Compassion, Empathy And Happiness

Cut-n-paste from The Science of Happiness:

In this section we’re going to talk about what compassion is both from a scientific and kind of a deeper cultural perspective. You know, one of the questions that motivates this definitional

work on thinking about what compassion is, is to try to understand why people so routinely act in kind fashion whether it be volunteering or giving money away or helping out a stranger in need or really more extreme forms of heroism that we’ll talk about towards the end of this section.

And social science takes this perspective where they think about there being really multiple motives to sort of guiding kind or altruistic behavior. So, as you’ve learned we can help people because of empathy.  Another reason that we can help is because we gain in our social status, that people tend to sort of esteem others who are generous and kind and that will motivate helping. Very often as we’ll learn later in this class, we will help and be kind and cooperate through feelings of gratitude, through feelings of a sense that others have given to us and we reciprocate in kind as a very powerful motivator of kindness and altruistic action. But really social science has really zeroed in on compassion as one of the primary drivers of kind and altruistic and cooperative behavior.

So what do we mean by compassion? Well, what we mean by compassion is really the feeling that you have when you witness someone else who is suffering or who is in need, and then you have this motivation to help them, to ameliorate their condition or to enhance their welfare. Now, that definition helps us distinguish compassion, when you feel concern over someone's welfare and have the desire to help them, with other kinds of states. For example empathy, really, is where you understand what someone feels or you may actually show the same emotions as they have. So if someone’s in physical pain and you have an empathic response, you too feel physical pain, but you don’t necessarily feel concern.

There’s a whole other scientific literature on the incredible tendency for people to mimic each other’s behaviors, right. So we mimic or imitate yawns and laughs and tones of voice and face scratching and postural movements, eyebrow movements, gaze activity, but that again

is something that’s really separate from the feeling of concern about somebody’s welfare with

compassion. And then finally, in the philosophical literature, there’s a lot of discussion about

pity, but we can really separate pity, which is the feeling of concern for someone that you feel is

inferior to you from compassion where there isn’t this sense of superiority or inferiority, right.

So we can separate pity from compassion. Now, it’s really interesting when we take a step back as Karen Armstrong, the great historian of religion and spiritual concepts did, where she made the case that about 2,500 years ago as there was this explosion of thought and writing and scholarship about human nature and happiness and what is the good life, Armstrong really suggested that a lot of the great ethical and spiritual traditions that you may be acquainted with really think of compassion as really one of the primary pathways to human happiness and the good life.

Let me give you some illustrative quotes. This runs of course throughout Christianity where we see for example in Matthew 7:12, “In everything therefore, treat people the same way you want to treat you, for that is the law.” There’s sort of this sense of fundamental caring. If you go to Buddhism, and we’ve already seen the Dalai Lama’s idea that to be happy you have to practice compassion, here’s another illustrative quote: "Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” And this is very much in keeping with the Buddhist philosophy of no harm, right that in your actions you practice kindness and no harm. If you go to Islamic traditions you see Mohammad writing a little bit later, “Hurt no one, so that no one may hurt you.” Again, a fundamental emphasis on compassion. And then Daoism which we encountered earlier of Lao Tzu, there you find you find the quote, “He is kind to the kind, he is also kind to the unkind.”

And throughout these great traditions you see this prioritization and emphasis on compassion.

So, when you think about this feeling of concern for the welfare of others and the desire to lift them up as our definition of compassion, what’s really remarkable – and this begins to raise interesting questions about how central compassion is to who we are as a species - what’s

fascinating is the historical evidence of how prevalent and powerful compassion is in the most

unlikely of contexts. This has really been documented eloquently by Jonathan Glover, who is a

historian who wrote this wonderful book I’d recommend called "Humanity." And Glover surveys

the sort of first hand accounts of what war was like and what battle was like in a lot of the 20th

century's wars: the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the world wars and the like. And what

he finds is with remarkable regularity, soldiers feel and are really overwhelmed by  what he

called sympathy breakthroughs, that when they encounter face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their adversaries, their lives are on the line, instead of pulling the trigger, they often sort of break down with sympathy and weeping in a sense of common humanity.

That sort of observation raises this interesting question that we’ll tackle in this section which is: well, why are we compassionate?   Why are we so frequently kind and generous? If you go back  to early evolutionary thought which guides some of the science, you find really contrasting answers. Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, published his theory of evolution in the same outlet as Charles Darwin and at the same time. He really felt that evolution didn’t have a lot to say about compassion or sympathy, that really evolution was about sort of physical structures in human beings and out in nature, but these moral sentiments like compassion or sympathy were put into human beings by God. Thomas Huxley, who was known as Charles Darwin's bulldog and was kind of a popularizer of Charles Darwin, was kind of a cynical guy and he said you know, there is no way that evolution would have crafted or sort of created or designed compassion into the human nervous system. It really is a cultural product. It's a set of norms that people as part of societies agree to.

Now here’s what’s fascinating and what’s really fun to encounter in reading deeply about what Darwin thought about human beings. In The Descent of Man from 1871, Charles Darwin made the case that sympathy, or compassion, is our strongest instinct. And I’ll quote, because “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish the best and raise the greatest number of offspring.” So what Darwin is offering is a really straightforward approach to why we’re sympathetic and compassionate as a kind of evolutionary adaptation - because it helps us get along in communities, it helps us take care of those offspring

who are the carriers of our genes, lots of good evolutionary reasons for being sympathetic

and compassionate.

So what about happiness? Well, you’re going to start to see a lot of different data on how cultivating compassion helps with physical health and the condition of your brain and other effects, but one of things that scientists have documented, Hooria Jazaieri is that a simple training exercise where you practice loving kindness, where you’re just thinking compassionate

thoughts towards others and towards yourself over time, actually pretty dramatically increases

your own personal happiness, suggesting that the Dalai Lama was on to something when he

said that compassion is the pathway to happiness.

I am grateful for my greatly increased compassion, empathy and happiness today.