Several years ago, I invited people into the lab and asked for detailed descriptions of the last time they felt a love of humanity. They described a time that a friend had donated an organ to a stranger, an experience building homes with Habitat for Humanity, and a stranger who brought back a wallet. 

A feeling of pride permeated these stories—a sentiment that said, I am one of these humans that can do good. They felt joy at being part of the human species—and we found that those momentary experiences of love of humanity left people motivated to do good themselves. It seems that when we identify with humanity, we are more likely to concern ourselves with others’ well-being. The reverse also appears to be true: people who frequently experience love of humanity have a stronger sense of being part of it.

Can we measure these qualities? Recently, psychologists Sam McFarland, Matthew Webb, and Derek Brown developed the Identification With All Humanity (IWAH) scale, which asks questions about how close, connected, affiliated, and concerned participants feel toward three groups: those in one’s immediate community, citizens of one’s own country, or people all over the world.

Here at the Greater Good Science Center, we turned this scientific scale into a quiz for our readers, which more than 2,000 people completed.

In analyzing the results, we found readers generally identified most strongly with people all over the world, followed by their community and then fellow citizens—which raises interesting questions about the values and experiences of our readers, and how those might shape their identities. We also asked demographic questions that allowed us to explore how key life details influence identification with humanity, country, and community. Here are some of the results.

Older people have a greater sense of common humanity. Love of humanity (and also of country and community) increased throughout life until middle age, when it plateaued. But then growth resumed as participants neared 70, with the elderly reporting 20 percent stronger love toward people all over the world than those younger than 18.

What stunts identification with others for 40-60 year olds, most dramatically in the “all humans everywhere” category? Is this an age when preoccupations with career and family stall pro-social sentiments? Or is there something unique about those generations? This needs more study. But the overall lifetime trend is clear: As we age, it seems we come more and more to discover commonality with other people.

Women feel more common humanity than men (and they take more quizzes). Three times more women than men took our quiz, and women reported greater identification with all three groups on our five-point scale: community (3.7 vs. 3.5), country (3.5 vs. 3.2) and humanity (3.8 vs. 3.6). But before you put men on Mars and women on Venus, consider the fact that the pattern is the same for both sexes: highest for humanity, followed by community, then country. The real difference is that women seem to identify much more strongly with groups in general. Why might that be the case? This result points to a much bigger discussion about how women think about themselves in the love/care realm and the extent to which this is a function of the complex intersection between biology and acculturation.

Liberals identify more with community and humanity than conservatives do; conservatives identify more with the fellow citizens than liberals do. Political orientation was systematically related to identification with community (the blue line in the graph at left) and people all over the world (green), but not fellow citizens (red). As we move to the Right on the political spectrum, identification with all people everywhere drops, and identification with citizens of one’s country shoots up among the “very conservative.” Conservatives tended to equally identify with community and fellow citizens.

That said, of the people who completed the quiz, only 161 rated themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative,” suggesting that the population sample was biased toward liberal. This bias might reduce the impact of conservative viewpoints on the overall data. If there were equally as many conservatives who took the quiz, for example, would more conservative people show even greater willingness to identify with fellow citizens? But as is, the pattern of those 161 conservatives differs considerably from that of our liberal readers.

Money can’t buy love of humanity. Generally, people with higher annual household incomes rated higher levels of identification with community and country, but this pattern did not hold for identification with all humanity. People making less than $15,000 per year showed the least identification with community and fellow citizens, which is consistent with Maslow-ian theorizing about basic needs and self-actualization—i.e., identifying with all humanity would be a privilege closer to self-actualization. People making $50-75,000 annually showed the highest levels of identification with community and fellow citizens, which dropped again in higher income brackets. However, annual household income had no systematic influence on their inclination to identify with people all over the world.

Spiritual people show more common humanity. In one of the most striking, consistent effects, self-reported spirituality strongly predicted the magnitude of identification with all three groups—community, country, and humanity. Why might this be the case? Many spiritual traditions explicitly advocate common humanity thinking and the “Golden Rule” (treat others as you wish to be treated)—and this might make it easier to consider all kinds of other people as “family.” Another factor to consider: Spirituality, as well as spiritual practices like prayer and meditation, are also associated with reduced stress and anxiety, and a greater sense of community. People have an easier time identifying with others when they are not stressed themselves, and when they feel enmeshed within a supportive community. 

Race and geography don’t make much of a difference. Ethnic background did not predict systematic differences in strength of love toward community or humanity. However, when I collapsed together responses from all non-white quiz takers and compared those to white quiz takers (3/4 of the respondents), non-whites reported slightly greater love of fellow citizens.

Where people live had only a minor impact on how much they identify with people in their communities, country, or all over the world, although West coasters (a majority of respondents) showed significantly greater love of humanity than people from the Midwest.

Why do we love the world?

Taken together, our Love of Humanity quiz begins to paint a picture of a primarily female, liberal, white, fairly spiritual population’s willingness to identify with people all over the world, followed by people in their communities, and least with fellow citizens.

There is something idiosyncratic about the love of humanity exhibited by Greater Good readers, given the nature of the questions. Logically, one might think that Love of Humanity should be the lowest value, since it’s the biggest bucket. However, this may be a case where logic doesn’t explain human behavior as well as a more nuanced, psychological perspective that takes emotions and interpersonal sentiment into account. How and why is it that Greater Good readers identify less with fellow citizens and communities than with people all over the world? Is there something easier about saying that you feel connected to people all over the world than to people in your own community or country of citizenship? Do memories of conflicts or ideological disagreement factor into our identification with communities or fellow citizens, but not into thinking about people all over the world?

This is an area that we have only just started to investigate—and we’d love to hear your own responses to these questions in comments.

He admits that empathy can do a lot of good: Decades of research shows that feeling empathy can lead us to be more caring, forgiving, and altruistic.

But according to Bloom, empathy also can do a lot of bad. It’s an untrustworthy moral compass because it is “parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate.” Empathy seems tuned to only one frequency, that of a single identifiable victim, with whom we feel some personal connection. According to Bloom, these biases make empathy ill-suited to help us confront crises like natural disasters, genocides, and climate change. Bloom concludes, “Empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.”

According to this argument, empathy is a double-edged sword. It can tug at our heart-strings and move us to help others, but its irrational biases can also be our moral downfall.

Though compelling and provocative, Bloom’s argument rests on empirically questionable assumptions about the limits of empathy—and in some cases, current research outright contradicts his points. In fact, the science says we can expand our empathic bandwidth and sensitize ourselves to situations with large numbers of strangers. The problem isn’t with empathy itself. Instead, it’s how people handle their empathy that matters.

Is empathy like a fossil fuel?

First, consider the claim that empathy is “innumerate”—a word that suggests empathy is a fixed and limited resource, like oil or natural gas.

Many scholars, from Buddhist monks to utilitarian philosophers, have argued that we should expand our moral circles and extend empathy to all beings. Yet Bloom suggests that “our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible.”

He has an intriguing point: If we are incapable of empathizing with all beings, then empathy may not be the safest basis for universal moral rules. And the research may seem to suggest as much. Many studies show that we empathize more with a single identifiable victim—such as the little girl trapped in the well—than with large groups of suffering victims, like the unidentified masses of starving children overseas. You see this difference if you compare one victim against thousands, against a dozen, or even against two victims. Studies have tried to counteract this identifiable victim effect by encouraging people to think more carefully, but to no avail. It seems like empathy is constrained to the few: When we need to feel the most empathy, we ironically feel the least. As Bloom writes, “It is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover.”

By this logic, empathy is a limited resource: There’s only so much to go around, so it doesn’t make sense to ask us to extend it to everyone. That would be impossible. But, paraphrasing the cool reason of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, perhaps the impossible can be more probable than it seems. What if the limits on empathy aren’t so rigid after all?

In my research, I have found that the limits of empathy are actually quite malleable. Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act.” If she thought about just how many suffering victims there were in the world, it would have been emotionally paralyzing and prevented her from actually providing help.

When confronted with charity appeals and stories about natural disasters, we may find ourselves in a similar position. We may think that trying to empathize with mass suffering would be emotionally overwhelming or financially unwise, and decide to actively turn off our empathy response. Studies have shown that this process happens when faced with single victims. For instance, college students will avoid situations that trigger empathy for a homeless man if they think they will be asked to donate lots of time or money. Additionally, doctors have been shown to spontaneously suppress empathy for patients’ pain, perhaps as a means to avoid becoming emotionally overwhelmed.

My research builds on these findings and extends them to large-scale crises, such as the unrest in Darfur. As I have described in an earlier piece for Greater Good, “How to Expand Your Compassion Bandwidth,” my work suggests that the identifiable victim effect is due to an active choice to turn off empathy.

But if you get people to think that empathy for others won’t be costly, they don’t show the identifiable victim effect—thus motivation seems to matter. And only people who can skillfully control their emotions show this effect—so emotion regulation seems to matter as well. The identifiable victim is due to strategic empathy avoidance, rather than reflecting a basic limit on how much empathy we can feel.

