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Compassionate dialogue isn’t just about talking and listening—it's a meaningful way to bridge divides, cultivate belonging, and reimagine education as a space for connection.
Summary: In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore the role of compassion in education and connecting across differences. We explore the bravery it takes to have tough conversations, how to create spaces where everyone feels they belong, and the profound impact of addressing marginalization in the classroom. Plus, we uncover practical ways to turn these classroom lessons into meaningful, real-world connections and community building.
This episode is sponsored by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
Today’s Guests:
JACKIE JUSTICE, M.A.E.T., is an English and humanities professor at Mid Michigan College, where she teaches courses in writing, literature, culture, and compassion studies.
Read Justice’s article about how learning to bridge differences can help students succeed: https://tinyurl.com/mw7r845h
Learn about our Bridging Differences online course at GGSC: https://tinyurl.com/2wk5h72z
JAMIL ZAKI is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.
Follow Zaki on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamil-zaki-b0b4a9192
Follow Zaki on X: https://x.com/zakijam
Read Zaki’s Book Hope for Cynics: https://tinyurl.com/mrxtzhmw
More episodes like this one:
How to Talk to People You Disagree With: https://tinyurl.com/4cpm8m3a
When It’s Hard to Connect, Try Being Curious: https://tinyurl.com/bde6wyu7
Why Compassion Requires Vulnerability: https://tinyurl.com/yxw4uhpf
More Happiness Breaks like this one:
Take a Break With Our Loving-Kindness Meditation: https://tinyurl.com/2kr4fjz5
Radical Acceptance, with Tara Brach: https://tinyurl.com/ycec7jwt
Tell us about your experiences and struggles with compassionate listening. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
SHUKA KALANTARI: This episode of The Science of Happiness is sponsored by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
JACKIE JUSTICE: I was visiting my niece in La Jolla, and there was a man sitting on the beach with a sign saying, compassionate listening for free sit down. And he was there three days a week, you could come and just talk to him, and he would practice listening. And I asked him if I could borrow his idea. I brought that idea back and pitched it to the college, and they said, that sounds great. I met some people who actually are training our faculty through their organization to help our faculty become compassionate listeners. So they go through compassionate listening training, and then we just have a little booth set up with a sign that says, come and be heard. But we're an area divided. We're a state divided politically. We think each other walking down the street potentially could be an enemy. And Dang it, that's scary. Just opening these dialogs with each other, looking each other in the eye, making connection, it just snowballs in a good way. Bridging doesn't have to be miserable. Sitting at a table with someone who's the polar opposite from us can be an enjoyable experience and teaching students that, on top of that, is just a gift.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Welcome to the Science of Happiness. I'm Allison Briscoe-Smith, psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, filling in for Dacher Keltner. This week, today, we're exploring how to connect. Learning how to connect across differences is one of the most crucial skills we can develop in today's world. It's something that touches every part of our lives, our politics, friendships, families, and yet, many of us might not be equipped to do this, or honestly, might not even want to. It's hard, but research, along with practical, clear strategies, is showing us how and why we should. Our guest is Jackie Justice, a professor at Mid Michigan College. She's made it her life's work to research and teach the art of connection and understanding in higher education through compassionate listening.
JACKIE JUSTICE: Compassion is biologically contagious, so when we have compassion, research shows that people around us are more likely to have and show compassion, and it's a domino effect.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: We'll also hear from Jamil Zaki, a psychologist and a director at the Stanford Neuroscience lab. He'll share how empathy and compassionate listening can help bridge divides, and how having honest conversations across differences can reduce hostility and our stress hormones.
JAMIL ZAKI: We each have a nervous system, a brain and body, but when we're with other people, truly communing with them, it's almost like we have a collective nervous system that spreads across us.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: More, after these messages from our sponsors.
Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Alison Briscoe-Smith filling in for Dacher Keltner this week. Listening deeply and connecting across different viewpoints takes practice, but it's a skill anyone can develop. Professor Jackie Justice discovered that while working with her undergraduate students at Mid Michigan College, she's here today to share those insights. Jackie, thank you so much for being here with us.
JACKIE JUSTICE: Thank you so much for having me.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Well, to start, I'd love to hear about what first drew you to education. How did you come to focusing on teaching others about building bridges and understanding?
JACKIE JUSTICE: So during the pandemic, my mom was dying, and I was sitting by her bedside, and she was in a facility, and I watched person after person come in to sing to her, to cradle her, to read to her, to kneel and pray at her bedside with her. And the last day my mom lived, one of the CNAs tore her knee, and another one herniated a disc in her back, and yet, still they were there, lifting her up, literally off the floor, and I just felt like I needed to give something back, and I teach English, and so my college gave me room to develop a studies in compassion course, and I started to study compassion and try to figure out a way that I can take our students through our Gen Ed program with a focus on compassion. They just talk about whatever they want to talk about. And every day I meet a new student, hear a new story. And sometimes they want to talk about their new dog, sometimes they want to talk about heartbreak or things that they're hopeful for, but it gives them a space to open up, to hear themselves, and they seem to find themselves as they speak. And it's just this incredible experience to see these students who, otherwise I may have never met, become part of my heart, and I feel like I'm part of theirs too.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: What are the main principles of compassionate listening as you practice them?
