to be close, or even best friends. The other half of the pairs that we brought in were two males, two females, who were complete strangers when we recorded their interaction, and then we had them after the interaction was over, go to separate cubicles, report all their thoughts and feelings during the interaction, and then they traded tapes, so that now you're watching the tape of the interaction, and you're getting the tape stopped at the point where the other person reported all their thoughts and feelings, and you're making your inferences about what the other person's thoughts and feelings were, and as we expected, we found that the friends were indeed more accurate in reading or inferring each other's thoughts and feelings than the strangers were. One way to explain that might simply be, well, maybe the friends simply had more to say to each other, and so they were exchanging more information, and with more information, they could more accurately infer each other's thoughts and feelings that turned out not to be what was going on. It wasn't just the amount of information, it was the kind of information friends had a long history of talking to each other, sharing their opinions about different things, learning about each other's preferences, attitudes, values, and it was that storehouse of information that they had acquired in the past which seemed to be really important in making the friends More accurate and inferring each other's thoughts and feelings.
There's, yeah, there's another aspect too, is like in terms of the relationship, how the relationship goes more deep deeper, becomes more Empath, more deeply empathic. And I'm hearing that, you know, as friends, maybe have that over time, have developed that that depth, there's another part, is how people speak too. I wonder if you looked at that, because what I find is in the empathy circle, someone who's very sort of intellectual, they can sort of detach from what it is, it's going on in their bodies, it's harder to follow them in terms of, you know what, what? Yeah, if they're not really expressing their felt experience, and it's those people who speak more about their they share what their own felt experience, it's kind of it's easier to to connect with them. And I think that ties in or if you looked at the work of gene Gen, he was, he worked with Rogers, and he did a study of of he was looking at who, how does growth happen in therapy? You know the people, there's people who go into therapy you know nothing happens for them, and you know it doesn't go anywhere, and others grow and learn and kind of move through kind of different issues. And he looked at a lot of different therapeutic processes, and what he found was it was how the person spoke that kind of really was a major factor in terms of how they had, how they had growth in the therapeutic process. And it was people who spoke about a felt experience, and especially were sort of at the edge of what their feelings were like. You know, you look at your you express a felt. Experience. And then there's other feelings that sort of vague underneath that. And by staying with those vagueness and the feelings that are underneath there that that was sort of people who stayed sort of in that state, were the ones that had the most growth. So I'm kind of looking at that with the empathy circle, like, how do we deepen the empathic connection with each other? So, you know, if empathy is sensing into the experience of someone else, the more the speaker is open and sort of transparent, the deeper the empathic connection can be. So just Yeah. So I'm kind of looking interested in sort of that aspect of deepening the empathic connection.
In our research, we have found that there are big differences in how readable different people are, how readable their thoughts and feelings are. And there are some people who hold their cards very close to their vest. They don't let their feelings get expressed in what they say or how they say it. And other people wear their hearts on their sleeves, so to speak, they they freely talk about their feelings and make what's you know inside available to people who they're talking to. So it's a very important variable. We found that the target's readability in general is more important than the perceivers empathic ability in determining empathic accuracy scores, which is another way of saying that although all perceivers might be trying to infer accurately other people's thoughts and feelings, their ability counts for less in the long run than how readable the people Are whose thoughts and feelings they're trying to infer.
Yeah, any more insights about that? I mean, that that's big, that it's, it's, it's, it's about you as a speaker, you know sharing your how and how you share your experience is gonna help the relationship.
Well, in everyday life, things are really complicated. I'm not saying that it's not complicated in a therapy situation or in your empathy circle, but in real life, people have all kinds of motives they bring to interactions, and some of the motives are exploitative, selfish, manipulative, in situations like that, you probably often are not getting the cues, the information that you would need to accurately infer the other person's thoughts and feelings. If they're trying to successfully manipulate you or to hoodwink you, they may have spent a lot of time practicing leading you to believe that they think one way or feel a certain way, when in fact, something else is going on entirely. The nice thing about the therapeutic relationship, or your empathy circle relationships is that people are making a genuine and honest effort to be accurate and expressing the feelings they really have be non defensive, not trying to hide thoughts and feelings To not be deceptive present false thoughts and feelings. So it's Messier in the real world, and I think we have to, we have to work in these settings where, like with your empathy circle, people can agree on the ground rules and do their best to follow them.
Yeah, that's a big part of that, is that agreement. And then I think having that agreement also builds trust that if you're in an environment where you know you're going to be heard, you're not going to have to compete. Usually, when people get together, a group gets together, there's a couple people that sort of dominate, you know, the conversation, do most of the speaking, and a lot of people are just kind of pull back, kind of withdraw, and in the empathy circle, you don't have to compete to be heard. And I think that kind of helps build trust, and that trust leads to more openness and transparency, too over time. I think it's like another it's also very
much affected by your experience of when you share your actual thought or feeling. What response do you get? Do people make fun of you for expressing your actual thought or feeling? Do they act dismissive? Right, like you shouldn't think that, or you shouldn't feel that. If your own thoughts and feelings are not respected by the other person, chances are pretty good you're just going to keep them to yourself. You're going to try to mask or disguise them. And that really defeats the point of what you try to you're trying to do in the empathy circle, but it's, it's something that has to be reckoned with in everyday life. When these these attempts to communicate, be empathic, to be understood and understand others, can get undermined by these kinds of factors.