Therefore empathy doesn’t have to be innumerate: People can feel more empathy for more victims when they want to. Bloom claims that “to the extent that we can recognize the numbers [of victims] as significant, it’s because of reason, not empathy.” My work suggests precisely the opposite—reason often stands in the way, strategically preventing empathy from unfolding when more victims are involved.

Ironically, Bloom foreshadows this point when he notes that “some individuals staunch their empathy through the deliberate endorsement of political or religious ideologies” and that “the empathy gap is situational… they have chosen to shut down their empathetic responses.” But Bloom does not connect the apparent limits of empathy to such empathy avoidance, and thus mistakes a situational empathy gap for a problem inherent to the emotion itself. 

The research so far says empathy isn’t a non-renewable resource like oil. Empathy is more like wind or solar power, renewable and sustainable.

Is all empathy local?

This confusion also applies to Bloom’s second claim, that empathy is “parochial”—that we can apply it only to those who are like us or physically close to us. By focusing us on salient victims close to home—as Americans did when violence struck Newtown and Boston—empathy may seem to blind us to victims that are physically far away or socially distant. Or even to our future selves, as in the case of global warming and its long-term effects. We feel more empathy for those that are near and dear.

But again, this may not be a limit inherent to empathy itself but have more to do with how we handle our empathy. Empathy for the in-group over the out-group may reflect a strategic decision to erase empathy for people who are different. My lab is currently exploring how these parochial biases in empathy may be due to strategic decisions to regulate empathy to avoid perceived costs.

Empathy may not be limited by scope or similarity. What may matter more is whether you think that empathy is limited in these ways. Some situations and traits make people afraid that empathy will be overwhelming or threatening, and so they make themselves callous. A comparable debate exists over ego depletion—that self-control is a limited resource that gets tired, like a muscle. Some studies have found that self-control is a limited resource only for the people who believe that it’s a limited resource. In a similar vein, the people who believe that compassion is a limited resource may avoid feeling empathy altogether, creating the very deficit they were worried about.

These considerations imply that people’s expectations about empathy can have powerful effects on how much empathy they feel, and for whom. Identification with all humanity is an empirically documented individual difference that predicts more empathic emotion and behavior. And research with mindfulness interventions suggests that training people to approach, rather than avoid, their emotional experiences can decrease fear of empathy and increase pro-social behavior.

Is empathy amoral?

Even were Bloom to concede the previous points, there is a deeper concern that his essay raises: that “empathy leads us astray only when we take it as a moral guide.”

Bloom acknowledges that clinical psychopaths show no empathy and commit morally atrocious behaviors. But he claims that empathy may not be necessary for morality, as autistic individuals who lack empathy can still act morally because of their strict adherence to moral rules.

What he fails to note is that for many people, empathy and moral rules are tightly bound to one another. Research finds that people who value being moral also tend to feel more empathy.

Indeed, empathy may be the motivating “spark of fellow-feeling” that connects a cognitive appreciation of moral rules to actual moral behavior. One of the messages from Simon Baron-Cohen’s book The Science of Evil (cited by Bloom) is that empathy suppression in everyday contexts can create a moral landscape not unlike that of the psychopath. For those of us who create situational empathy gaps by actively pushing empathy to the side, we may erode the bedrock of our own morality.

Bloom claims that “there is no evidence to suggest that the less empathetic are morally worse than the rest of us.” In fact, the research says otherwise. In my work, I have found that people who regulate empathy—by comparison to those who regulate distress or who do not regulate any emotion—erode their moral principles and values. As Greater Good has pointed out, callousness has a cost: suppressing empathy forces people into a state of cognitive dissonance in which they begin to either value morality less or relax their standards for moral behavior. Importantly, these facets of the moral self-concept each predict real-world moral behavior.

As Bloom rightly notes, some situations really seem to require us to override empathy. Think about the surgeon in the operating room, the judge who has to make a fair ruling, or the public health official who has decided to sacrifice some lives to save many more. Pushing empathy aside might seem like the right course of action in these cases because it clarifies the moral principles in play. But research suggests that doing so might actually undermine these principles and have worse consequences down the road.

Empathy doesn’t erode on its own. We make active choices to push empathy to the side, and that is what seems to account for the supposed limits and biases of empathy. If we understand that, then we can understand how to keep renewing and expanding our feeling for others.

Research shows that relationships are built from interactions, and interactions are built from moments. A critical moment in an interaction is when one person wants something from the other one. (“Wants” include wishes, needs, desires, hopes, and longings.) The want could be simple and concrete, like “Please pass the salt.” Or it could be complex and intangible, such as “Please love me as a romantic partner.”

Wants can be communicated in many ways. Gaze, touch, tone, facial expression, posture, and action speak volumes. Whether verbally or nonverbally, some people express their wants clearly, but many do not. The more important a want is, the more likely it will leak out slowly, or be expressed with a lot of distracting add-ons and emotional topspin.

Now what?!

Think of a significant relationship, at home or at work. How clearly have you expressed your own wants in it? How do you feel when the other person makes a sincere effort to give you what you want?

When I reflect on these questions myself, it makes me realize that it’s not so easy to communicate clearly and that I should cut others more slack.

Second, it makes me realize that I should generally try to give others what they want if it’s reasonable and possible. Out of self-interest, doing this is the best odds way to get off their radar, build goodwill, and take the moral high ground. Out of benevolence, doing this is kind and caring. Everyone is scared and hurting, not just me.

Of course, I do not mean giving people things that would harm them, you, or others. Nor do I mean giving up asking for what you want. And if they’re rude, demanding, threatening, snippy, high-handed, or harsh, then their want could be a nonstarter until they change their tone.

In essence this practice is about an inner freedom. You are free to decide what is reasonable in what the other person wants and what you are going to do about that. You are free to disentangle yourself from your emotional reactions to their wants. And free to live by your own code, honoring your own values and perceptions of reality, no matter what others do.

How?

Find out what they really want. Sort through the surface clutter to the real priority for the other person. What could be the softer, deeper, younger longing? Perhaps ask questions like: What is important to you here? What would it look like if you got what you wanted?

Most people want pretty straightforward things: Put the cap back on the toothpaste. Don’t interrupt so much. Ask me questions each day about myself, and pay attention to the answers. Be nice to me. Keep being my lover even while we raise children. Pull your weight with housework. Stick up for me with others. Be interested in how I feel. Most of the time, it’s really not that hard to give someone what they want. It’s more a matter of whether you want to.

Once you have a pretty clear idea about what the person wants, decide for yourself what if anything you are going to do. Remember that your wants matter, too, and that you can’t give without also filling yourself up. And remember that giving others what they want is usually a good way to take of yourself.

Personally, it was a great breakthrough to realize that giving others what they wanted was not knuckling under to them. Rather, it was a kind of triple-bonus aikido move that tapped into my caring for people while pulling me out of conflicts and putting me in the best position to ask for what I wanted myself. I redefined situations in which people criticized me into a kind of game in which I unilaterally eliminated the reasonable basis for their complaints, and began to enjoy what’s traditionally called “the bliss of blamelessness.”

Pick something reasonable and just give it to the other person for an hour or a week without saying a word about it, and see what happens. Pick something else and see what happens. When it feels right, talk about what you’re doing. When you like, also talk about your own wants.

This practice may seem like a high bar. But actually, when you make the shift, it’s like walking downhill with the wind at your back. You are still taking care of your own needs and not letting people push you around. Instead of getting caught in sticky quarrels, you’re delivering the goods as best you can and moving on.

Know what it’s like to be with someone who takes care of herself while also giving you what you want as best she can? That’s what it’s like to be with you when you do the same yourself. Very sweet!

These plans have been met with angry protests from teachers and parents who argue that the closures will force students to cross dangerous gang lines on their way to school. In Chicago at least, officials have promised to give these children “safe passage” to and from school, and to provide counselors to help them adjust.

It won’t be enough. If the closings go as planned, the districts’ work will have only just begun. But if the cities heed lessons from sociology and social psychology, they may be able to keep a difficult situation from getting even worse—and, in the process, improve relationships between kids from clashing neighborhoods.

Research that one of us (Trinh Tran) has conducted suggests that the threats to displaced students may even go beyond stray bullets on the way to school; they’re also at risk to have their class sizes balloon and their teachers leave their jobs at a higher rate.

What’s more, when kids from different neighborhoods are merged into the same school, they face greater risks of conflict within school. That’s in part because the school becomes a battleground for warring neighborhood identities.

These are all findings from Trinh’s fieldwork in the south side of Philadelphia, an area demographically similar to the neighborhoods affected by Chicago’s and D.C.’s school closings. There she studied the experiences of students from low socio-economic neighborhoods who attend either their neighborhood school or a magnet school in another part of town. Even within neighborhood schools, kids told her that they don’t feel safe. For decades, some of the streets where they live have been warring with another street a few blocks over—and these turf battles continue in the school hallways.

“It’s about the block you live on,” one student told her. “I live near 27th Street and apparently that’s one of the most hated streets. … After a while, I just stop telling people where I live [or] I’m gonna find myself hurt somewhere.”

That’s the situation even at neighborhood schools; at magnet schools, which pull from many more neighborhoods, the potential for conflict is much worse.

Yet Trinh has also found that conflict in the magnet schools is often less than in neighborhood schools. How is that possible?

