Science | Compassion Journal

Golden Rule and Development

June 1, 2015 By Andrea Gunn

A go-to tactic for many parents when trying to get their children to examine their own behaviour is to ask them to put themselves in the shoes of others.

The results of a recent psychological study show that approach is pretty effective.

A joint study between Dalhousie University Dean of science Chris Moore and Markus Paulus of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, published in the journal Social Development, shows that children as young as three can anticipate negative feelings in others and adjust their own behaviour in response.

In the study, children aged three to six were divided into three groups. One group was asked to think about how they feel when someone shares with them or not, and the second was asked about their feelings and about how someone else might feel in the same situation. The third group, the control, was not asked about emotions.

The children were then asked to perform an experimental task in which they were given the option to share stickers with a fictional child.

In the end, children who were encouraged to spend time thinking about their feelings and the feelings of others were more likely to share than the control group.

“If you think about how parents encourage pro-social behaviour with their kids, they’ll often say things like ‘How do you think Jenny felt when you did that?’ That’s actually a pretty good strategy,” Moore said.

“Perspective taking becomes very important.”

The study was an extension of social development research that has been taking place at Dalhousie under Moore, a developmental psychology expert, for the last 20 years. Using simple sharing experiments, Moore has been trying to get a larger picture of what factors influence what’s referred to as pro-social behaviour in children.

“We’re primarily interested in the development of social behaviour and social understanding, so how young children develop the ability to interact with other people in socially appropriate ways and how they understand other people,” Moore said.

Inside Dalhousie’s Life Sciences Centre, a room filled with toys, books and games sits amid corridors of offices and classrooms, bright decals in the hallways contrasting with the drab white walls. It’s the waiting area for kids that come through for testing, Moore said.

In the experiment room, there’s more of the same; a child-sized table with matching chairs sits in the middle.

Though the experiments differ depending on what Moore and his colleagues are studying, the basic task stays consistent.

A child is given a laminated piece of construction paper divided into two columns, each topped with a stick figure, one side representing them and the other a sharing partner. The child is then asked to distribute the resources — always stickers — with the partner however they choose.

In one experiment, the child is asked to think of their best friend and someone they know but aren’t friends with. They are then given the option to share their stickers with both. More often than not, Moore said, the child will share with a friend more than someone they don’t like or a stranger.

“What’s interesting is it’s unlikely they would have acquired that pattern of preferential behaviour from parenting because parents don’t tell children to treat people differently, and yet they still do it,” Moore said.

In another study, a child is shown a video of a little girl who is distraught because she recently lost her dog and another video of a child who is not sad, then asked to share with each. That experiment showed children are more likely to share with the sad child, suggesting that feeling empathy for someone has an effect on pro-social behaviour.

Other experiments show children can be more likely to share with a partner who has similar interests, and envy also plays a role.

The German study showed that thinking about emotions, not just feeling them, also influences sharing behaviour.

“The general point is you can affect children’s pro-social behaviour, how generous they are, by manipulating a number of things,” Moore said.

Moore said plenty of research has been completed, but there hasn’t been a lot looking at factors that influence responses.

He said getting a more complete picture of how these complex thought processes work could be helpful in determining how to encourage pro-social behaviour.

“If we can understand these kinds of things then potentially we can support that in terms of how we parent and how we educate kids.”

This article first appeared in http://thechronicleherald.ca/.

Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness

May 1, 2015 By Emma Seppala

Stanford University neurosurgeon Dr. James Doty tells the story of performing surgery on a little boy’s brain tumor. In the middle of the procedure, the resident who is assisting him gets distracted and accidentally pierces a vein. With blood shedding everywhere, Doty is no longer able to see the delicate brain area he is working on. The boy’s life is at stake. Doty is left with no other choice than to blindly reaching into the affected area in the hopes of locating and clamping the vein. Fortunately, he is successful.

Most of us are not brain surgeons, but we certainly are all confronted with situations in which an employee makes a grave mistake, potentially ruining a critical project.

The question is: How should we react when an employee is not performing well or makes a mistake?

Frustration is of course the natural response — and one we all can identify with. Especially if the mistake hurts an important project or reflects badly upon us.

The traditional approach is to reprimand the employee in some way. The hope is that some form of punishment will be beneficial: it will teach the employee a lesson. Expressing our frustration also may relieve us of the stress and anger caused by the mistake. Finally, it may help the rest of the team stay on their toes to avoid making future errors.