Well, the empathy circle I find is one of the structure that kind of holds, helps hold sort of empathic so that empathic way of being, that mutual empathy, or I actually see it as holistic empathy, in terms of definitions, in that you know that when you speak, whatever you say, will be the person will share. They will reflect back actively listen to what you say. So they won't, you know, Judge, they won't. You know, all those things you're talking about that they'll just you're kind of guaranteed to be heard and understood, and that that kind of helps just know that that's going to happen. Just, I think, builds trust. And, you know, the barriers go down. And one thing I was just thinking about is with Rogers, this is kind of about the definition of empathy too. Because usually empathy, it seems to me, is defined as, you know, one how one from an individualistic point of view, where one person is empathizing with another person. And so in the case of the therapeutic situation, you had the therapist listening to the client, and and it's a one way empathy, you know, primary direction of the client and therapist. And what we're trying to do is bring it into the into mutual empathy. So there is no, you know, one person who's outside of the circle. Everyone is listening to everyone else in the circle. So there's no person, sort of outside of that space, like the therapist is, and that sort of, I'm kind of curious in about this, in terms of of definition of empathy, because I'm seeing there's in terms of the definition that there's a holistic empathy. So in the empathy circle, you have four people, and sort of a true or a holistic empathy is when all parties are empathizing with each other. So it's, it's like an empathic space, a mutual empathy. And I see that empathy, you know, primarily gets defined in sort of an individualistic definition of one person empathizing with another versus seeing sort of a holistic empathy and having that difference. I think if I've noticed, there's a lot of criticisms of empathy and a lot, for example, there's a book coming out called suicidal empathy and and, and their their criticism is that progressives empathize with immigrants coming across the, you know, illegally across the border, but they're not empathizing with other, with other people who are being impacted by that. And I think there's a point to that, that a holistic empathy would be, you know, the community empathizing with immigrants, but immigrants also empathizing with, you know, people in the country and everybody sort of empathizing with each other in this holistic way. And so in turn, I don't we do you have any thoughts about that this sort of relational, holistic empathy versus sort of an individual definition of empathy?
Well, I want to react to the last of your points that in some ideal society, everybody would be fully aware of everybody else's perspective and see why from that perspective, that person's values, beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and feelings are coherent and make sense. But that's an awful lot to ask of people and even adults, it's an awful lot to ask where we can pay attention to every potential party and adopt their perspective in succession and somehow come up with a picture or a take on the situation. Situation that's that's fair. And just everyone there, we give you a simple example. They're doing some road repair there, where I live. And what that did was it funneled all the traffic into a single lane at a very busy, busy intersection, now on the street where the road works being done, there are restaurants where people are going in to eat, and they want to get back into that traffic flow. But now there's a line of cars that's been waiting for several minutes for a light so that they can move the people in the restaurants just off that street. They want to get into the traffic flow immediately. And some people think, well, I'll be nice. I will create a gap here and let that person in. That sounds like they're being empathic, and they're taking this individual's perspective into account, but are they really giving enough weight to the perspective of the 30 people lined up behind them who've been waiting a lot longer. You know, if you let somebody into the traffic flow, that's makes it sound like you're a nice person, but did you ever consider that you should get the permission of all those people behind you who've been waiting a lot longer than the person who just finished eating now wants to immediately get into the traffic flow. Just as you can see the problem here, you not only have to take different people's personalities, or perspectives, rather, into account and you also have to take into account the context. Is it fair that just because this person's ready to go, I have to keep the people behind me waiting even longer than they already have.
Yeah, so it's so if you have, well, the empathy circle sort of creates a context for doing that. So we'll have people in conflict, and you bring in all the parties who are in the conflict, and they can have an empathy circle to kind of discuss it, and then you have this situation you're describing. So you have all the stakeholders. You've got the 30 people in the car behind you. You've got the driver who's pausing. You have the driver who's wanting to, you know, get into get, you know, coming from the restaurant. So there's a lot of stakeholders that all their sort of concerns and needs and need to be heard in a purely ideal, empathic environment, right? People would have a chance to voice those. And I think that as part of what democracy is about, saying that, you know, we as a democracy, can work out these issues through, through dialog, ideally, and, you know, sort of a mutual empathy. And, you know, sometimes it's just not practical to be able to have, you know, everybody in come into that circle, but having more environments where that is possible, like, you know, teaching the mindset in the schools, the community, there's someone that does these community events, something like, if there's going to be this parking, this situation you're talking about, you have the restaurant, you know someone from the restaurant. You have some of the local community you have the public works department, they get together and they have these dialogs to kind of hear everyone's concern, to kind of try to work out issues in advance. And so it's, you know, bringing everybody together in one big empathy circles. You know, maybe not practical, but still, the sort of, the direction, sort of is an ideal, and how do we sort of move, at least move in that direction, versus sort of a top down, let's say authoritarian, sort of, this is how we're going to do it. Approach.