The answer lies in the way these magnet schools have managed to foster a new collective identity that trumps students’ neighborhood identities. Creating this identity requires members of conflicting neighborhoods to come together—sometimes a tall order, given the groups’ histories. But Trinh found that magnet school students identified more with their school than their neighborhood, in part because of the strong school spirit and cross-neighborhood friendships encouraged by the magnet schools.

Indeed, these findings show how when bringing together students from conflicting groups, districts can not only help these students adjust to their new schools but help promote peace between opposing neighborhoods.

Of course, magnet students choose to be at their school; kids impacted by the closures might resent that they’re forced to change schools or to open their doors to rival neighborhoods.

But time and again, social psychology research has found that personal contact between members of different groups can actually help those groups overcome prejudice and conflict, even when group members are less motivated to intermingle—as along as certain important conditions are in place. So what are those conditions?

First and foremost, the interactions need to be friendly and endorsed by authority figures. In schools welcoming new students, this could mean that principals take the lead in creating a “buddy” or mentor program, where existing students take a new one under their wing, under the supervision of a teacher, counselor, or other adult at the school. Without this initial “friendly” interaction, group cohesion will be difficult to create.

Another important condition is that both parties feel like they’re of equal status. This means that returning students shouldn’t get first choice of cubbies, lockers, classes, or extracurriculars; instead, schools should convey that newcomers are just as much a part of the school community as anyone. They could even involve students in choosing a new mascot and school colors, soliciting equal input from old and new students alike.

Finally, to promote peace between groups, group members need to have common goals and a sense of interdependence that gives them incentive to cooperate. For instance, early in the school year, principals might create an academic or athletic competition within the school, grouping the students into teams that intentionally cut across neighborhood boundaries.

None of this will be easy; weathering these transitions will require hard work and commitment from all involved. But, in the end, these efforts may yield a benefit that everyone can get behind: safer neighborhoods and schools.

For students in a first-grade class at Park Day School in Oakland, California, the most in-depth project of their young academic careers involved several months spent transforming their classroom into an ocean habitat, ripe with coral, jellyfish, leopard sharks, octopi, and deep-sea divers (or, at least, paper facsimiles of them). Their work culminated in one special night when, suited with goggles and homemade air tanks, the boys and girls shared what they had learned with their parents. It was such a successful end to their project that several children had to be gently dragged away as bedtime approached.

By the next morning, however, something unexpected had occurred: When the students arrived at their classroom at 8:55 a.m., they found yellow caution tape blocking the entrance. Looking inside, they saw the shades drawn, the lights out, and some kind of black substance covering the birds and otters. Meeting them outside the door, their teacher, Joan Wright-Albertini, explained: “There’s been an oil spill.”

“Oh, it’s just plastic bags,” challenged a few kids, who realized that the “oil” was actually stretched-out black lawn bags. But most of the students were transfixed for several long minutes. Then, deciding that they were unsure if it was safe to enter, they went into another classroom, where Wright-Albertini read from a picture book about oil spills.

The children already knew a little bit about oil spills because of the 2010 accident in the Gulf of Mexico—but having one impact “their ocean” made it suddenly personal. They leaned forward, a few with mouths open, listening to every word. When she finished, several students asked how they could clean up their habitat. Wright-Albertini, who had anticipated the question, showed them footage of an actual cleanup—and, suddenly, they were propelled into action. Wearing gardening gloves, at one boy’s suggestion, they worked to clean up the habitat they had worked so hard to create.

Later, they joined their teacher in a circle to discuss what they learned: why it was important to take care of nature, what they could do to help, and how the experience made them feel. “It broke my heart in two,” said one girl. Wright-Albertini felt the same way. “I could have cried,” she said later. “But it was so rich a life lesson, so deeply felt.” Indeed, through the mock disaster, Wright-Albertini said she saw her students progress from loving the ocean creatures they had created to loving the ocean itself. She also observed them understand a little bit about their connection to nature and gain the knowledge that, even as six and seven year olds, they could make a difference.

It was a tender, and exquisitely planned, teachable moment that reflected what 
a growing number of educators have begun to identify as a deeply felt imperative: To foster learning that genuinely prepares young people for the ecological challenges presented by this entirely unprecedented time in human history.

“Ecoliterate” is our shorthand for the end goal of this kind of learning, and raising ecoliterate students requires a process that we call “socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy”—a process that, we believe, offers an antidote to the fear, anger, and hopelessness that can result from inaction. As we saw in Wright-Albertini’s classroom, the very act of engaging in some of today’s great ecological challenges—on whatever scale is possible or appropriate—develops strength, hope, and resiliency in young people.

Ecoliteracy is founded on a new integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence—forms of intelligence popularized by Daniel Goleman. While social and emotional intelligence extend students’ abilities to see from another’s perspective, empathize, and show concern, ecological intelligence applies these capacities to an understanding of natural systems and melds cognitive skills with empathy for all of life. By weaving these forms of intelligence together, ecoliteracy builds on the successes—from reduced behavioral problems to increased academic achievement—of the movement in education to foster social and emotional learning. And it cultivates the knowledge, empathy, and action required for practicing sustainable living.

To help educators foster socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy, we have identified the following five practices. These are, of course, not the only ways to do so. But we believe that educators who cultivate these practices offer a strong foundation for becoming ecoliterate, helping themselves and their students build healthier relationships with other people and the planet. Each can be nurtured in age-appropriate ways for students, ranging from pre-kindergarten through adulthood, and help promote the cognitive and affective abilities central to the integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence.

1. Develop empathy for all forms of life

At a basic level, all organisms—including humans—need food, water, space, and conditions that support dynamic equilibrium to survive. By recognizing the common needs we share with all organisms, we can begin to shift our perspective from a view of humans as separate and superior to a more authentic view of humans as members of the natural world. From that perspective, we can expand our circles of empathy to consider the quality of life of other life forms, feel genuine concern about their well-being, and act on that concern.

Most young children exhibit care and compassion toward other living beings.
This is one of several indicators that human brains are wired to feel empathy and concern for other living things. Teachers can nurture this capacity to care by creating class lessons that emphasize the important roles that plants and animals play in sustaining the web of life. Empathy also can be developed through direct contact with other living things, such as by keeping live plants and animals in the classroom; taking field trips to nature areas, zoos, botanical gardens, and animal rescue centers; and involving students in field projects such as habitat restoration.

Another way teachers can help develop empathy for other forms of life is by studying indigenous cultures. From early Australian Aboriginal culture to the Gwich’in First Nation in the Arctic Circle, traditional societies have viewed themselves as intimately connected to plants, animals, the land, and the cycles of life. This worldview of interdependence guides daily living and has helped these societies survive, frequently in delicate ecosystems, for thousands of years. By focusing on their relationship with their surroundings, students learn how a society lives when it values other forms of life.

2. Embrace sustainability as a community practice

Organisms do not survive in isolation. Instead, the web of relationships within any living community determines its collective ability to survive and thrive.

By learning about the wondrous ways that plants, animals, and other living things are interdependent, students are inspired to consider the role of interconnectedness within their communities and see the value in strengthening those relationships by thinking and acting cooperatively.

The notion of sustainability as a community practice, however, embodies some characteristics that fall outside most schools’ definitions of themselves as a “com- munity,” yet these elements are essential to building ecoliteracy. For example, by examining how their community provisions itself—from school food to energy use—students can contemplate whether their everyday practices value the common good.

Other students might follow the approach taken by a group of high school students in New Orleans known as the “Rethinkers,” who gathered data about the sources of their energy and the amount they used and then surveyed their peers by asking, “How might we change the way we use energy so that we are more resilient and reduce the negative impacts on people, other living beings, and the planet?” As the Rethinkers have shown, these projects can give students the opportunity to start building a community that values diverse perspectives, the common good, a strong network of relationships, and resiliency.

3. Make the invisible visible

Historically—and for some cultures still in existence today—the path between
a decision and its consequences was short and visible. If a homesteading family cleared their land of trees, for example, they might soon experience flooding, soil erosion, a lack of shade, and a huge decrease in biodiversity.

But the global economy has created blinders that shield many of us from experiencing the far-reaching implications of our actions. As we have increased our use of fossil fuels, for instance, it has been difficult (and remains difficult for many people) to believe that we are disrupting something on the magnitude of the Earth’s climate. Although some places on the planet are beginning to see evidence of climate change, most of us experience no changes. We may notice unusual weather, but daily weather is not the same as climate disruption over time.

If we strive to develop ways of living that are more life-affirming, we must find ways to make visible the things that seem invisible.

Educators can help through a number of strategies. They can use phenomenal web-based tools, such as Google Earth, to enable students to “travel” virtually and view the landscape in other regions and countries. They can also introduce students to technological applications such as GoodGuide and Fooducate, which cull from a great deal of research and “package” it in easy-to-understand formats that reveal the impact of certain household products on our health, the environment, and social justice. Through social networking websites, students can also communicate directly with citizens of distant areas and learn firsthand what the others are experiencing that is invisible to most students. Finally, in some cases, teachers can organize field trips to directly observe places that have been quietly devastated as part of the system that provides most of us with energy.