JACKIE JUSTICE: Compassionate listening, I've learned, is something beyond active listening. Where we listen only to listen. There's no judgment, there's no feedback, we don't even offer our opinions. If asked, it's just opening space and giving acceptance for people to say what they need to say. And so it takes a lot for somebody who is a teacher who's used to guiding people. My guidance is only, that must be really hard for you. I'm really sorry that you've gone through this. Thank you so much for sharing this, and it's a practice for me that's making me a better listener, and I think a better person because of it too.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: You've been working to pair students with differing political views to talk about polarizing issues. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
JACKIE JUSTICE: They're paired with someone with different political beliefs somewhere else in the country who is a college student, and it's a really well orchestrated experience with a moderator and all sorts of safety nets where they're challenged to discuss things, statements like, healthcare should be a universal right. One person will say their opinion, the other person will say their opinion, they discuss it, and then they move on to the next question. So they're hands on, and they're making connections, and they're making connections with people that they wouldn't have otherwise.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: I think the popular notion is that we cannot talk across our differences. We won't talk across our differences. This is too big, this is too hard, and it's not possible, but I hear you actually telling stories that this is possible.
JACKIE JUSTICE: Absolutely. I'd say 99.9% of the students who've done this so far say we weren't really that different. I'm not sure if I was paired correctly, because we agreed on almost everything. You know, the nuances were different, like surprise, that's America. Before we talk about difficult topics, we talk about how their bodies will react. The idea that our bodies need to be grounded in a place that's healthy for us isn't how I was raised, you know, in a conservative Midwest area, to be able to breathe and relax, and how are we feeling in our bodies right now? And I had to learn that first and then teach it to the students too. Even though it's an English class, we're still thinking about the way that we're neuro biologically able to accept new ideas based on reaching homeostasis. We do things like massaging the vagus nerve above our hearts so that they can be in the head space and the body space to be able to take in what, maybe even an hour ago, seemed to be impossible ideas. I think tense moments are tense moments that are meant to be felt. I think we do so much work avoiding discomfort that we're missing what's on the other side of discomfort, which is growth. We can't be thinking creatures until we're feeling creatures and acknowledging that is, to me, huge.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: I like the idea that it's a practice. It's not going out and solving the dilemma. It's trying on these skills as a means of connecting. You've got this beautiful name, Jackie Justice, and it also sounds like, through the work that you've been doing, that you've been seeking out justice. And I'm curious what the name means to you, or how did you come by that name?
JACKIE JUSTICE: I was born with this name, and after a divorce a few years ago, I decided to go back to this name. I'm really proud of my family that carries this name. We have a civic duty, social obligation, and it's really important for all of us, back, even generations, to give back. We've always been really proud of how we are, how we raise our kids, and what we add to the community. So I think the name fits. I like it.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: I think you're living up to the name in the stories that you've told us, in the ways that you seek it out. And we know and understand that our names are powerful and can be determinative in many different ways. But my goodness, what a good time to speak to someone named Jackie justice,
JACKIE JUSTICE: Well, thank you.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Thank you so much for sharing these stories of possibility and hope. I know that it really helped me, and I really appreciate your work. So thanks so much for sharing these stories with us.
JACKIE JUSTICE: Thank you for this time, and thank you for everything.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Up next, we're going to hear from psychologist Jamil Zaki about how empathy and compassionate listening can ease the tension in conversations across differences.
JAMIL ZAKI: At the Stanford social neuroscience lab, we study what connections do for us, how they can help us stay mentally healthy, how they can help us bridge divisions, social and even political divisions, how they can help us form communities.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: More after these messages from our sponsors.
Hi everybody, welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Allison Briscoe-Smith, psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, filling in for Dacher Keltner. Today we've been talking about the art of bridging differences through compassion. When we are compassionate, we are motivated to relieve one another's difficulties and to take action. The root of the word in Latin means to suffer together. But there's a precursor to this state, which is empathy
JAMIL ZAKI: As we think about it. In my corner of psychology, empathy includes three pieces.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: That’s psychologist Jamil Zaki, the director of the Stanford social neuroscience lab and author of the new book Hope for Cynics, he says the first piece to empathy is feeling what others feel.
