Is empathy always good? | Bill Nye, Alan Alda, Paul Bloom & more | Big Think

Is empathy always good?
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Empathy is a useful tool that allows humans (and other species) to connect and form mutually beneficial bonds, but knowing how and when to be empathic is just as important as having empathy.

Filmmaker Danfung Dennis, Bill Nye, and actor Alan Alda discuss the science of empathy and the ways that the ability can be cultivated and practiced to affect meaningful change, both on a personal and community level.

But empathy is not a cure all. Paul Bloom explains the psychological differences between empathy and compassion, and how the former can "get in the way" of some of life's crucial relationships.
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TRANSCRIPT:

0:00 Intro
0:30 Bill Nye on the evolution of empathy
1:15 Alan Alda’s empathy exercise
4:52 Empathy in virtual reality
5:55 How empathy backfires
7:36 Empathy vs. compassion

​- Why are we empathetic?
- It's something that we can foster and cultivate.
- But if you sink into that feeling and get lost in it then it's no longer a tool. It's something that's working against you.
- Empathy is exhausting. It is unpleasant. It is difficult. And it makes you withdraw.

BILL NYE: Why are we empathetic? Just consider what a tribe would be like, a tribe of humans, would be like without empathy, without ability to feel what someone else is feeling, without ability to see it from another person's point of view. You probably wouldn't be a very successful tribe. You wouldn't take care of each other. You probably wouldn't divide up tasks. You do this and I'll do that. I know that's hard for you, I'll do this. Well, I'm good at this. I know you're good at that, so you do that and I'll do this. I mean, imagine a tribe without empathy. So my claim, which is extraordinary at first, is not only are size and shape determined by the process of evolution but so are our feelings, and empathy is part of that. Our ancestors without empathy were not as successful.

ALAN ALDA: I find, and I think other people who have studied empathy have found that there's more patience associated with empathy. This is an amazing thing. I find other people less annoying. Isn't that's funny? Because I get a little more empathy about what they're going through, or what I think they're going through, or what I can hear from things they say. And instead of being annoyed by them, I think I think I know where this is coming from and it explains it, and just getting the explanation of what might otherwise be annoying behavior or an annoying thing they're saying, the annoyance kind of evaporates. It's not that empathy is making me a better person, it just gives me a little more patience. So in that regard, it probably does make you a little, a little easier to get along with. But I noticed when I get more empathic my voice gets more intimate. My face is more welcoming. And the funny thing is, I think I see that happening on the person I'm talking to. I think they're responding to what's happening to me. And I'm getting from them a more relaxed tone, a more relaxed, accepting visage. This strange thing about empathy is as valuable as it is, we tend to lose it. It tends to evaporate.

It's very easy to lose your touch in making contact with other people. I see it happening to me. I see it happening to other people. So I thought, is there something I can do on my own that would build empathy and keep my empathy thermometer at a high enough temperature? So I started experimenting on myself. I love to experiment on myself. And I thought, okay it has something to do with reading emotions. So why don't I, as I walked down the street as I go into a restaurant or talk to friends, why don't I try to figure out what they're feeling? And maybe it will be really good if I name the feeling. And I was talking to a psychologist about this and he said, "You came up with this by yourself?" I said, yeah. He said, "I'd like to study that." So he did a study where he had people doing this, during the day for a week. He gave them a standard empathy test at the beginning of the week. And at the end of the week, he gave them another empathy test to see if their scores in empathy would go up by doing this exercise. And he had other things they did to control variables. And what was interesting was not only did their scores go up, the more they did it so that the people who only did it twice didn't go up very much. But the people who did it a hundred times during the week their scores went up considerably. Not only that, it wasn't just naming the emotion that they thought they saw in the other person, it was just noticing the other person...

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