4. Anticipate unintended consequences

Many of the environmental crises that we face today are the unintended consequences of human behavior. For example, we have experienced many unintended but grave consequences of developing the technological ability to access, produce, and use fossil fuels. These new technological capacities have been largely viewed as progress for our society. Only recently has the public become aware of the downsides of our dependency on fossil fuels, such as pollution, suburban sprawl, international conflicts, and climate change.

Teachers can teach students a couple of noteworthy strategies for anticipating unintended consequences. One strategy—the precautionary principle—can be boiled down to this basic message: When an activity threatens to have a damaging impact on the environment or human health, precautionary actions should be taken regardless
of whether a cause-and-effect relationship has been scientifically confirmed. Historically, to impose restrictions on new products, technologies, or practices, the people concerned about possible negative impacts were expected to prove scientifically that harm would result from them. By contrast, the precautionary principle (which is now in effect in many countries and in some places in the United States) places the burden of proof on the producers to demonstrate harmlessness and accept responsibility should harm occur.

Another strategy is to shift from analyzing a problem by reducing it to its isolated components, to adopting a systems thinking perspective that examines the connections and relationships among
the various components of the problem. Students who can apply systems thinking are usually better at predicting possible consequences of a seemingly small change to one part of the system that can potentially affect the entire system. One easy method for looking at a problem systemically is by mapping it and all of its components and interconnections. It is then easier to grasp the complexity of our decisions and foresee possible implications.

Finally, no matter how adept we are at applying the precautionary principle
and systems thinking, we will still encounter unanticipated consequences of our actions. Building resiliency—for example, by moving away from mono-crop agriculture or by creating local, less centralized food systems or energy networks—is another important strategy for survival in these circumstances. We can turn
to nature and find that the capacity of natural communities to rebound from unintended consequences is vital to survival.

5. Understand how nature sustains life

Ecoliterate people recognize that nature has sustained life for eons; as a result, they have turned to nature as their teacher and learned several crucial tenets. Three of those tenets are particularly imperative to ecoliterate living.

First of all, ecoliterate people have learned from nature that all living organisms are members of a complex, interconnected web of life and that those members inhabiting a particular place depend upon their interconnectedness for survival. Teachers can foster an understanding of the diverse web of relationships within a location by having students study that location as a system.

Second, ecoliterate people tend to be more aware that systems exist on various levels of scale. In nature, organisms are members of systems nested within other systems, from the micro-level to the macro-level. Each level supports the others to sustain life. When students begin to understand the intricate interplay of relation- ships that sustain an ecosystem, they can better appreciate the implications for survival that even a small disturbance may have, or the importance of strengthening relationships that help a system respond to disturbances.

Finally, ecoliterate people collectively practice a way of life that fulfills the needs of the present generation while simultaneously supporting nature’s inherent ability to sustain life into the future. They have learned from nature that members of a healthy ecosystem do not abuse the resources they need in order to survive. They have also learned from nature to take only what they need and to adjust their behavior in times of boom or bust. This requires that students learn to take a long view when making decisions about how to live.

These five practices, developed by the Berkeley-based Center for Ecoliteracy, offer guideposts to exciting, meaningful, and deeply relevant education that builds on social and emotional learning skills. They can also plant the seeds for a positive relationship with the natural world that can sustain a young person’s interest and involvement for a lifetime.

These are the stories of bullying that Emily Bazelon explores in her new book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate.com, has done her research, talking to all of the players involved—experts, families, schools, and both bullies and victims—to get at the complicated dynamics of these events. And because of her willingness to suspend judgment and to listen to all sides, she has some interesting insights to share.

For one, many of the kids labeled as bullies in these stories don’t see themselves in that light. Instead, they consider their verbal taunts as part of normal teen “drama,” which plays out continuously in middle school and high school. While Bazelon found that many students seem to recognize the wrong in teasing kids who are weak or helpless, they don’t always see verbal taunting as bullying—especially if the victim has equal or near equal social status, or has given as good as they got.

Kids find many social rewards for bullying, which perpetuates the problem. As Bazelon writes, “Maybe they’re after a laugh from another kid they want to impress, or induction into a clique; maybe they want to publicly distance themselves from a friend they sense is now seen as a loser.” These kinds of rewards make bullying an insidious problem hard to resolve easily.

However, not all kids react the same to bullying. Many find it abhorrent and will stand up to bullies at school. Also, while some victims fall apart when taunted, others learn to handle it, by employing friends, disengaging from the conflict, or otherwise growing from the experience. In other words, taunting between students—at least from a teen’s perspective—may not always have only negative consequences.

Bazelon believes that the media fuels fears around bullying that are exaggerated, and that parents often react in out-of-control ways, making the problem worse. The vast majority of kids in schools don’t bully, she says—at least not if you define bullying as abuse repeated over time and involving an imbalance of power, the definition attributed to Dan Olweus, the researcher who first popularized the anti-bullying movement.

And therein lies the problem: Too many incidents are labeled as bullying and then relentlessly prosecuted in the media, sometimes leading to more trauma for families and fragmenting communities, when a gentler, less knee-jerk reaction is what’s needed to help improve the situation.

“For better or worse, adults play a crucial role in bullying stories,” writes Bazelon. “When the narrative spins out of control, it’s usually not because of the errors and wrongdoing of kids.”

For example, the girl who was labeled a whore at school had been suffering from depression for quite awhile before killing herself. Her death was a tragedy—but were the kids who taunted her really to blame? Instead, the girl should have been receiving treatment, to help her through her depression and build her coping skills. But too often there are not enough resources at the school to follow all of the kids who are suffering from mental illness, and it’s easier to put the blame on the bullies.

This is also where Bazelon’s case for character education and empathy come in. If we put our energies toward getting everyone in a school to agree to treat each other with respect and consideration—teachers and administrators, as well as students—we will improve the social climate for the vast majority of students. Individual counseling and more serious reprimands can be reserved for victims and bullies who need that kind of attention.

Bazelon evaluates some of the programs that have a proven track record for changing school social climates, including a “positive behavioral intervention and supports” program developed at the University of Oregon and Olweis’ anti-bullying curriculum. Using examples from schools that have implemented these and other programs, she illustrates how much of their success depends on their implementation.

“As I traveled from school to school and talked to expert after expert, I concluded that the most important thing is for a school to pick one approach that administrators, teachers, and parents buy into and stick with it,” she writes.

But the problem isn’t just with schools, writes Bazelon. When TV reality shows, political commentators, and other media regularly glorify putdowns and posturing, they send a message that it’s OK to bully. She also admonishes parents to play their role, by learning how to stay connected to their children and monitor their online lives, while being careful to not over-react to social “drama” and allowing their kids to make mistakes and grow from them.

Bazelon has a beef with social media sites like Facebook, who seem “eager to sign up our kids and encourage them to share, share, share,” but who could and should “invite in some administrators and counselors who are currently sweating over cyberinvestigations, and ask them how to make their jobs easier,” perhaps by offering a hotline or email drop box where schools could alert Facebook to posts that involve bullying.

The main message of the book is that we all need to do our part to protect kids and to not get lost in anti-bullying frenzy. Vigilante-like attacks don’t do any good. A better approach is to teach positive social-interaction skills to everyone, so that kids can help police each other and can trust that adults are on their side, willing to help.

I hope that Bazelon’s book will raise some awareness on the matter and further push schools towards adopting effective social-emotional learning programs. Then, perhaps, we’ll all have fewer of these heart-wrenching stories in our lives.

This school seemed to be on to something, and I secretly wondered whether the students needed our help at all. When I got to class, I asked the children to tell me about the signs, and what it meant for them to be kind.

“Just be nice,” one child said. “Don’t be mean,” said another. 

I was sure it was fairly easy for them to be kind to their friends, but I wondered whether they could extend this kindness to others. I asked if they could be kind to someone who had bullied them.

“No way!” yelled one child.  “Probably not,” said another. Some of the other children looked puzzled. 

I knew from that moment that we had work to do. Many of us recognize the benefits of kindness and compassion, but how do we learn to be more kind—even to those who commit unkind acts? 

Training compassion

My colleagues and I at Emory University believe people have a natural capacity for empathy, love, and compassion, and that it can be deliberately deepened and expanded—to include even so-called “bullies”— through training. 

Compassion involves both the heartfelt wish that others be free from suffering and the readiness to act on their behalf. It arises from a deep sense of affection for others, coupled with a sensitivity to their pain and the recognition that their suffering can be transformed. 

Most of us find it easy to feel compassion for those that are close to us. The closer we feel to someone, the more unbearable it seems to witness their pain. It is more difficult, however, to feel compassion or even concern for strangers, those that are not like us, or those who have harmed or wronged us in some way. When it comes to those we dislike strongly, we may feel little if any discomfort in seeing their suffering, or may even, in the worst cases, take pleasure in it.

In order to learn to extend our compassion in ever-widening circles, including to those whom we have had difficulties with, we need to cultivate impartiality. To enhance our feelings of closeness and connection to others, we must generate affection toward them. One strategy for this is to cultivate gratitude for others by reflecting on the kindness of others and the countless ways in which we depend on others to survive. These two conditions—impartiality and affection—are necessary for compassion. 