JAMIL ZAKI: That vicarious sense that you've caught somebody else's emotions, which we call emotional empathy. The second is thinking about what somebody else feels, which we call cognitive empathy.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: The third is actually caring about what they feel.
JAMIL ZAKI: Which we call empathic concern, and which you could also call compassion, if you put work into understanding what they feel, then it's more natural for you to start caring about what they feel, to develop a motivation that, hey, I want this person to feel better. I want to maybe even try to help them. So we see this kind of progression between ancient sort of mirroring, between my emotions and yours to a deeper understanding that your reality is valid and true and important to my investment in you, which is that end state of compassion.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Our brains have mirror neurons that help us empathize and understand each other. Quite literally. We are wired for connection.
JAMIL ZAKI: Our brains are resonant organs. When you imagine something, when you step out of your own here and now, your brain goes with you. It untethers from your current situation and goes wherever your mind does. So if you think about a bright light, for instance, your pupils will constrict as though you're seeing it. If you imagine kicking a soccer ball, the parts of your brain involved in kicking will come online. And the same is true of other people. When we see other people feeling something, our brains tend to mirror what it would be like for us to experience that state.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Zaki tudies empathy using brain imaging. In one study, his team at Stanford had people record videos describing emotional experiences. Another group watched those videos while their brain activity was scanned. The scan showed that the viewers could accurately interpret the emotional states of people in the videos. But this ability becomes more challenging when we're under high stress.
JAMIL ZAKI: That makes it harder to understand the emotions of other people. When you are in a state of threat, your body and mind constrict. One thing that happens is your sympathetic nervous system takes over, hormones like cortisol and adrenaline flood through your body. And one of the things that that does is it stops blood flow from your extremities, from your limbs. And the reason for that is that if you're in a state of high threat, you know, in the animal kingdom, in ancient pre-history, you might lose a limb. And so you should really try to pool, literally, your blood where you will potentially need it more. It's this state of activity, and also this state of self protection,
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Compassionate listening, shifts us out of a protective mindset, and it also has a positive effect on our bodies.
JAMIL ZAKI: When people feel as though others are truly paying attention to them, their stress hormones decline, right? They feel a sense of calm and safety. They feel a great sense of reward. One of the big takeaways from this is that being heard is almost like a form of psychological nourishment. Being heard is. Its own reward. And when we feel heard by other people, we become loyal to them. We become attached to them in a pleasant and healthy way. We know that those are people we are safe around, people who we can trust. And so that sense of being listened to is often the bedrock on which strong and important relationships are built. So many of us, many people, feel a sense of unsafety when they're around people who are different from themselves, and that can change their literal, physical perception of those people in ways that make them feel or look even more frightening, as opposed to seeing those folks often for who they really are. We ran a study a couple of summers ago in 2022 and decided to bring Republicans and Democrats together for Zoom conversations, and they would talk about abortion, gun control and climate change, so not very light hearted subjects, we submit all of our work to an institutional review board, and those reviewers were terrified. They said, What is going to happen in these conversations? People are going to yell at each other, threaten each other, Dox each other, it's going to be awful. We were scared. We trained research assistants meticulously. Here's when you need to stop a conversation. We've got a kill switch on all of these conversations. If they go to a place that you don't like, you need to interrupt people.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: But there were zero instances where researchers had to interrupt the conversations. They found that Democrats and Republicans were able to speak to one another without hostility. They found common ground.
JAMIL ZAKI: Even months later, their animosity, their hatred towards the other party, was lower than if they hadn't had these conversations. And also, we found that exchanging with a reasonable person who disagrees with you made people realize, well, maybe, my opinion, is not the only one. So to me, this study is deeply hopeful, but also vexing, because when we have conversations across difference, they go better than we expect. That's the positive and hopeful part. The vexing part is that we don't know that as a culture, and in fact, what we hear from the media is the exact opposite. We're led to believe that these conversations will be awful, and so we don't have them. And so we lose each other, we lose sight of who's really on the other side, and replace that with stereotypes that are often absolutely wrong. But we also stop connecting and stop collecting the social data that would allow us to become less wrong. So I guess I'm on a mini crusade to help us collect those data, to help us stop relying on media representations and start trying to actually connect with one another.
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Tune in next week to the science of happiness to dance.
LORI ARNETT: So with my daughter, we're just dancing, having fun, and at one point I grabbed her hands, so we started dancing with our hands, and we're not doing the same thing, but we were touching. And at that moment, it really sunk into me. Really hit home the connection
ALLISON BRISCOE-SMITH: Uncover the science behind why dancing may be the best medicine.
Thanks for joining us on The Science of Happiness. This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Dasha Zerboni. Sound design from Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Allison Briscoe Smith, filling in this week for Dacher Keltner. I hope you decide to practice the art of compassionate listening and feel more equipped to have more difficult conversations. Have a great day.
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