Evolution of Empathy
How has empathy evolved in humans?
How do we navigate our differences at work, at home, in politics, and in society? In this enlightening, lightly humorous, and research-based talk, Dr. Jamil Zaki delivers an astonishing overview of empathy: how it really works, why it truly matters (especially to workplaces), why it’s on the decline, and how to build it back up through deliberate practice.
NPR Podcast
The End of Empathy
We believe in empathy. But are we right? In this episode, we'll let you decide. We tell the same story twice in order to examine the questions: who deserves our empathy? And is there a wrong way to empathize?
By: Paul Bloom
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.
The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
By: Jamil Zaki
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.
Frans B.M. de Waal
Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Psychology Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322; email: dewaal@emory.edu
Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy
Evolutionary theory postulates that altruistic behavior evolved for the return-benefits it bears the performer. For return-benefits to play a motivational role, however, they need to be experienced by the organism. Motivational analyses should restrict themselves, therefore, to the altruistic impulse and its knowable consequences.
ARTICLES TO READ
Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality
By: Brian Hare
The challenge of studying human cognitive evolution is identifying unique features of our intelligence while explaining the processes by which they arose. Comparisons with nonhuman apes point to our early-emerging cooperative-communicative abilities as crucial to the evolution of all forms of human cultural cognition, including language.
The emergence of human prosociality: aligning with others through feelings, concerns, and norms
By: Keith Jensen, Amrisha Vaish, and Marco F. H. Schmidt
The fact that humans cooperate with nonkin is something we take for granted, but this is an anomaly in the animal kingdom. Our species’ ability to behave prosocially may be based on human-unique mechanisms…Empathatic concerns align individuals with one another, and norms align individuals with their group.