Feeling moved by suffering is not necessarily the same as compassion, however. Sometimes witnessing pain can overwhelm or even paralyze us. Thus it is just as important to foster inner strength and courage as it is to cultivate sensitivity to others’ pain. We gain this strength in part by deepening our insight into the causes of suffering and recognizing that it can be overcome. When we realize that we have the capacity to transform our suffering, we gain the confidence and determination to do so. This courageous practice of open-heartedness, insight, and vulnerability is what we call self-compassion. 

These three ingredients—impartiality, affection, and self-compassion—form the basis of our Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program. CBCT, a secular compassion program developed by Geshe Lobsang Negi at Emory University, draws from the lojong or “mind training” tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and involves the systematic practice of gradually training the mind in compassion until compassion becomes spontaneous. 

The program is “cognitively-based” in that it relies on analytical meditations that encourage us to actively work with our emotions and cognitive appraisals in order to release hostility and indifference toward others and develop deep feelings of affection for, and positive connection with, others. This style of meditation does not involve simply thinking about something in a purely intellectual or detached way. We have to make it personal. The point of these reflections is to gain insight into the ways we think of and relate to others, and to deepen these insights through repeated reflection and practice until they transform the ways in which we treat others. 

Be kind (it’s good for you)

Simply wishing to be kind, or telling our children to do so, won’t necessarily make us caring or compassionate (just as simply wishing for money won’t make us wealthy!). But if we develop and cultivate the conditions for compassion, it will arise and deepen naturally. 

Being kind isn’t just about being nice or polite; it is also good for us. Our research has shown that CBCT training can reduce stress as well as the activation of autonomic and immune pathways that have been implicated the development of a host of chronic, stress-related illnesses, including depression, heart disease, and diabetes. But these benefits don’t simply come from attending classes or thinking about being more kind or compassionate. One of the most important implications from these studies is that practice matters: one needs to meditate regularly in order to effect real change. 

CBCT training also helps us build skills necessary for sustaining and enhancing our personal relationships. Practicing CBCT enhances our empathic accuracy—that is, our ability to infer others’ mental states—which is essential for building our social relationships. These skills are especially important for many adolescents in foster care who have difficulty forming new, healthy relationships in part because of past trauma or neglect. Compassion training seems to help these children build inner strength and gain the emotional tools necessary for opening to and connecting more deeply with others. 

CBCT aims to help participants gain psychological flexibility, learn to reduce suppression or avoidance of intrusive thoughts and emotions, and increase positive emotions and social connectedness, all of which may promote coping and resilience. Although CBCT was not designed to treat trauma specifically, our team is exploring its potential application as an adjunctive therapy for the treatment of PTSD. Members of our team are also investigating the efficacy of CBCT for suicide attempters at a local hospital in Atlanta, GA. 

We have also begun to explore ways in which CBCT can promote prosociality and well-being in schools. Our team developed curricula for elementary school children (ages five to nine) that not only teaches them the practices of mindfulness and attention but also facilitates their emotional intelligence and moral development through the practices of self-compassion, impartiality, empathy, affection, and engaged compassion for others. We are currently evaluating the effects of this program on prosocial behavior, bullying, social exclusion, stereotyping, and bias at a local school.

It is our hope that further research can help us learn the most effective and developmentally appropriate ways to help our children (and ourselves) learn both why and how to be more kind, compassionate, and caring. 

Though we have not published the results of this program yet, our work in elementary schools seems to be making a difference. We spent a lot of time during the course working towards cultivating compassion for bullies. A few weeks into the program, I asked the children how they would feel if their best friend got in trouble at school for saying something unkind to another student. One girl said that she would feel very bad, because she knows that her best friend is a really good person, and that she would only ever say something like that if she were really upset. 

I understood what she meant—it’s certainly easier for us to forgive those that are close to us, for we are able to see them as complex beings, capable of doing or saying unkind things from time to time, even if deep down they are really good people. Then I asked if she would also feel bad for the school bully if she got in trouble for saying something unkind to another student. “Well, no, but….” she said, pausing for a moment. “Well, I might feel a little bad. Maybe she was just upset, too.” 

Something clicked in that moment: part of learning to relate to others, even bullies, is learning to recognize them as just like us in wanting to be happy and free from suffering. Learning why others are unkind is part of the path of learning how to be kind.

But new scientific findings suggest that Mrs. Obama may need to add another component to her program: volunteering.

In a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, 106 10th-grade students were asked to volunteer in after-school programs where they worked with elementary-aged children for 60 to 90 minutes per week for 10 weeks; another group of 10th graders, who were waitlisted for volunteering, served as a control group.

Compared to the non-volunteers, the students who volunteered showed a steep drop in risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including cholesterol levels and body mass index, at the end of 10 weeks. These benefits were even more pronounced for students whose empathy and altruistic behaviors increased the most and whose negative moods lessened over those 10 weeks.

So, while the study didn’t focus on decreasing obesity specifically, it did show that volunteering may prevent one of its potential consequences: heart disease. And it has the added value of increasing kind, helpful (or “pro-social”) behavior—a nice alternative to the low self-esteem and academic troubles that can result from childhood obesity.

The findings add an exciting new physical dimension to what scientists know about the many social and emotional benefits volunteering brings students, including: higher levels of positive emotions; a stronger ability to regulate their emotions; lower levels of risk behavior, such as early pregnancy and drug use; increased civic engagement and moral reasoning; and a greater likelihood of volunteering in adulthood.

So for schools that already provide volunteer opportunities for their students—keep up the great work! Research tells us that you’re benefiting your students not only mentally and emotionally but physically as well.

But for those schools that haven’t yet integrated volunteering into the curriculum, or for those that would like to make student volunteering more effective, here are some research-based tips.

1) Make service social. As much as possible, provide opportunities for students to engage directly with people who are receiving the service. One study discovered that student volunteers who worked directly with people versus those who didn’t afterwards felt a stronger connection to other people in general, along with the belief that they could make a difference in the world. Another study showed that direct contact made students more likely to take a stand on issues they cared about, for instance by demonstrating or boycotting about those issues. In general, research has found that social connection provides a vast array of physical and mental health benefits, whereas loneliness weakens our cardiovascular and immune systems.

While the authors of the JAMA study didn’t test different kinds of service, I think it’s quite possible that volunteering helped the students’ hearts because it fostered greater connections between them and younger students; indeed, if they felt stronger empathic connection to others, these cardiovascular benefits increased even more. I know when I was a teacher, I saw a significant change in my older students when they were given the responsibility of working with kindergartners. It was as if they had taken an empathy pill—one that made them more patient, understanding, and kind.

2) Service-learning vs. community service—take your pick! Some schools mandate community service through formal service-learning programs, while others make service voluntary through more informal community service opportunities.

According to researchers, it doesn’t matter which way you go—both have the same positive impact on students, particularly when compared with students who never volunteer. So, what’s important is that students are volunteering—period.

However, I would add from personal experience that requiring service might help students who would never consider volunteering try it out—and they just might fall in love with it. Case in point: One of my best friends was required to do community service in high school and found that working with autistic children changed his life. Rather than becoming a lawyer, he decided to teach high school and start his own fabulous service-learning program.

3) Consider the people and organizations receiving service. While most of the studies on service-learning and volunteering focus on the students who perform the service, some researchers decided to turn the lens around and ask those receiving service about their experience. And what they found isn’t all roses.

Imagine this scenario: An enthusiastic 16-year old arrives at your workplace, ready to save the world. However, this teen has very few skills and even less knowledge about the work your organization does. Oh—and can only help three hours a week for six weeks total. Needless to say, the organizations interviewed for the study responded with a hearty, “AAACKK!!”

So when you’re sending your students off to volunteer, be sure to communicate with the organizations ahead of time to find out what their needs are and consider if your students have the skills and time to fill those needs.

I take heart that so many schools already have volunteer programs in place—together, you’re creating a world of do-gooders. And as we’re learning, so many activities that are good for the world are also good for students’ own minds, bodies, and hearts.

I’d love to hear from those of you who work with student volunteer programs about what does and doesn’t work. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to share your experience with other readers.

Yet there is a gray area in between total parental rejection and the absolute, all-consuming love that we consider normal. In that gray area there are the children whom parents must struggle to love. They are children with disabilities so profound that the parents are denied any possibility of a normal life. They are the children of rape. They are children who grow up to commit heinous criminal acts. They are also children whose identities make them outcasts, such as boys who wish they had been born girls and girls who come to identify as male.

According to author and psychologist Andrew Solomon, these extreme cases reveal something fundamental about the parental condition. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity,” he writes in his new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. How can parents see the world through the eyes of these strangers—and in doing so, love them for who they are, not who we wish them to be?

Solomon won the 2001 National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Advisor on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered affairs to the Yale School of Medicine. For Far From the Tree, Solomon interviewed 250 families facing issues that range from schizophrenia and deafness to rape and transgendered identity. The book is about how parents can bridge differences with their children—but it’s also about how groups of people who seem very different from each other can use their own experiences to develop empathic connection and find common ground.