Well, if you see these kinds of situations develop in highways, there's often somebody with like a flagman or even a traffic cop, and they let all the traffic going a certain direction go for a certain length of time. So X number of cars moves through it's not fair that, even though there's a ton more cars behind them, that those people all have to clear out completely before the side traffic comes in. The traffic cop May time it, or at least attempt to time it. Make sure that everybody's got an equal opportunity to move. Nobody's advantage where they get to move right away, and other people have to wait for several minutes. It's the kind of thing that you know. You shouldn't have to collect information from each individual participant. You just make sure that in the aggregate, people going both directions are treated fairly or at least following the same. Uh, procedure,
yeah. So they already had gone through these public works, probably had done studies and try to find the best, most efficient solution to that problem.
If you can activate it, that's probably the best you can do. Yeah,
the other
I noticed one thing. In the most, most recent presidential election, the Republicans ran an ad, and when I saw it, I said, as somebody who used to study advertising techniques, I said that ad was brilliant. I said, it's probably going to be the single most effective ad against the Harris waltz ticket, and it was an ad that concluded with the lines, Harris and waltz Are for they and them. Trump and Vance are for me and you. And the idea was that they and them were people like transsexuals or people who had the sexual orientation or gender identity that's different from the norm, and they're very much in a minority. I think, I think that that was a hugely influential ad, because it gave the impression that the Democrats were not, were not just concerned about minority rights, but had carried this overboard to the point where they take the perspectives and the thoughts and feelings of a very tiny percentage of people and they amplify them so that they appear in the minds of the electric to be just obsessively focused on this tiny group and ignoring Just about everybody else. Now, that may be an unfair characterization, but I think that was the effect that the ad had. And it was essentially saying, not at an individual level, but at a group level. You know, some groups deserve all this extra focus of attention, having their thoughts and feelings weighted very heavily. And I think that what the ad, what he had worked was it created the sense of disproportionate or privileging the thoughts and feelings of a few at the expense of the many.
Yeah, that's, you know, that's what we try to work with in the empathy circle, that it's, you're not weighing any one group, that there's a sense of fairness and equality, that you'll you get a voice too. So I think that's important, you know, for any sort of policies, to make sure everyone feels like they've, they've had a voice. And I think the empathy circle helps at the core. And, you know, we also have free speech in the empathy circle. It's like, say whatever you want and you'll be whatever you say will be met empathically. And I find that that sort of slowly transforms the conversation, you know, makes it more real, or kind of goes deeper.
I guess the point I'm making is people don't have a problem with other people having a voice, where they draw the line and where they have the problem is if a very tiny but highly vocal group gets listened to a lot, and the vast majority of people, by comparison, get listened to less. Yeah, so it's not just, it's not just making sure that everybody has a voice. It's how much of a voice does each person or each group have, and and is it disproportionate, or is it fair to everyone, yeah,
with again, we used the empathy circle as a model. So in the empathy circle, everyone gets five minutes to speak and get reflection, and then it goes around, and people get multiple turns. So it takes away that part. We're just one person, even if they're in distress. You know, sometimes somebody's in the empathy circle and and they have a lot of distress, but they get just equal time with everyone else. So I think that's important, I mean, and what you're saying is people inherently, they they don't like when just one group gets, gets, you know, more of a voice disproportionately than others.
They see them as being singled out for special attention or special considerations.
Yeah. Well, that's, again, the empathy circle, I think, sort of models that you know, giving sort of equal voice to everyone. Yeah,
you know, I would, I would love to see. What happens if there was a generation of kids who went through public school participating in empathy circles, not just in one semester, but in repeated semesters, and then they developed that as a life skill, as a tool kit for seeking feedback from people in everyday life, parents, people in the community, people at their age level, older, people where they felt confident of their ability based on this kind of experience. To say here, you know when you said that, I thought maybe you meant this, is that right? Or it seemed to me that you got a little bit angry at that point. Were you really angry when you were saying that? What was it you were feeling? It sounds simple enough, and it is simple enough in conception to say, we all ought to have that tool, and we ought to be able to use it in any situation without causing offense, or people feeling like it's non normative, but I think it is non normative now in our society. But I think if you could somehow get people trained to do that very young, and let them carry it through in their lives outside of the empathy circle, we could transform society potentially.
