[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

Thu Feb 23 23:40:57 UTC 2017

Thanks for the video, Natalia (I also enjoy RSA videos). At the risk of
seeming that I lack compassion (I hope not!), I have some thoughts on it. :)

To me it seems like Brené Brown is conflating empathy with compassion
and/or understanding, and is completely mis-defining sympathy in order to
prop up empathy as a better alternative. (This makes me think this is a
technique for argumentative fallacy, maybe "reverse straw man"? "Begging
the question"?)

Specifically, these are the example conversations she uses for sympathy:

   - "I just had a miscarriage."
      - "At least you know you can get pregnant."
   - "I think my marriage is falling apart."
      - "At least you have a marriage."
   - "John is getting kicked out of school."
      - "At least he is an A-student."

I'm not sure that sounds like sympathy to me (wiktionary defines sympathy
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sympathy> and empathy as basically the same
thing, where the former is weaker than the latter). Is a silver lining the
defining aspect of sympathy?

In any case, the risk expressed in the article I linked is
<http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/when_empathy_hurts_compassion_can_heal>
that empathizing can lead to poorer decision-making (bias) and emotional
burnout on the part of the empathizer:

> Negative emotions did not disappear after the loving-kindness training;
> it’s just that the participants were less likely to feel distressed
> themselves. According to Klimecki and her colleagues, this suggests that
> the training allowed participants to stay in touch with the negative
> emotion from a calmer mindset. “Compassion is a good antidote,” says
> Klimecki. “It allows us to connect to others’ suffering, without being too
> distressed.”
>
> The main takeaway is that we can shape our own emotional reactions, and
> can alter the way we feel and respond to certain situations. In other
> words, says Klimecki, “Our emotions are not set in stone.”
>

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 3:09 PM, Natalia Harateh <nharateh at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Thanks for sharing, Max! I’ll definitely read the article. If I can add to
> the discussion, here’s a short 2:53 min video explaining empathy in a way
> that resonated with me <https://youtu.be/1Evwgu369Jw>.
>
> TL;DR:
>
> *What is the best way to ease someone's pain and suffering? In this
> beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only
> create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get
> in touch with our own fragilities.*
>
> On 23 Feb 2017, at 23:53, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> I ran across an article claiming that empathizing with others on their
> issues can be a slippery slope to bias, or at the very least unnecessary
> absorption of another person's issues and feelings. The article was
> political in nature, so I won't post it, but it did make some claims that I
> thought to research.
>
> That let me to this article on compassion as an alternative to empathy:
> http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/when_empathy_
> hurts_compassion_can_heal
>
> I can't attest for the reputation of the site linked, but it makes some
> interesting arguments. I thought those arguments might be relevant since we
> often operate in an environment with, and espouse values using, words like
> "empathy."
>
> TL;DR:
>
> we can better cope with others’ negative emotions by strengthening our own
>> compassion skills, which the researchers define as “feeling concern for
>> another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that individual’s welfare.”
>> “Empathy is really important for understanding others’ emotions very
>> deeply, but there is a downside of empathy when it comes to the suffering
>> of others,” says Olga Klimecki, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute
>> for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany and the lead author of
>> the study. “When we share the suffering of others too much, our negative
>> emotions increase. It carries the danger of an emotional burnout.”
>>
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