I sat down to interview Solomon at Berkeley’s Hillside Club, shortly before he gave a talk co-sponsored by the Greater Good Science Center.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Why did you write this book?

Andrew Solomon: Twenty years ago my editors at the New York Times asked me to write about the deaf on the grounds that I had done a lot of reporting about foreign cultures and this was a foreign culture in our midst.

I immediately saw parallels between the experiences of deaf people, with their claim on culture that was questioned by the outside world, and gay people, who had made a similar claim. And I found that most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and that most gay children are of course born to straight parents. I wrote a lot about the ways in which in exploring the deaf experience I found this resonance with my own experience as a gay man.

Then a few years later a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf, and I heard her asking all the same kinds of questions that hearing parents of deaf children asked themselves: “Do I bring her up to be friends with other dwarfs? Do I tell her she just like everyone else, only she’s shorter? What is the approach supposed to be here?”

As I listened to that experience, I suddenly saw this recurring theme: this idea of parents who perceive themselves to be normal and children who perceive themselves to be different—and parents who don’t know how to deal with these children who are different. If it’s true in these categories, I thought, then it must be true in a lot of others, too. That’s the state of being I explore in Far from the Tree.

JAS: The research is staggering. You ultimately had 40,000 pages of interview transcripts, and you did background research into each of the issues the families faced, including autism, dwarfism, prodigial intelligence, and criminality. Why was it necessary to cast such a wide net? What were you trying to accomplish?

AS: I really felt like I had insights into each of the individual syndromes I wrote about, but my primary insight was the way they’re all the same.

But you can’t argue that difference is the one thing that unites us—that people dealing with schizophrenia, criminality, and genius are all going through similar experiences—unless you really establish yourself as an authority in each of those areas. You can’t just skate over the surface and say, “I met one family that had a child with schizophrenia and one family who had a transgendered child—and I decided their experiences were the same.” You have to be able to say, “I’ve really looked at these communities.” I needed all that research in order to make the argument that I wanted to make.

And in some measure, I needed all that research in order to discover the arguments I ultimately made. It seemed to me at the start that there were some similarities, but I didn’t know right away what the similarities were. I had to discover them through the research.

JAS: Even the unlucky reader will be affected by at most one of the issues you touch upon. What do they stand to gain from reading about all these other issues?

AS: Dealing with any one of these situations can be a lonely experience. There aren’t all that many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are not that many families dealing with autism, or criminality, or Downs Syndrome.

But if you look at the experiences that are common to families dealing with all of these kinds of difference—if you search for what all these experiences have in common—then you find yourself not in a weird, marginalized, lonely little group, but part of something that constitutes perhaps the majority of humanity: families that have a child who is strikingly different from the parents in some way.

But I have yet to meet anyone who hasn’t at some point looked at their child and said, “Where did you come from?” Parenthood can be very lonely. I’d like to think that if you find common cause with these people, you’d feel less alone. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed: “Why did you agree to sit down and talk to me?” And they would answer: “I really felt like I had been so alone, and I thought that if I could tell my story, I would help people not feel as lonely as I did.”

JAS: What did you find were the qualities of parents who were able to survive and thrive in the face of their children’s difference?

AS: The most resilient people sought meaning in these experiences. They made a deliberate decision to construct meaning. At the beginning, people would say to me: “I found it so meaningful having a child with severe disabilities, I’m so glad I had this experience.” And I thought that it sounded artificial and foolish to me.

But as time went on and I spent more time with these families, I changed my mind. All of us have children who are in some measure flawed, and we love with our flawed children with their flaws. We might want to help them to be less flawed, but we certainly don’t want to exchange them for other children.

I also realized that one has to make a choice. You can look at an experience like this and say, “I wish I had had a different life”—and spend the rest of your existence regretting the life that you had. Or you can decide that you’re going to find what is meaningful in your life. I think the construction of meaning takes a while. Parents have to have both love and acceptance—two things that don’t always go hand in hand. The construction of meaning is something that can be undertaken quite consciously and quite deliberately. Some people say that God had a greater purpose for them. Some people say it has nothing to do with God, but I’m going to find a greater purpose.

And there’s no question that while this may not be the way in which you would have chosen to grow, that these experiences cause people to grow. Many people said, “I now feel much more deeply about life, about love, about myself, about others—than I ever would have if I didn’t face these challenges.” If they didn’t do that, it made it much harder for them to parent their children. Having an embittered relationship to your own life—even if it’s fully justified, and the completely reasonable, rational response—is toxic. It makes it hard to live your own life and it makes it hard to take care of your child, which you need to do.

So, in the end, I thought: Even if you don’t see much meaning in it, if you dig up just a little bit of meaning, then it will soften your experience. I’m not saying that everyone should turn their lemons into lemonade, or try to cast a rosy glow over painful and difficult experiences. I don’t think you should say, “Oh, it’s not so painful and difficult, it’s all wonderful.” Instead, you need to be able to say, “It’s extremely painful and difficult, and yet there are some notes of meaning to found in it.”

JAS: You devote a section to families with children who became criminals. I’m curious if you found parents dealt with criminality—which most people see as a question of behavior instead of identity—differently than those with mental or physical disabilities.

AS: The first half of my book is about things that are disease entities and the second half is about things that are more socially constructed. These are children who present an impediment to love—and how to parents contrive to love them anyway?

There are some criminals who come from homes in which they were hideously abused or exposed to criminality, but a lot of them come from homes with very nice parents who appear not to have committed any crimes and who are quite distressed that their children are doing this. And as I spent time with these families I came to feel that criminality is more like an illness than some of the illnesses I was writing about. You have this child, you’ve done your very best, you’ve done things pretty well, and this child behaves in this strange way.

It’s a lot like autism in that regard—there’s a child who is doing things that are alien and inexplicable to you, and you can’t figure out what to do about them. A lot of the families I met really wanted to bring about a change, and a lot of them of course felt guilty or implicated because they felt they had somehow caused this. A lot of them felt angry, because they felt they child should be able to control it. But I ended up feeling that many of the children didn’t have much more control over their aberrant behavior than autistic people do.

JAS: What about the relationship with the rest of the world? Many of these situations come with a lot of stigmatization and marginalization—how did families negotiate that?

AS: The stigma is diluted by a sense of community. At the request of people in book, I created a website, farfromthetree.com, which is a place where people can tell their stories and interact with others. I think the thing that makes people feel most self-assured in the face of stigma is interacting with people who are dealing with stigma. When you build a community of people who are dealing with the stigma together, then you can get a civil rights movement going.

There’s the stigma and marginalization, and there’s also the fact that people with these conditions mostly are supposed to have access to a lot of services that are very difficult to obtain, and require a lot of know-how and wherewithal to extract from the apparatus of government. There’s a lot of managing of these conditions and managing the care that one should be getting.

JAS: What cultural or political changes could serve to de-marginalize and de-stigmatize the families?

AS: I really think that if we can get all these families to all work together, to recognize this commonality of interest, then they are a large force that could really militate for social change and recognition. I think we need to have much better services for people dealing with these things. I think we need to get rid of the shame and blame game.

But we also need to see a capacity for accepting that identity is a fluid idea. Something that constituted an illness when I was growing up, like homosexuality, now constitutes an identity. Things that are currently illnesses might come to be seen as identities down the road. Many people living with conditions that we on the outside would hate to live with actually feel a sense of purpose or belonging or pride in their experiencs—and this, perhaps more than many medical interventions, helps them to flourish.

But there’s a flip side to these stories. Research suggests that some young people in the United States are actually becoming more self-absorbed and less connected to others.

A recent study that examined the empathy levels of almost 14,000 university students between 1979 and 2009 found that students have become dramatically less empathic over the years, particularly since 2000.

In addition, narcissism, which correlates negatively with empathy, is on the rise amongst university-aged students. Narcissists, by definition, are extremely self-focused and tend to see other people in terms of their usefulness rather than true friendship—not exactly a recipe for empathy.

What’s more, a 2006 survey showed that 81 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds think getting rich is an important goal, and 64 percent think it’s the most important goal. Sadly, only 30 percent believe that helping others in need is important.

While these studies focused on university students and young adults, the findings suggest that somewhere in their earlier development, they weren’t cultivating the skills needed to connect with others.

So how can teachers help students avoid the joyless path of self-absorption and instead cultivate a life in which they feel part of something larger than themselves—one of the keys to a meaningful life?

There are, of course, many strong programs that have been designed to help students develop empathy and positive relationships.

But new research suggests another way: awe.

Very little is known about the experience of awe; however, several new studies, many conducted by the GGSC’s Dacher Keltner, have shown awe to be a potentially powerful positive emotion that might just help our students develop empathy.

Here’s how it works:

When we see a grand vista in nature such as Victoria Falls, or experience an inspiring work of art such as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” or Michelangelo’s Pieta, or ponder the phenomenal inner strength of a great soul like Gandhi who non-violently led India to independence, we often feel two things: 1) a sense of vastness that gives us 2) a new perspective on the world and our place in it. This is awe.

Dacher’s lab has found that awe makes us feel very small and like we’re in the presence of something greater than ourselves. We also may lose awareness of our “self” and feel more connected to the world around us.