Some managers, however, choose a different response when confronted by an underperforming employee: compassion and curiosity. Not that a part of them isn’t frustrated or exasperated — maybe they still worry about how their employee’s mistakes will reflect back on them — but they are somehow able to suspend judgment and may even be able to use the moment to do a bit of coaching.

What does research say is best? The more compassionate response will get you more powerful results.

First, compassion and curiosity increase employee loyalty and trust. Researchhas shown that feelings of warmth and positive relationships at work have a greater say over employee loyalty than the size of their paycheck. In particular, a study by Jonathan Haidt of New York University shows that the more employees look up to their leaders and are moved by their compassion or kindness (a state he terms elevation), the more loyal they become to him or her. So if you are more compassionate to your employee, not only will he or she be more loyal to you, but anyone else who has witnessed your behavior may also experience elevation and feel more devoted to you.

Conversely, responding with anger or frustration erodes loyalty. As Adam Grant, Professor at the Wharton Business School and best-selling author of Give & Take,points out that, because of the law of reciprocity, if you embarrass or blame an employee too harshly, your reaction may end up coming around to haunt you. “Next time you need to rely on that employee, you may have lost some of the loyalty that was there before,” he told me.

We are especially sensitive to signs of trustworthiness in our leaders, and compassion increases our willingness to trust. Simply put, our brains respond more positively to bosses who have shown us empathy, as neuroimaging research confirms. Employee trust in turn improves performance.

Doty, who is also Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, recalls his first experience in the OR room. He was so nervous that he perspired profusely. Soon enough, a drop of sweat fell into the operation site and contaminated it. The operation was a simple one and the patients’ life was in no way at stake. As for the operation site, it could have been easily irrigated. However, the operating surgeon — one of the biggest names in surgery at the time — was so angry that he kicked Doty out of the OR room. Doty recalls returning home and crying tears of devastation.

Tellingly, Doty explains in an interview how, if the surgeon had acted differently, he would have gained Doty’s undying loyalty. “If the surgeon, instead of raging, had said something like: Listen young man watch what just happened, you contaminated the field. I know you’re nervous. You can’t be nervous if you want to be a surgeon. Why don’t you go outside and take a few minutes to collect yourself. Readjust your cap in such a way that the sweat doesn’t pour down your face. Then come back and I’ll show you something. Well, then he would have been my hero forever.”

Not only does an angry response erode loyalty and trust, it also inhibits creativity by jacking up the employee’s stress levels. As Doty explains, “Creating an environment where there is fear, anxiety and lack of trust makes people shut down. If people have fear and anxiety, we know from neuroscience that their threat response is engaged, their cognitive control is impacted. As a consequence, their productivity and creativity diminish.” For instance, brain imaging studies show that, when we feel safe, our brain’s stress response is lower.

Grant also agrees that “when you respond in a frustrated, furious manner, the employee becomes less likely to take risks in the future because s/he worries about the negative consequences of making mistakes. In other words, you kill the culture of experimentation that is critical to learning and innovation.” Grant refers to research by Fiona Lee at the University of Michigan that shows that promoting a culture of safety — rather than fear of negative consequences – helps encourage the spirit of experimentation so critical for creativity.

There is, of course, a reason we feel anger. Research shows that feelings of anger can have beneficial results – for example, they can give us the energy to stand up against injustice. Moreover, they make us appear more powerful. However, when as a leader you express negative emotions like anger, your employees actually view you as less effective. Conversely, being likable and projecting warmth — not toughness — gives leaders a distinct advantage, as Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School has shown.

So how can you respond with more compassion the next time an employee makes a serious mistake?

1. Take a moment. Doty explains that the first thing is to get a handle on your own emotions — anger, frustration, or whatever the case may be. “You have to take a step back and control your own emotional response because if you act out of emotional engagement, you are not thoughtful about your approach to the problem. By stepping back and taking a period of time to reflect, you enter a mental state that allows for a more thoughtful, reasonable and discerned response.” Practicing meditation can help improve your self-awareness and emotional control.

You don’t want to operate from a place where you are just pretending not to be angry. Research shows that this kind of pretense actually ends up raising both your and your employee’s heart rates. Instead, take some time to cool off so you can see the situation with more detachment.

2. Put yourself in your employees’ shoes. Taking a step back will help give you the ability to empathize with your employee. Why was Dr. Doty, in the near-tragic OR moment, able to respond compassionately to his resident? As a consequence of recalling his own first experience in the OR room, he could identify and empathize with the resident. This allowed him to curb his frustration, avoid degrading the already horrified resident, and maintain the presence of mind to save a little boy’s life.