Yeah, I totally agree with that, and that's what we're working on. That's really our mission, is to do that. I've been looking for a school. We'd like to have, a school where we could have all the students, teachers, you know, staff, would learn how to take part in an empathy circle. Is a sort of a model of what would happen. I think it would be a good if you know any graduate students or others who want to do a research program project, that would be a, I think, a great project to show what the effect is, you know, on the on the school culture and that. And one thing we do, like with the empathy circle, you do, I find, is, you do, we do the empathy circle, and you kind of practice this. And then when, and then when you have conversations that sort of that mindset. You know, when you're not, you're just talking to people, that same mindset is still there. And then when we have, let's say, and then, if you're in a relationship and you have some problems come up, we say, well, then go back to the empathy circle. I've got conflict starts happening. So, you know, and I've done that with my nephews and nieces, where they would, they're like, five, six years old, they get in a conflict. And I sit down and I listen to each of them actively listen, and then I have them do active listening with each other, and then they actually work out their problems. And then sometimes I hear they have a conflict comes up, and I say, Oh, you've got a conflict. What do we do? And they say we have an empathy circle, you know, so it's like kind of so you have that as a fallback too, like in a school, if you're going to learn the practice, I think it would shift the mindset. And then you also have a fallback, that if conflict does happen, you have some tools for working those out. Yeah,
some people, though we have to acknowledge, are reticent. They don't like to share themselves. They don't like to necessarily provide accurate information about what's going on with them, their thoughts and feelings, and if somebody tries to get that information from them, however diplomatically, however much experience they've had, successfully getting that kind of information and questioning others and getting feedback about their inferences of those individuals, thoughts and feelings, some people may be very reactive to that, and say, stay out of my head. Why are you asking me these questions about my thoughts and feelings? They're mine. They're private. They don't belong to you. And there are cultural differences that apply here as well. When we first started doing our empathic accuracy research many years ago at the University of Wisconsin, and then later at the University of Texas at Arlington, we would find that we'd have people participating in these pairs in the laboratory as strangers, and at the end of the session, we would find that there were individuals that wouldn't report their thoughts and feelings, they wouldn't write them down for us in the form of a sentence. Or we might find that they came up with one. But the rest of the you know, the rest of the time, they didn't come up with any. It turned out that what we observed over and over again, this was probably a product of the time. I'm sure it's somewhat different now, but this was back in the 1970s 19 early 1980s these instances often involved international students from Asian countries. At first I thought, well, maybe they don't understand what they're supposed to do. You know they're supposed to go through the view the videotape of the interaction they were just in. They're supposed to pause the videotape, and then at each of the points where they had a thought or feeling, they're supposed to write out the content of the thought or feeling. So I would talk to the students who weren't coming up with these thoughts and feelings, who weren't reporting them, and I'd say, did you understand that that was your task and how you were supposed to do it? They understood all that perfectly. And I said, Well, why didn't you write down any thoughts and feelings? And they seem, they seem to have a reason, but they were reluctant to share it. I had to get a little bit pushy, a little bit assertive, and saying, you know, it really would help us, since we're trying to develop this research technique to know why you weren't forthcoming with your thoughts and feelings. Finally, you know, when I pushed them, I started getting answers like I came here from Hong Kong. People live in constant interaction with other people, mostly strangers. People are all around you all the time. There's no privacy to speak of except in your own mind. And so our cultural norm is the one thing that you are allowed to, even encouraged to keep completely to yourself is your own thoughts and feelings. You have no obligation to share them, and it's rude for somebody to ask for them. So by the cultural standards that applied to those students at that time, we were incredibly insensitive. We were asking them to report their thoughts and feelings from this interaction they were just in that wasn't at all their cultural experience, and we were the rude people who were insensitive to their cultural standards.
Yeah, so different cultures have different levels of sharing then, so you
have to be sensitive. Try to introduce the the quality circle concept in, say, Hong Kong, back in those days, it would have been a real challenge. I would expect,
yeah, the we that empathy tent that I was telling you about. We take that out to public spaces and just offer active listening to people just out on the streets. So I'm in Berkeley and in Santa Barbara, kind of between the two places, and we'd taken it to UC Berkeley, Sproul Plaza, you know, offered listening. And just a couple months ago, we were at UC Santa Barbara, and we set up to, you know, we just set up a bunch of chairs. We had a group of people doing listening, and students could come by and sit down. And I just remember someone from China, a woman from China came, and a student from China came, and she was actually very open, you know, she talked about her mental illness and, you know, all the stuff she was going through, she shared how, you know, her parents are paying, you know, for her schooling, and she needed therapy. And it was therapy was helpful, but it was too expensive, and she felt bad about her parents, you know, having paying for it, so she stopped. And anyway it was, it could be, yeah, so anyways, just in terms of that same culture, there's probably differences in that culture too. And
he was very interesting. I think things have changed over time. I think that this, this reticence that we observed back in the 1980s is probably not there to the same extent, probably much reduced, you know, in the year 2024
Yeah, oh, yeah. So yeah. Another thing that I just had that I did want to ask you about in terms of the definitions of empathy. And I saw in some of your your work was there's when, when you look at the definite the current definitions, a common definition is that there's affective and cognitive empathy. And I find those terms not very helpful. I think that the cognitive and effective emotional and thought are so intertwined, it's hard to really differentiate those two. I just wondered what you think about those terms. You seem like I in one. Of the video audio interviews of you seemed like you had a little bit of skepticism about that too. Well,
actually, I would say, based on our experience, which involves roughly 20 years of doing these kinds of studies and looking at hundreds of interactions between pairs of individuals. What we one of the things we found was that people have virtually no difficulty distinguishing their own thoughts from their own feelings. So when we would have them pause the tape and write down the thought or feeling, they had two options. They had a thought box that they could choose to report a thought and they had a feeling box that they could choose to report a feeling. Now, if they had both a thought and a feeling, they were free to use both boxes, but people almost never told us that they had any trouble deciding whether what they were reporting was a thought or a feeling, it was an easy distinction for them to make. Now, occasionally, you know, what they're reporting is both a thought and a feeling, but the vast majority of reports were of things that they considered to be only a thought or only a feeling, not something that was both. But you're right, we, we didn't make a big deal of that in terms of are people more accurate inferring each other's thoughts or each other's feelings, because the research was showing that they were really pretty similar in their accuracy for thoughts versus feelings.