Imagine the potential of this life-changing emotion for students—and, in particular, for our hyper-self-focused teens! Since adolescence is a crucial period for identity-formation, some researchers have suggested that adolescence is a particularly important time to experience awe—it could help them see themselves as deeply connected to the world around them, not the center of it. Inducing the uplifting experience of awe could also be a positive way to keep narcissism in check.

While scientists haven’t yet examined if this temporary loss of self-focus directly impacts empathy levels, they do know that awe makes people feel less impatient and more inclined to volunteer their time to help others—strong evidence that it makes them feel more connected and committed to something bigger than themselves.

So can teachers actually create awe-inducing experiences for their students?

Absolutely! In an experiment to see if awe could be elicited, Dacher and his team had one group of university students look at a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and another group look down a long hallway. On a follow-up survey, the only difference between the groups was that members of the T-Rex group felt like they were part of a larger whole—a defining feature of awe.

It’s probably not too difficult to imagine something that might induce awe in teens, or kids of any age; I’ve named a few examples above. Stories of exceptional modern-day figures such as Nelson Mandela (consider his ability to forgive) or pictures of the universe such as the birth of a star may be engaging and effective—especially if you find the subject matter to be awe-inspiring. Many teachers already bring content like this into the classroom, and this research on awe validates that approach and suggests it should be tried with more frequency and focus.

Here are two important points to remember if you want to expose your students to awe-filled experiences:

1) Not all students will get it. Dacher has found that some people are more prone to awe than others—usually the ones who are comfortable changing how they see the world. So, if you’ve got some students who seem immovable, don’t fret. If nothing else, they’re still learning about “awesome” art, music, nature, and people.

2) Help students process what they’ve experienced. Awe requires what psychologist Jean Piaget called “accommodation”—the process of changing our mental models to incorporate something to which we’ve recently been exposed. Discussing and writing about experiences of awe will help students understand and process at a deeper level what they’ve just felt.

Awe is not a term heard very often in schools, but its potential is vast. Think of the enthusiasm and wonder and joy that awe-filled experiences could bring to our students—experiences that could not only help them out of the narcissistic funk of adolescence, but also put them on a path to a life lived in compassionate connection with others. Awesome!

But what is empathy? It’s the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions. That makes it different from kindness or pity. And don’t confuse it with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.” Empathy is about discovering those tastes.

The big buzz about empathy stems from a revolutionary shift in the science of how we understand human nature. The old view that we are essentially self-interested creatures is being nudged firmly to one side by evidence that we are also homo empathicus, wired for empathy, social cooperation, and mutual aid.

Over the last decade, neuroscientists have identified a 10-section “empathy circuit” in our brains which, if damaged, can curtail our ability to understand what other people are feeling. Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that we are social animals who have naturally evolved to care for each other, just like our primate cousins. And psychologists have revealed that we are primed for empathy by strong attachment relationships in the first two years of life. 

But empathy doesn’t stop developing in childhood. We can nurture its growth throughout our lives—and we can use it as a radical force for social transformation. Research in sociology, psychology, history—and my own studies of empathic personalities over the past 10 years—reveals how we can make empathy an attitude and a part of our daily lives, and thus improve the lives of everyone around us. Here are the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People!

Habit 1: Cultivate curiosity about strangers

Highly empathic people (HEPs) have an insatiable curiosity about strangers. They will talk to the person sitting next to them on the bus, having retained that natural inquisitiveness we all had as children, but which society is so good at beating out of us. They find other people more interesting than themselves but are not out to interrogate them, respecting the advice of the oral historian Studs Terkel: “Don’t be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.”

Curiosity expands our empathy when we talk to people outside our usual social circle, encountering lives and worldviews very different from our own. Curiosity is good for us too: Happiness guru Martin Seligman identifies it as a key character strength that can enhance life satisfaction. And it is a useful cure for the chronic loneliness afflicting around one in three Americans.

Cultivating curiosity requires more than having a brief chat about the weather. Crucially, it tries to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day, like the heavily tattooed woman who delivers your mail or the new employee who always eats his lunch alone. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with one stranger every week. All it requires is courage.

Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities

We all have assumptions about others and use collective labels—e.g., “Muslim fundamentalist,” “welfare mom”—that prevent us from appeciating their individuality. HEPs challenge their own preconceptions and prejudices by searching for what they share with people rather than what divides them. An episode from the history of US race relations illustrates how this can happen.

Claiborne Paul Ellis was born into a poor white family in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. Finding it hard to make ends meet working in a garage and believing African Americans were the cause of all his troubles, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Ku Klux Klan, eventually rising to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of his local KKK branch.

In 1971 he was invited—as a prominent local citizen—to a 10-day community meeting to tackle racial tensions in schools, and was chosen to head a steering committee with Ann Atwater, a black activist he despised. But working with her exploded his prejudices about African Americans. He saw that she shared the same problems of poverty as his own. “I was beginning to look at a black person, shake hands with him, and see him as a human being,” he recalled of his experience on the committee. “It was almost like bein’ born again.” On the final night of the meeting, he stood in front of a thousand people and tore up his Klan membership card.

Ellis later became a labor organiser for a union whose membership was 70 percent African American. He and Ann remained friends for the rest of their lives. There may be no better example of the power of empathy to overcome hatred and change our minds.

Habit 3: Try another person’s life

So you think ice climbing and hang-gliding are extreme sports? Then you need to try experiential empathy, the most challenging—and potentially rewarding—of them all. HEPs expand their empathy by gaining direct experience of other people’s lives, putting into practice the Native American proverb, “Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticize him.”

George Orwell is an inspiring model.  After several years as a colonial police officer in British Burma in the 1920s, Orwell returned to Britain determined to discover what life was like for those living on the social margins. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed,” he wrote. So he dressed up as a tramp with shabby shoes and coat, and lived on the streets of East London with beggars and vagabonds. The result, recorded in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, was a radical change in his beliefs, priorities, and relationships. He not only realized that homeless people are not “drunken scoundrels”—Orwell developed new friendships, shifted his views on inequality, and gathered some superb literary material. It was the greatest travel experience of his life. He realised that empathy doesn’t just make you good—it’s good for you, too.

We can each conduct our own experiments. If you are religiously observant, try a “God Swap,”  attending the services of faiths different from your own, including a meeting of Humanists. Or if you’re an atheist, try attending different churches! Spend your next vacation living and volunteering in a village in a developing country. Take the path favored by philosopher John Dewey, who said, “All genuine education comes about through experience.”

Habit 4: Listen hard—and open up

There are two traits required for being an empathic conversationalist.

One is to master the art of radical listening. “What is essential,” says Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and founder of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), “is our ability to be present to what’s really going on within—to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment.” HEPs listen hard to others and do all they can to grasp their emotional state and needs, whether it is a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer or a spouse who is upset at them for working late yet again.

But listening is never enough. The second trait is to make ourselves vulnerable. Removing our masks and revealing our feelings to someone is vital for creating a strong empathic bond. Empathy is a two-way street that, at its best, is built upon mutual understanding—an exchange of our most important beliefs and experiences.

Organizations such as the Israeli-Palestinian Parents Circle put it all into practice by bringing together bereaved families from both sides of the conflict to meet, listen, and talk. Sharing stories about how their loved ones died enables families to realize that they share the same pain and the same blood, despite being on opposite sides of a political fence, and has helped to create one of the world’s most powerful grassroots peace-building movements.

Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change

We typically assume empathy happens at the level of individuals, but HEPs understand that empathy can also be a mass phenomenon that brings about fundamental social change.

Just think of the movements against slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. As journalist Adam Hochschild reminds us, “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts but human empathy,” doing all they could to get people to understand the very real suffering on the plantations and slave ships. Equally, the international trade union movement grew out of empathy between industrial workers united by their shared exploitation. The overwhelming public response to the Asian tsunami of 2004 emerged from a sense of empathic concern for the victims, whose plight was dramatically beamed into our homes on shaky video footage.

Empathy will most likely flower on a collective scale if its seeds are planted in our children.  That’s why HEPs support efforts such as Canada’s pioneering Roots of Empathy, the world’s most effective empathy teaching program, which has benefited over half a million school kids. Its unique curriculum centers on an infant, whose development children observe over time in order to learn emotional intelligence—and its results include significant declines in playground bullying and higher levels of academic achievement.

Beyond education, the big challenge is figuring out how social networking technology can harness the power of empathy to create mass political action. Twitter may have gotten people onto the streets for Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but can it convince us to care deeply about the suffering of distant strangers, whether they are drought-stricken farmers in Africa or future generations who will bear the brunt of our carbon-junkie lifestyles? This will only happen if social networks learn to spread not just information, but empathic connection.

Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination

A final trait of HEPs is that they do far more than empathize with the usual suspects. We tend to believe empathy should be reserved for those living on the social margins or who are suffering. This is necessary, but it is hardly enough.

We also need to empathize with people whose beliefs we don’t share or who may be “enemies” in some way. If you are a campaigner on global warming, for instance, it may be worth trying to step into the shoes of oil company executives—understanding their thinking and motivations—if you want to devise effective strategies to shift them towards developing renewable energy. A little of this “instrumental empathy” (sometimes known as “impact anthropology”) can go a long way.