The ability to perspective-take is a valuable one. Studies have shown that it helps you see aspects of the situation you may not have noticed and leads to better results in interactions and negotiations. And because positions of power tend to lower our natural inclination for empathy, it is particularly important that managers have the self-awareness to make sure they practice seeing situations form their employee’s perspective.

3. Forgive. Empathy, of course, helps you forgive.

Forgiveness not only strengthens your relationship with your employee by promoting loyalty, it turns out that it is also good for you. Whereas carrying a grudge is bad for your heart (blood pressure and heart rate both go up), forgiveness lowers both your blood pressure and that of the person you’re forgiving. Other studies show that forgiveness makes you happier and more satisfied with life, significantly reducing stress and negative emotions.

When trust, loyalty, and creativity are high, and stress is low, employees are happier and more productive and turnover is lower. Positive interactions even make employees healthier and require fewer sick days. Other studies have shown how compassionate management leads to improvements in customer service and client outcomes and satisfaction.

Doty told me he’s never thrown anyone out of his OR. “It’s not that I let them off the hook, but by choosing a compassionate response when they know they have made a mistake, they are not destroyed, they have learned a lesson, and they want to improve for you because you’ve been kind to them.”

Emma Seppala, PhD, is a Stanford University research psychologist and the Associate Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She consults is a corporate well-being consultant as well as a science journalist with Psychology Today, Huffington Post, Scientific American Mind and the e-magazine she founded, Fulfillment Daily. Follow her on Twitter @emmaseppala or her websitewww.emmaseppala.com.

This article was originally published in the Harvard Business Review, at https://hbr.org.

The Compassionate vs. Empathetic Brain

April 1, 2015 By Chris Kukk

Brain research, especially over the last decade, has provided unique and helpful insights into problems and questions in many areas and disciplines including computer science, economics, education, philosophy, politics, psychology and robotics. An area of neuroscience research with the potential to profoundly change the way we think and interact in society (from classrooms to living rooms to boardrooms) is the work being done in labs focused on understanding the difference between compassion and empathy. The compassion-empathy difference is more than semantic; the consequences are pragmatic. The distinction is real and so is its effect on society: knowing the difference can help individuals build resiliency and avoid burnout as well as turn “empathy gaps,” which have recently made headlines, into junctures for local community and national strength.

Compassion and empathy are not synonymous. Empathy is feeling the same emotion as someone else and compassion is feeling kindness towards another person. Where empathy is about stepping into the shoes of another to understand and share their feelings, compassion is about acquiring a 360 degrees understanding of the suffering or problem that a person is experiencing and taking action to resolve it. Compassion is a two-step process of understanding and acting but empathy is only one step and it is about emotionally absorbing the feelings of another.

Our brain knows the difference between compassion and empathy even if we aren’t aware of it. Tania Singer, director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Lepzig, Germany has used MRI scanners to show that compassion and empathy “are two different phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” When we think compassionately we “light up” the same regions of the brain as love but empathetic thinking lights up regions associated with pain.

The neuroscience effect of having compassion at the forefront of our thinking is positive for each of us as individuals and for our communities. The effect, in very basic terms, is that when we think from a compassionate mindset, we release the peptide hormone oxytocin, which then activates the neurotransmitters of dopamine (brain reward) and serotonin (anxiety reduction) contributing to happiness and optimism—two characteristics that contribute to success.

Compassion’s strength as a power source for fostering communal as well as individual success is that it is not only derived from the same neural networks as love but it is centrally focused on the concern and care for others. When empathy is used as the source for helping another, the central motivation is to alleviate your own pain and stress. And that egocentric motivation is, I believe, one of the keys for understanding why burnout occurs much easier when we think empathetically. Emotionally absorbing another’s feelings, which empathy entails, is physically draining and can make you feel metaphorically stuck in quicksand. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps the emotional quicksand at a distance by using a more cognitive understanding of a person’s suffering when attempting to alleviate the pain: understanding without absorbing. We have confused compassion fatigue with empathy fatigue and that confusion has been reflected repeatedly in major media outlets over the last few months. If our society’s caregivers (i.e., nurses, paramedics, doctors, social workers, police and fire personnel, etc…) could learn how to harness the power of compassion, they would be helping themselves just as much as they are helping others. Their resiliency is an important source of our community strength.

Research has clearly shown that compassion can be taught and learned. Envision a world in which economics, education, medicine and even politics are infused with more compassion. Practicing compassion in politics would not only help Congress to act but act constructively. Imagine politicians who do more than say “I feel your pain” (empathy) but actually understand and do something about it (compassion): we would have more politicians who act with principles rather than for principal. Our modern political world could reflect the words of President Lincoln: “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar; but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar.”