Yeah, when we do, when someone is speaking and sharing and you're reflecting back, it seemed like it's the thoughts and feelings, or least, least for me, or so intertwined that might maybe, yeah, and in fact, I mean, this is it seems to me that thoughts have a feeling, just that if you have a thought, that there is a felt experience associated with with the thought. If that makes sense, that if you go deep enough into a thought, you can start sensing the various feelings that make up that thought that makes sense
just factual statements that people make is not just teachers who are trying to convey course material that speak very matter of factly and report on facts. We do it. We do it at work. No matter what our occupation is, we answer questions that people ask us, like, how did what? What part of the building is this agency in? So it's the case that there are an awful lot of thoughts that we report that really don't have emotional content associated with them. But you're right. There are ones that were it is hard to separate the emotional content from the factual statement or the thought component.
Yeah, that seems to be the you know, how that those definitions got foreign. I mean, you've been doing this a long time. Have you seen that evolution of the definition of empathy? You know, the cognitive and effective empathy model.
I didn't feel like I really be began to understand what the term empathy meant, until I found something really old in the literature. Back in 1929 a German philosopher named Max Shaler, S, C, H, E, L, E, R, in German distinguished different types of experiences in which the thoughts and feelings of a perceiver reflect what's going on in somebody that they're perceiving and empathy is only one of those states. Taylor listed a bunch of others. We didn't have English equivalents for most of them, until a sociologist named Howard Becker, who was, I guess, fluent in German, worked to try to transfer or translate Becker's distinctions into English. And so Becker did a good job, I think, of distinguishing empathy from things like sympathy or empathy from what Becker called or what Shaler called competent, would be just feeling the same feeling at the same time another person is is having the feeling a husband and a wife are standing at the graveside of their deceased son and. Having the same feeling at the same time because of the situation and its common effect on them that's different from them, actively trying to figure out what's going on in the in the other person's mind. There's no need to do that, because of the situation guarantees that they're they're feeling the same thing at the same time. Taylor also translated one of these states as empathy, where suppose you're watching a person in the circus who's walking on a wire, and you see the person flinch, and you automatically flinch. That's not something that you're consciously trying to cognize. It's a it's an automatic response to a behavior that has a meaning to you. This person felt on the edge of peril. There's a moment of panic there, and you flinch and react to it without consciously trying to process. You don't need to do that. So when I when I found that, I found it very helpful. I describe shalers distinctions in my book everyday mind reading. And I talked about how empathy, if you think about a multi dimensional space in which these different forms of reactions to other people's experience occur, empathy is right in the middle. It's in the center. So it's in an ideal position to get confused with all of these other states which Taylor was so careful to distinguish from empathy. So empathy became a kind of a Rorschach word after a while. Not long after it was introduced, Theodore Reich, for example, in the 1940s said that empathy has so many different meanings now that doesn't have any meaning at all. It does. It's just that we haven't done as good a job as we need to do of recognizing that empathy is different from sympathy. It's different from compete, it's different from empathy, different from unipathy. I know these terms don't make much sense because they're the equivalent of terms that otherwise would not exist in English, since they were originally in the German. But I think you see what I'm getting at. We need to do a better job of doing a very rigorous, systematic, even philosophical analysis of these states and make fine distinctions among them. I think that a lot of the theorizing, as you're hinting, is been kind of crude and even careless.
Yeah, that's I'm thinking of even doing a book on defining empathy, like, you know, I had talked to Dan Batson. He says, you know, it you pretty much have to just lay out your definition of empathy and sort of stick with it, you know, and be clear about how you're defining it. So I did want to really articulate how I'm seeing empathy, but late put it into the context of an empathy circle, so that whatever aspect of those different, you know the terms you were using, that we can actually role play those in an empathy circle so that you can experience it. For example, you might have heard of the book against empathy by Paul Bloom with that one.
I haven't read the book, but I am familiar with.
So, you know, I had talked to him, you know, had the email exchange with him, and I just couldn't figure out, what is criticisms of empathy work. And then finally, something he wrote, he said, it's, it's like you go to his therapist, you're totally upset, you're totally angry, and then your therapist gets angry too. And that's that compathy, I think you were just saying, right? Or is that it's sort of a state matching use defining empathy is you get angry, you're angry, and then your therapist gets angry, which I think is actually a block the empathy, you know. So I think it's that term compete that you were using, is that
that might be the closest term from shalers list, or in terms of what people in the English speaking tradition have used, probably, they call it emotional contagion
state matching emotional contagion? Yeah, yeah. So we can, we can role play that in an empathy circle, where the you know, the people that the speaker, has that emotion, and then you as the listener, instead of. Reflecting back, you know, the speaker says, Oh, I'm totally angry. Then the speaker and the listener says, Yeah, I'm totally angry, too. And you can sense the difference between that. And then the listener saying, Oh, I understand that you're feeling angry. And then, you know, staying present with with the speaker. So it's, yeah, it's almost like the eye of a needle. There's such a there's so many different other experiences around empathy that it can get confused with and the same with sympathy, in the sense that I, if I in the speaker, talk about, really a struggle I'm having, I feel really down that you, instead of reflecting back the oh, I'm hearing you're having this struggle, and you're feeling down, sort of staying present with me, that you start saying, Oh, I feel so sorry for you. Or, you know, sort of a more of a sympathetic which is all and beat so to be able to experience the difference in the quality of empathic reflection, empathic reflect presence and these other subtle you know feelings or approaches,
sometimes feeling the same thing or what you suspect and believe is exactly the same thing that say a client in therapy is feeling may help you connect better with the client's experience. May help you be a more sensitive, effective therapist, but it may, in some cases, just derail you. Maybe what you need is to be objective and to have a separation between yourself and the client, and not let the clients feeling overwhelm your analysis of the client situation and what, what, what the elements of it are. Sometimes it might be helpful, sometimes it might not, to try to share the client's feeling at a given moment.
