The Compassionate Instinct

A few weeks after Mother’s Day, we met here in the sanctuary after the service and considered whether to become a Welcoming Congregation [a congregation that welcomes gay people]. When John stood in support of the resolution, and spoke of how, as far as he knew, he was the first gay man to come out at First Parish, in the early 1970s, I cried for his courage. Later, when all hands went up and the resolution passed unanimously, I cried for the love expressed by our congregation in that act. That was a tear of celebration, a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says it’s okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it’s in our nature. That kind of tear is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in.

PART TWO:HOW TO CULTIVATE GOODNESS IN RELATIONSHIPS WITH FRIENDS, FAMILY, COWORKERS AND NEIGHBORS

INTRODUCTION

Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith

IT’S ONE THING to recognize the potential for human goodness, as contributors did in the previous section; it’s something else to realize that potential.

The essays that follow are intended to help us do just that. Each one offers concrete, research-tested steps for building stronger, more compassionate relationships with spouses, coworkers, friends, family, and other people in our daily lives.

It goes without saying that it can be difficult to take these steps, for human relationships are complicated and shaped by social context. Take, for example, empathy, a skill that is a fundamental building block to our individual happiness and well-being, as well as to a peaceful society. Like many pieces of advice, the age-old adages to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” and “see the world from someone else’s perspective” can sound painfully naive. Indeed, they seem to go against human nature, serving as moralistic attempts to rein in our tendencies toward self-interest. Can we truly understand what other people are thinking or feeling—and if so, how?

Those are the questions at the heart of many of the following essays, several of which explore the human capacity for empathy and how it is related to behaviors like gratitude, forgiveness, and altruism. But it’s not always clear what the term empathy means and how it differs from other concepts, like sympathy. In this section, many contributors highlight what is sometimes called “perspective taking”: understanding what another person is seeing and feeling to the point that you actually begin to feel those same emotions yourself. (By contrast, sympathy involves recognizing the suffering of another person and feeling sorry for that person, but not sharing his or her sad or distressed emotions.)

With that definition of empathy in mind, it’s not hard to see why we should try to cultivate it. Perspective taking enables us to see things from our spouse’s point of view or helps us to build workplaces that demonstrate care and compassion for employees. Our sense of justice and fairness stems from our ability to really understand other people’s emotions and therefore respond to their suffering.

Gratitude is another seemingly simple skill that just doesn’t seem to fit into contemporary American society. Indeed, argues psychologist Robert Emmons in Part I of this book, “We’ve come to overlook, dismiss, or even disparage the significance of gratitude.” It’s easy to understand why. After all, “thank you” is one of the first phrases we teach children to say—how complicated could the concept be? We see gratitude as a basic form of politeness, like chewing with your mouth closed, and we don’t usually consider what deeper significance it may hold.

Yet the fact that we try to make “thank you” such an essential part of a child’s vocabulary and that children (and adults) often have a hard time bringing themselves to utter those two words suggests that gratitude is more complex than we typically assume. Indeed, as many contributors to this book make clear, true gratitude is more a state of mind than a single act, and it takes real effort to cultivate. The same can be said of forgiveness and apology and indeed any act that acknowledges our interdependence with other people and deepens our social ties.

Fortunately, we have good reason to believe that most of us can develop empathy and gratitude, as well as forgiveness and apology and other related skills—and there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should. As several essays in this book reveal, skills like these can serve as powerful tools to build health, trust, cooperation, and respect between people in a number of daily situations, from home to work to politics.