Quotes About Empathy

Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it's not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.

Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.

Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people "senders.

as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

Pronin calls this phenomenon the "illusion of asymmetric insight." She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.

Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.

Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.

they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the "illusion of asymmetric insight." She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can't look away one time and scream at him another. You can't treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn't hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.

Owe no one anything except to love one another;

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.

The paradox of talking to strangers: we need to talk to them. But we're terrible at it (p. 166).

allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

You've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening. The danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You're preventing them from resolving the situation.

Whenever we have something that we are good at - something we care about - that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding.

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn't make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.

But maybe the simpler answer is that the more a subject matters to you, the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it.