Yeah, in terms of that sharing of the client or the other person's feeling, the way I look at is the person has a feeling, and I'm sensing into that feeling, but I'm not, sort of, like overwhelmed with it. I'm still present, and I can listen to the feeling, and I can start hearing what's sort of behind the feeling.
And you can be more objective. You can say the feeling doesn't have to flood everything. The feeling doesn't have to overwhelm everything. Let's put the feeling in perspective with other things that are going on in the situation, in the client situation, that may be just as important or even more important,
yeah, and that can actually be helpful, because it keeps the person the from being sort of overwhelmed themselves when they hear someone else, you know, hear them. I think that's maybe one of the healing aspects of it. Just no one that there's somebody else there. So you have, you have that sense of connection with someone else, and that's sort of very supportive, and also maybe that sense of perspective or or, yeah, where it's it's not like all one feeling overwhelming you so anyway, imagine
that you have clients that come in and they catastrophize. Everything is blown up. It's huge. It's larger than life. You could you could quickly see that it might not be particularly helpful clients like that for you to co catastrophize along with them and make all these small problems seem huge and unsurmountable. What would probably increase your effectiveness as a therapist, is to say, wait a minute, is that big reaction really justified to something that most people would decide is pretty small and insignificant in the scheme of things? And I think Freud was concerned about that from the very beginning, that the therapist would get caught up in the patient's emotions, and that be less effective in helping the patient put it, put those emotions in a realistic perspective.
Yeah, well, that's where the empathy circle helps, too. By having four people in the circle, I find is that you have multiple points of view that empathic points of view, so if somebody is catastrophizing and the listener is reflecting back, but then the listener also gets a chance to speak, and their views, their feelings, their thoughts, get shared with someone else, you create A space where there's multiple people sharing and, you know? And, yes, and there's sort of more of an empathic, mutual, empathic space. So that person is catastrophizing doesn't fill the whole space.
And some of the other people say, Well, it's a big deal. To you, but it's never been a big deal to me, and I've gotten along just fine without blowing this up and making it a big emotional event suggests you know that your experience is not invalid. It's valid for you, but it's not the only experience people have in situations like yours, and you might actually adapt and perform better if you didn't catastrophize. Yeah,
so it's perhaps maybe put that into context for that person. So you're retired now from from your studies. Are you still doing work in this area? Or
I'm retired. I've been retired since about 2021 so it's been roughly three years.
Are you still doing kind of studies in your retirement? Or what's your interest now?
In 2005 I had an invitation to go to Belgium and spread the word about our empathic accuracy research. My wife went with me. It was a wonderful experience. We organized a series of conferences throughout Belgium. People came and presented their work and their ideas, and the goal was, when I left, planted the seeds for different lines of empathic accuracy research to be done by by people in that part of the world. And it pretty much worked, particularly at Ghent University in northern Belgium, and that group has, as they've continued to do empathic accuracy studies, occasionally, in fact, fairly often, given me a chance to participate, not in collecting the data or analyzing the data, but participate as one of their co authors and make contributions to manuscripts and help revise for publication. So I've kind of kept a hand in that way, but I'm not on my own collecting data actively now, and although it was wonderful to have a research career that extended over decades, it's been easier than I would have thought to scale it back and maybe even see it come to an end.
I started in this on this topic of empathy. Got interested about 15 years ago, and your work was sort of seminal work, you know, back when I first got started. So
I think it's a little bit ironic, as I sort of hinted earlier that it was wanting to study social interaction between strangers and wanting to figure out, what are all the behaviors they display coming at it from a strictly methodological point of view. And then once we figured out how to measure various observable interaction behaviors, getting kind of greedy and saying, Well, can we get more information from these videotaped interactions than how much they looked, how much they smiled, how much they gestured? And we came up with a way to look at the thoughts and feelings they were having. And then that led eventually to, well, what if we assess how well they can figure out each other's thoughts and feelings. My point is that I didn't start by intending to be an empathy researcher or an empathic accuracy researcher. The methods that we've been developing over the course of 10 years led me there. Then I said, Oh, we can do it. We can study empathy this way, might as well try and the research turned me into an empathy researcher. It wasn't a pre existing goal that I had so so in a way, I feel like there's something slightly fraudulent about how I came to be an empathy researcher. I was a person who was kind of obsessed with methodology, and by leading, following where the methodology led us, we wound up studying empathy.
Well, following that. That's kind of, that's how it happened for me, too. I didn't think, you know I was going to be getting into this empathy work years ago is just you kind of follow your interests, you follow the data, you fall and it just kind of leads you somewhere. It's kind of interesting, and then
you realize, well, you know, okay, I got to a place in my research interest where other people started, and it took me 10 years to get there. But that doesn't mean that my experience as a researcher is any less valid or interesting than theirs.
