“For the past decade, I’ve been studying how empathy works and what it does to us.
Psychologists studying empathy today are in a similar position to climatologists studying polar ice caps.
“Each year we become more deeply aware of the value of empathy and compassion, yet both continue to diminish in the world around us.”
---p.25

“We can develop empathy through practice and become kinder as a result.
This idea may sound surprising, but it's actually supported by decades of research.
Research from many labs, including my own, suggests that empathy is more of a skill than a fixed dispositional trait.
“It’s a skill that can be sharpened over time and adapted to the modern world.”
---p.35

“This book is about those drugs and the science that is their root.
By seeking out the right therapies, including friendships, art, and community-building that blossom in unexpected places, we can strengthen our empathy muscles and, in the process, broaden our scope of kindness.
In this book, we will meet police officers learning to communicate more peacefully with civilians, Hutu and Tutsi people who have endured genocide but are moving toward forgiveness, and stubborn people who have spent their lives doggedly working to dispel hatred.
You will see ex-convicts discuss the novel with the judge who convicted them, rediscovering their humanity in the process, and you will see doctors and nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit learn how to support patients' families during their most difficult times without wallowing in their own pain.”
---pp.37~38

The struggle to be kind to them is not easy, and it won't be easy for any of us. This book won't teach you 10 simple steps to becoming a kinder person today.
I wouldn't even guarantee that people are inherently good, despite what they appear to be.
At birth, humanity is either 39 percent kind, 71 percent kind, or somewhere in between.
“What matters is not what our initial state was, but what state we can move toward.”
---p.38

“New Yorkers face a deluge of hardship and poverty as they walk the streets of Manhattan.
If he were to take all of that into himself, he would be caught in a dilemma where he couldn't do anything.
He can either give everything away until he has nothing left, or he can live with the guilt of not giving.
People often avoid empathy in these situations.
One study found that people who believed they would later have the opportunity to donate to a homeless person avoided versions of the homeless person's story that contained emotionally provocative details.
“It’s not that they couldn’t empathize with the homeless, it’s that they actively chose not to empathize.”
---p.92

“In one study, male and female participants watched videos of people telling emotional stories and then were asked to guess what emotions the speakers in the videos were feeling.
Here, men were less able to guess women's emotions than women.
A follow-up study found that people were paid to accurately understand the speaker.
Then the gender gap in empathy disappeared.
A few years later, another research team told heterosexual men that women were attracted to "attentive men."
Men who learned this fact worked hard to empathize.
“It's an emotional equivalent of the behavior of putting pressure on your stomach when an attractive person passes by.”
---pp.100~101

“People in majority groups or groups with higher power often develop a more compassionate view of others when they have these discussions.
However, this was often not the case for people from minority groups or low-power groups.
They already understood the majority point of view.
Because that's what I had to do to survive.
In a recent interview, comedian Sarah Silverman captured that feeling succinctly:
“Women are very keenly aware of men’s experiences.
Because our entire existence must pass through the lens of that experience.
Men, on the other hand, have never had to understand the female experience to exist in this world.”
---p.146

“Angela was a victim of extreme bullying at school, and at some point she decided that the best way to stop being a target was to become one of the bullies.
He became homophobic and racist and began committing hate crimes.
Angela was arrested for armed robbery at a Jewish-owned store and sent to prison.
His arms, legs and chest were covered in Nazi crosses, and the Nazi salute, SIEG HEIL, was tattooed on the inside of his lower lip.
Angela expected prison life to be a race war.
But shockingly, his first cellmates were not Aryans, but a group of Jamaican women.
While playing the card game, they questioned Angela's beliefs, but also accepted her as a human being.
Angela recalled:
“Aggression, anger, violence… That’s how I’ve reacted to everything my whole life.
But when people treated me with kindness and compassion, I felt disarmed.”
---pp.152~153

“If caregivers are overly empathetic, they may be tempted to take heroic life-saving measures when they are likely to fail, or to make bad news sound palatable to avoid causing pain.
(…) Additionally, caregivers who are good at empathy may develop symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Not because of his own suffering, but because of the suffering of his patients.
“A quarter of neonatal intensive care unit nurses reported ‘secondary trauma’ such as insomnia, flashbacks, and burnout – a rate about twice as high as that of nurses in other departments.”
---p.222

“That vocabulary also included language that distinguished different types of empathy.
In Buddhism, 'compassion' includes caring for others without shouldering their suffering.
“That kind of separation is necessary.
“Because if you detach too much, it becomes ‘that person’s problem, not mine,’ and if detachment doesn’t occur, you identify too deeply with the suffering around you.”
Psychologists similarly distinguish between “empathic distress” and “empathic concern.”
Suffering is one outcome of emotional empathy, which involves feeling the same emotions as another person by indirectly sharing their pain.
Concern, on the other hand, is the feeling of empathy for someone else's feelings and the desire to improve their well-being.
---p.243

“People who practiced loving-kindness meditation were more generous and experienced less suffering than other groups.
These changes were also observed in their brains.
In contrast, people who learned to empathize with others' pain showed an enhanced mirroring response to pain.
Their brains reacted as if they were in pain.
However, people who practiced loving-kindness meditation showed activation in brain regions associated with motivation, and even in brain regions associated with reward.
Instead of focusing on the suffering of the victims, they imagined a world where suffering was reduced.”
---p.246

“We usually think of kindness as sacrificing ourselves to benefit others.
A person who helps others takes on the pain himself in order to make it less painful for others.
(…) However, there are also cases where you benefit from helping others.
Generosity enriches the giver, reduces stress, and, for older volunteers, even extends their lifespan.
My colleagues and I have found that the benefactor's benefits are especially significant when the giver empathizes with the recipient of the goodwill.”
---p.350

“Even if we are living together now, it is difficult to empathize with people who are distant or different from us.
But how can we expect to care about someone we'll never know? Peter Singer suggests removing the variable of our emotions from this problem.
Singer argues that effective altruists “don’t dedicate themselves to the causes that resonate most strongly with them.
“They devote themselves to the cause that does the most good,” he wrote.
---pp.356~357

“The form of empathy that has existed since time immemorial begins with self-protection.
We care for our children because they carry our genes, and we care for our tribe because they provide sustenance, sex, and security.
Caring about future generations who will never remember who we are goes against our Darwinian impulses.
But there are still ways to cultivate such consideration.
If we can cultivate that kind of mindset, we will be able to evolve our empathy in real time, growing it into something bigger and more enduring.”
---pp.362~363

“It’s easier to live without thinking about things like intentions.
Cultivating a new kind of empathy toward someone who may not reciprocate takes effort and sacrifice.
But now, faced with increasing cruelty and isolation, we struggle to live moral lives.
It's rarely worth doing something easy, and in this day and age, it's even risky.
We have a choice, and the sum total of our choices will create our future.

What will you do?”

---p.363