Let’s fill in life’s empathy gaps with the compassion two-step. Let’s ride the neural networks of compassion to stronger and more resilient communities. While Dr. Singer and others are researching “whether it is possible to transform people’s empathetic reactions into compassionate action,” shouldn’t we just simply create waves of kindness that our neural networks naturally want to ride?

Dr. Chris Kukk is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity and Innovation. He’s also Co-Founder and CEO of InnovOwl LLC, a ‘think and do’ consulting firm that solves micro and macro problems through innovative education.

Reprinted from http://chriskukk.com/.

Just Being Exposed To Buddhist Ideas May Make You Feel More Compassionate, Study Finds

April 1, 2015 By Carolyn Gregoire

Buddhists are known for promoting a philosophy of nonviolence, compassion and interconnection of all beings. According to provocative new research, simply being exposed to Buddhist terminology may be enough to activate tolerance and compassion among both Buddhists and non-Buddhists.

Researchers from Stanford University, along with scientists from Belgium and Taiwan, found that exposing people of different spiritual backgrounds to Buddhist concepts was effective in not only undercutting prejudice but also in promoting prosociality, which includes having a sense of responsibility for others, feelings of compassion and empathy.

The study, which was published in the April issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, illustrates a phenomenon known as priming. Priming occurs when people are exposed to certain words or images (in this case, Buddhist words) that then subconsciously influence their thinking or behavior.

For the experiment, 355 total study participants were divided based on their backgrounds: Western Christians, Westerners who practiced Buddhism and Taiwanese with a Buddhist/Taoist background. These three groups were broken down even further, with some participants being primed with religious words and others being exposed to nonreligious, yet still positive, words (e.g., “flower,” “sun,” “freedom”). After this priming, participants took tests designed to reveal any prejudices they may have against different ethnic or religious groups.

Across all groups, people who were exposed to words like “Buddha,” “Dharma” and “awakening” in a word puzzle showed fewer negative associations with African and Muslim people than those who were exposed to Christian or nonreligious words.

Participants who were primed with Buddhist words also scored higher on a test measuring prosocial behaviors. These effects were particularly pronounced among people who scored higher on tests measuring open-mindedness.

Prosocial behaviors are generally in line with the core values of Buddhism, including tolerance of different ways of thinking, universality and interconnection.

However, the researchers don’t mean to suggest that Buddhism is “better” than any other religion.

“What we really want to argue is that Buddhist concepts are associated with tolerance, across cultural groups,” Magalli Clobert, a post-doctoral student at Stanford and one of the study’s authors, told The Huffington Post. “It means that, at least in people’s mind, there is a positive vision of Buddhism as a religion of tolerance and compassion.”

Carolyn Gregoire is a Senior Writer at the Huffington Post, where she reports on health and wellness, psychology and human behavior, and brain science. She has discussed her work on MSNBC, The TODAY Show, and The History Channel, and has spoken at TEDxYouth and the Harvard Public Health Forum.

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.

What Can Bonobos Tell Us about Ourselves?

March 1, 2015 By Frans de Waal

When newspaper headlines recently screamed that both humans and chimpanzees are “natural born killers,” this was obviously hype. Not only were some articles accompanied by a picture of two playing chimps, with their mouths wide open the way apes laugh (which was mistaken for aggression), there was a much deeper flaw. The media frenzy was instigated by a Nature paper that reported 152 confirmed, inferred, or suspected killings among wild chimpanzees, mostly by males—and only one suspected killing among wild bonobos.

Why was the second data point ignored? Is the peacefulness of a close relative not worth reporting on?

The media were eager to follow Winston Churchill’s line, who long before he earned his reputation as a warrior wrote: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”

No one denies our warrior potential, but Churchill may have gotten the interludes wrong. Contemporary hunter-gatherer groups co-exist peacefully most of the time. This probably applied even more to our ancestors on a planet with extremely low population densities. We may need to turn Churchill’s dictum around and speculate that our lineage experienced long stretches of harmony interrupted by brief interludes of territorial confrontation.

We simply don’t know. This is what is so puzzling about the assumption that humans in a “state of nature” (as if such a thing ever existed) would be waging continuous war, and the accompanying assumption that human prehistory is best understood from the male perspective. Violent scenarios inevitably turn around males, with females being the prizes rather than the engines of evolution.