Well, what we're looking at is, you know, how do we spread this empathy, you know, as a cultural value. And you know, you're saying, if we can get empathy circles and trainings into the. Schools. I think, you know, it's a foundational value that can really improve cultural, societal well being, personal well being. So that's
a big challenge. And I think you may be aware of this, but I imagine there are many of your listeners that don't know about how in the early 1970s at the University of Texas in Austin, where I was a graduate student, one of my mentors, Elliot aaronson, was contacted by representatives of Austin Public Schools to help with the problem of racial tension in the schools following integration, suddenly, classrooms were integrated when they hadn't been before. And there was a real concern that minority students who were placed in classrooms where a lot of their new peers were the majority Anglo American students who may have had educational advantages that the nori students didn't have, they would be automatically second class citizens in these newly integrated classrooms. Well, aaronson and his team came up with the concept of the jigsaw classroom, where the students taught each other. Instead of the teacher doing all the teaching, the students were responsible for learning, each of them a different part of the course material. And then, in something very like your quality circles, a group of four or five, which would have a majority student, wide Anglo student, maybe a Mexican American student, an African American student, an Asian American student, they would take turns teaching each other. They're part of the material. Well, the students had better self esteem those who were in from minority groups, because they realized I'm making essentially an equal contribution compared to everybody else, their grades did not decline following being in these newly integrated classrooms they went up. There have been tons and tons of studies all over the country that have validated the effectiveness of this jigsaw classroom concept, and yet, because it's not their tradition, traditional way of doing things. Even though the data are overwhelming, it's been really hard to convince school boards. You can do slide show demonstrations, present them with all kinds of journal article data showing that this works. People are sucking their traditional views of how education should proceed. I think that the jigsaw puzzle concept, if it had been widely implemented across the country going back to when it was first introduced in 1970s over the last 50 years, might have just absolutely transform the landscape in this country, not eliminate all prejudice, all forms of discrimination, but reduce it a lot. By the same token, I think your quality circle idea, if it was widely used and adopted in public schools to transform an entire generation of people, and not just them, but how they raise their kids and how those kids raise theirs. The problem is, you introduce something that new and different, met by not reasoned opposition, but just kind of an unthinking we've never done it that way before.
Yeah, well, I feel that IQ, I might be enthusiastic about I think can have a real benefit and doing whatever I can to move that forward it, and I think in, you know, other people can build on it. It's like, I feel like I've kind of done my part, you know, I've, I've contributed as much as I can, and you know, future generations can pick up on it, and hopefully we can have more effective live to get it, some studies done, if you know of any, like I said, Any researchers or, you know, grad students who want to do a PhD on the empathy circle, or, you know, to get more studies on it. At
this point in my career, I'm not training graduate students, but it seems like something that a lot of graduate students would get excited about.
Yeah, well, we're trying to get it out there. You know, it's kind of spread the word is we have empathy summits, where we have, you know, speakers who have taken part in empathy circles, where they can, you know, talk about about their experiences and their insights. So, yeah, we're pretty dedicated to it. There's also the empathy tent, which we haven't really done. Much of since COVID, but we would go out to knock down, drag out political rallies, like a lot of the right wing would come to Berkeley after Trump was elected, in order to demonstrate here. And then it'd be counter demonstrations with Antifa and so forth. And it'd be maybe five of us in the empathy tent offering to listen actively, listen to both sides and help support them in listening to each other.
Sessions, videotapes they were
I can send you a video of it. There's a documentary called Trump phobia, what both sides fear, and it was a filmmaker she was traveling around the country, videotaping all these different demonstrations. And she came to Berkeley, saw our empathy tent, got really excited, did an interview with us, and videotape what we were doing, then invite us down to LA where there was a impeach Trump rally. And we took the empathy tent down there set up in the Los Angeles City Hall on their lawn, and it was these big demonstrations. You know, on the other side of the street was the pro Trump and anti Trump folks screaming and yelling. And we would bring one person from each side into the empathy tent, and I would sort of have them do an empathy circle, and we and during the day, we did five pairs, and we had six pairs of, you know, eat from each side, and five of them ended up, five pairs ended up giving each other hugs at the end. So, and I've got it on video. I'll send you a link to that part of the video.
It is what I'm wondering now. And you know, we're living at a time when it's getting harder and harder, in some cases, to distinguish between documentaries and feature films. But if you were to routinely videotape these kinds of encounters in the empathy tent, I bet that it would be possible to attract a feature filmmaker to come in and use those as source material, or creating a very dramatic feature film where professional actors may actually repeat the very lines, the very sentiments that were expressed by the people in your empathy tent, and produce an hour and a half two hour movie that offers some of the most dramatic examples of what you're talking about, people who would start out by yelling each other from their respective camps, not make any progress in mutual understanding, pulling them into the emphasis. And by the end of it, you're seeing the tears, you're seeing the hugs you're seeing the reconciliation of two human beings who were apparently at the beginning just completely opposed and irreconcilable.
Yeah, that we do need a film like that could have a huge impact something like that. You know, we do have someone who's, since
you're based in California, it's kind of natural to float that ideas and say, Who picks up on it?