Empathizing with adversaries is also a route to social tolerance. That was Gandhi’s thinking during the conflicts between Muslims and Hindus leading up to Indian independence in 1947, when he declared, “I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew.”

Organizations, too, should be ambitious with their empathic thinking. Bill Drayton, the renowned “father of social entrepreneurship,” believes that in an era of rapid technological change, mastering empathy is the key business survival skill because it underpins successful teamwork and leadership. His influential Ashoka Foundation has launched the Start Empathy initiative, which is taking its ideas to business leaders, politicians and educators worldwide.

The 20th century was the Age of Introspection, when self-help and therapy culture encouraged us to believe that the best way to understand who we are and how to live was to look inside ourselves. But it left us gazing at our own navels. The 21st century should become the Age of Empathy, when we discover ourselves not simply through self-reflection, but by becoming interested in the lives of others. We need empathy to create a new kind of revolution. Not an old-fashioned revolution built on new laws, institutions, or policies, but a radical revolution in human relationships.

Now, of course, begins the hard work of actually tackling the country’s many social and economic problems—a task made even harder by intense partisanship. How can liberals and conservatives respond to climate change and fix the economy when it doesn’t even seem like they can have a civil conversation?

To get at an answer, we turned to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. For years, Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, has studied the psychological bases of our moral and political views. He has been especially interested in why morality varies across cultures—and even within the same country. This interest has led him to consider whether ideological differences between liberals and conservatives in the United States reflect deeper psychological differences between them.

Through studies with tens of thousands of people, Haidt and his colleagues have identified six distinct “moral foundations” that underlie the moral and political judgments people make around the world. And, sure enough, Haidt and his colleagues have concluded that liberals and conservatives build their political views off of these foundations in different ways.

Liberals, studies show, place greater value on the moral foundations of care for others and fairness; conservatives, on the other hand, care more than liberals about the moral foundations of group loyalty, respect for authority, and “sanctity,” meaning an aversion to unpure or disgusting things. (Both groups rely on the foundation of liberty, though in different ways.)

So does this simply mean that liberals are from Mars and conservatives are from Venus, doomed to conflict and misunderstanding? Not necessarily. Along with highlighting our differences, Haidt’s work has also suggested how liberals and conservatives can bridge these differences and learn from each other—ideas he explores in his recent book, The Righteous Mind (and which he also shares in a New York Times op-ed published today).

I spoke with Haidt this morning to get his morning-after-Election-Day analysis of how the country can move forward in the wake of an intensely partisan election year. 

Greater Good: You’ve written extensively about liberals’ and conservatives’ shortcomings in understanding the moral psychology of the other. In light of what you saw this past election year, do you believe liberals and conservatives are getting better or worse at understanding and talking to each other?

Jonathan Haidt: I’d say worse. The survey data on what people think about the other side shows a consistent downward trend. Liberals have always thought negatively about conservatives and vice versa. It wasn’t so bad up to the 1990s, but then it started going down, and it’s actually gotten much worse in the Bush and Obama years. There’s no sign of improvement, and there are plenty of signs that things are getting worse.

GG: Why do you think that is?

JH: It all begins with the purification of the parties. The two political parties were not liberal versus conservative until after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and that started a long process of purification, when the Republican party became all conservative and the Democratic party became all liberals. Once the two parties became pure, then it became much easier to hate the other side because they really were different.

Now, for the first time, the two parties are really different sorts of people with different personalities and different values—it’s not just collections of interest groups, it’s really much more of a clear moral split than it ever was before.

GG: You’ve said before that you think liberals are worse at understanding the moral psychology of conservatives than the other way around. Is there any evidence from this election year that has made you reconsider or feel more certain about that assessment?

JH: No, no sign that it was wrong. The reason why I say that is not that liberals are more narrow-minded. They’re not. They’re slightly better at perspective taking than conservatives in general. But in this case, because conservative morality rests on moral foundations of group loyalty, respect for authority, and sense of sancity—these are three moral foundations that many liberals reject, or just cannot simulate in their own minds.

Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I ran a study testing this, and we didn’t know how it was going to come out. But it really came out clearly that people on the far left were the worst—they could not pretend to be the other side. Moderates and conservatives were the best at pretending to be the other side.

Now what’s happened is that the culture war used to be about loyalty, authority, and sancity, up until the Tea Party. So this lack of understanding really put liberals at a big disadvantage. Now, the culture war has shifted to more economic issues—issues of fairness—and there the problem is not simply that liberals can’t understand what conservatives mean. Put it this way: Now the liberal difficulty of empathizing with conservatives is less of a problem on economic issues than it was on social issues.

GG: For conservatives waking up today to another Obama administration, what advice do you have about how they can communicate their ideals effectively to liberals—to make themselves understood, feel less culturally and politically marginalized, and try to create a less partisan political climate?

JH: Well, I think that the polarization in Washington, at least, has been very asymmetrical. The Democrats went through a period in the 70s and into the 80s where they spun out into left field in a moralistic spiral that made them more blind to reality. But they came back to earth in the 90s.

And now it’s the Republicans turn. The Republicans have spun out into a moralistic spirial that puts them at a disadvantage in understanding reality. And I think they’re going to have to stop that. They’re going to have to have some kind of reform movement. There are vey few Republican moderates left, but until they’re given a voice, I think the Republicans are going to be marginalized, and will deserve their marginalization.

GG: When you refer to a moralistic spiral, what are you referring to specifically?

JH: So a basic principle of morality is that morality “binds and blinds,” and the more a group circles around its sacred value, the blinder it goes. So when the left was circling around civil rights and women’s rights, that made them unable to think about empirical findings—for instance, about sex differences.

The Republicans are now in that kind of crazy moralistic spiral. For example, they’ve got certain economic assumptions that are just false—like, if you give tax breaks to the rich, they will stimulate the economy. That simply is false. But they’re circling around it, and until they give that up, they will neither have their ideas heard nor deserve to have their ideas heard.

GG: You’ve said before that “our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and then to blind us to the truth.” But of course, who we see as being a member of our “team” can shift over time. What would you like to see the Obama administration do to reduce the divisive feelings between the liberal and conservative teams in the United States today?

JH: First, you have to distinguish between “elite polarization”—what’s happening in Washington and the media—versus “mass polarization,” what’s happening among the people.

Our problem is really elite polarization. Congress is really broken, and it’s in part because the Republicans are so deep into this moralistic circling. Until the Republican party is reformed, it’ll be hard to deal with them.

So what Obama can do is encourage moderates—many in the Republican party are more moderate than they appear. The forces on Congress are such that they have to do things that they don’t really have their heart in.

My advice would be that Obama try bipartisanship once more, but this time, with a very clear, explicit message that this is a time-limited offer—one or two months. If Republicans are willing to join him and contribute some ideas—and they do have some good ideas—and reach a bipartisan compromise, they’re welcome, and he’ll take their ideas seriously. But if they have not done it within the next two months, then he will blame them for the next three-and-three-quarters years for being hyperpartisan when our country needs statesmen.

In other words, what Obama did not do last time was attend to the other side’s BATNA, which stands for Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement. If you have a good alternative to a negotiated agreement, then you have no need to make a deal. You can hold out for a lock. And last time the Republicans calculated that if they don’t deal, if they don’t compromise, they could make Obama fail. And it did work—they took the House in 2010.

So Obama was a very poor negotiator last time around. But he’s a very smart guy who learns from his mistakes, and I hope he will, this time around, to reduce the Republicans’ BATNA. Then try bipartisanship.

GG: So what about the rest of us, who aren’t the elites? Do you feel that mass polarization is not as pronounced as elite polarization?

JH: It’s not as pronounced. It is pronounced. Some political scientists say it doesn’t exist, but most say it does, and I think they’re right. The public is getting more polarized, but only by a little. So if you look at who calls themselves liberals, conservatives, or moderates, moderates are shrinking, but only by a few percentage points. The general public is getting a little more polarized.

The general public takes its cues in part from the elites. So because the Republicans have been spinning out into this moralistic spiral, the Republican public has as well. But if the Republican party goes through a reformation, as Bill Clinton did with the Democrats, it will go down to the common people, and I think we’ll see some moderation in the people as well.

GG: And do you think it probably will be that kind of top down process? For those who feel like they are sick of polarization and recognize, to a certain extent, that we have common threats that we should collectively act against, is there a way these individuals can bind together or work on their own to have some kind of impact on the political conversation?

JH: In general, many people are sick of the polarization, many people are moderates. But moderates tend to have little influence. They don’t have much political action. So in general, there’s not much moderates can do.

There’s a very good group now called NoLabels.org. All moderates, people of the center-right and center-left in particular, should be flocking to NoLabels.org and joining and supporting it, because I think that’s a real voice for moderation.

It’s not that they’re after moderation, per se. They’re trying to fix Congress, trying to reform Congress. Congress is broken, there are a number of simple fixes that will make it work much better. So I think that’s the best route that people have, is to join NoLabels.org.

NoLabels is at least applying public pressure. Until individual legislators feel pressure to work for solutions rather than partisan advantage, nothing will change.