Yeah, we do have a film like someone who's been studying film. He's still young, though, and he's trying to get into do a graduate program, you know, in the UCLA or New York. So he's really interested in that. And he he just sent off his applications, and I, you know, gave him a recommendation and just said how he was enthusiastic about creating films about empathy. So,
yeah, well, you could provide, if you routinely videotape these encounters in the empathy tent, you could provide lots and lots of these previously taped and counter source material that people could draw from. They'd have to get some degree of creative license in picking and choosing what they wanted to present in their feature film. But you could have actors who are good at conveying strong emotions, right? You have writers who are really good at picking the most dramatic moments and integrating them so that there's a building of the effect from the beginning of the film to the end. But that could be something super powerful, and that a lot of people would see, as opposed to just a relative few who are interested in the documentary of this sort, right
feature film with actors and you're just really seeing it, yeah, that would be, I mean, the empathy tent is so powerful because most of the most media we got was for the empathy tent. Work like it was on Fox and Friends on Breitbart. You know, Sacramento Bee. LA Times, the TV stations here in the Bay Area all sort of mentioned it, you know, in one way or another. So it really gets a lot of publicity.
Well, think about the effect it would have if it was a feature film, yeah, on your empathy tent sessions that wound up on Netflix. Yeah, that'd be powerful on prime where you have hundreds of millions of people potentially as an audience for that.
Yeah, definitely. It's just finding the right people to be able to do it and that hold that intention. Yeah, well,
I think one way to get a start is just with the position, with the signed consent of the participants. Tell them that you want to build up an archive of these encounters people are having in the empathy tent that they'll never be identified by name. They'll never be displayed their own personal image, but these will be interactions that are recorded and used as a source of inspiration for creative film, and specific lines might be drawn from their interaction and portrayed in the film. It won't be identified with them personally, I don't think it'd be too, too difficult with those assurances to get people to contribute to that kind of archive. And when the archives are big enough, and you can select great examples to show to filmmakers, I think that you can build that enthusiasm.
Well, I will send you the video. Would love to see what you think about it, and so maybe the media kit that we have have about it. And also, if you're you know, if you have any time to just think about how to get the empathy circle practice out there. I think the one thing about the this is it's good to have an actual practice, something tangible. It seems like it's, to me, it's sort of like the minimal viable process, you know, that it's, it's a little structure that incorporates that, you know, that active listening, that empathy, but in a small group so and from there, I just see it as sort of a gateway practice, you know, you got sort of a baseline empathy building practice and that we can build on. That is what we're doing, you know, build, you know, courses. Well, we have a training. We We hold these empathy circles on different topics. And in fact, one of them, if you don't know if I sent you that article, the Scientific America article, they mentioned an empathy cafe we did with the community and police. So we brought online, you know, community and members and police together to have empathy circles with each other. And that turned out pretty well. So, you know, having events like that, and that was all based on the everything references.
I've seen references to that online, where you hold those for the police, yeah. But another possibility is corporations, where people tend to do their creative work together is members of small groups, if you had something that you could bring in that was already well organized and tested, and you could provide that as a service, maybe for A fee, and be able to talk about tangible benefits to employers. That's something that employers might be willing to let you provide to their employees, to foster empathy, better communication, better feedback about what other people are thinking and feeling, to produce more cohesive, more respectful, more productive work groups.
Yeah, we're looking at that. We just had our empathy Summit, and one of the speakers was talking about how to bring empathy circles into corporations. So definitely, and we have a training a two day. We call it empathy circle facilitation training to learn how to facilitate these circles. It's pretty simple process, so you don't need a lot of people can just pick it up very quickly, but to go when you're dealing with conflict and so forth, the higher level of conflict, the more skills it's good, good to have. So we have a training for that. So yeah, bring it into the schools and and and into corporations, businesses. In fact, I'm writing co writing. There's someone that works on empathy in with museums. She's written a couple. Books, and she holds regular conferences on how museums can create more empathy. And she has a book she's putting together with a lot of editing, with a lot of different authors, on actual practices for fostering empathy. So we're working on a chapter for that book on how to do empathy circles in museums. So, yeah, that's, that's, so that's what we're doing, is really seeing, how do we get the nuts and bolts into the culture, you know, and all those are great ideas, and the corporations and business and schools and museums, you know, who's
going to sustain all this empathy related activity after you're gone? Do you have successors? Do you have a succession plan? Yeah,
we have a nonprofit. The the empathy Center is a nonprofit, so it's the 501, c3, and we have a we have five people on the board of directors, so it's, you know, when I go, the organization will keep going. So, you know, we're really setting the foundation. It's really planting the seeds, so it keeps, you know, going and growing.
Well, this sounds like an exciting time to be doing what you're doing? Yeah,
well, it's a pleasure to talk with you, Bill, with as I mentioned, as I said, you know, I saw your work way back when I was first getting started. So you've been really, you know, doing a lot of great work, you know, on this empathic accuracy, and it's a real reference. And, you know, people build on your work, right? So you've, you're putting down some, you know, some foundational work for building this empathy movement. And you know, really appreciate that, and appreciate you taking the time to, you know, chat with me about this, and glad to talk anytime on this topic, and
let me reciprocate and tell you how much I've enjoyed finding out about all the things that you and your group are doing. I didn't understand just how diverse those activities were and what the potential was for so many of them. So congratulations to you and your colleagues. I wish you guys great success. Take it public, get it get it just as publicized as you possibly can. We've talked about a few ways that could be done, but I hope that you find avenues for making that happen. Yeah,
and spread the word. If you, any of your community friends are interested, we're glad to talk with them. And, you know, work together and collaborate so well, okay, and I'll put them in touch with you. Okay, very good. Bill. Real pleasure. So, take care, take care, bye, bye.