I call it Single Quadrant Anthropology (SQA), because even though every human evolutionary scenario has two genders to work with, and the behavior of two equally close extant ape relatives to consider, only one out of the four possible comparisons is favored. It is all about males and chimpanzees. The male focus has given us the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis, books about the adaptive value of rape, or how the human brain is first of all a male brain that advertises its fitness to females. The chimpanzee focus is recognizable in books with depressing titles such as Demonic Males, and uplifting ones such as The Better Angels of Our Nature, which promote this ape species as the only realistic model to understand where we come from.

Not only are bonobos ignored, they are actively pushed out of the picture. They are too peaceful, too female-dominated, too gentle for the taste of many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. They simply don’t fit.

In 2009, Kent State University came out with a press release under the shocking headline “Man Did Not Evolve from Apes.” Kent State had been involved in the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, also known as “Ardi,” a 4.4-million-year-old fossil from Ethiopia. Inevitably, creationists and intelligent-designers jumped on the misleading press release as a gift from God. The confusion arose because a scientist on the Ardi team, despite being blessed with the bonobo-like name of Owen Lovejoy, concluded that Ardi’s physique was too different to have come from a chimp-like forebear. Ardi’s less protruding mouth and relatively small, blunt teeth clearly set her apart from the chimpanzee in which males are equipped with long, sharp canines.

But what if we descend not from a blustering chimp-like ancestor but from an empathic bonobo-like ape? The bonobo’s body proportions—its long legs and narrow shoulders, even its grasping feet—seem to perfectly fit the descriptions of Ardi, as do its relatively small canines.

Why was the bonobo overlooked? What if the chimpanzee, instead of being an ancestral prototype, is in fact a violent outlier in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage? Ardi is telling us something, and there may exist little agreement about what she is saying, but why do I always hear the drums of war while listening to evolutionary scenarios. This has been going on unabated since Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey.

Bonobo are most of the time marginalized. The recent genome data confirm that bonobos and chimpanzees are equidistant to us, and genetically exactly equally similar to (or different from) us. Yet, most anthropology texts about our ape ancestry mention the species only to say how lovely and charming they are, immediately followed by how we can safely ignore them. They are not to be taken seriously. Even their endangered status has been held against them. Anthropologist Melvin Konner once advocated attention to chimpanzees rather than bonobos by saying “And in any case, chimps have done far better than bonobos, which are very close to extinction.”

I have no trouble with the conclusion of the authors of the Nature paper, led by Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota, according to which chimpanzee violence is a natural behavioral tendency that is not a product of human interference. The interference hypothesis perhaps made sense in the days when Jane Goodall maintained a banana camp for her apes, but those days are long gone. Most of the evidence for violence in the wild now comes from chimpanzee communities that never received any extra food from humans. I have witnessed enough chimpanzee violence first-hand to understand what they are capable of, and have little doubt that field workers are right that chimps use violence to achieve dominance or expand their territory.

No, my beef is rather with the exclusive focus on one ape species and one gender, and the highly speculative nature of the claim that we have continuously been at war since the split between ape and human lineages. Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) is entirely lacking from before the Agricultural Revolution of about 12,000 years ago. We have no data to make any claims about warfare before this time.

Consider a different scenario. Let’s say we descend from peaceful bonobo-like apes, which mingled at their borders without any violence, the way wild bonobos are known to do today. Instead of fighting, they have sex and groom each other. Like Ardipithecus, our ancestors were anatomically similar to bonobos and slowly developed more aggressive and territorial tendencies, which erupted into full-blown territorial combat only once we settled down and collected land and livestock. This was the main cause of warfare.

In the meantime, an offshoot of the ape branch, the chimpanzee, also became more violent, perhaps because of higher population densities or other reasons related to resources, but its behavior never resembled warfare in the human sense. It did not consist of one organized army meeting another, but was more like opportunistic raiding behavior, so that a comparison with warfare is problematic. The above scenario is equally compatible with the current knowledge about our history and prehistory as the bloody scenario reflected in the media headlines.

I for one would love to see science consider all options. This means inclusion of the female point of view—female reproduction, cooperation, competition, and care for offspring—as well as serious consideration of the make-love-not-war bonobo. The species may be embarrassing to some scholars the way 1960s hippies were to their parents, but it is time for us to explore all four quadrants of comparison rather than limiting ourselves for no good reason to just one of them.

Franciscus Bernardus Maria “Frans” de Waal, PhD is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. De Waal’s most recent book is The Bonobo and the Atheist.

This essay originally appeared in This View of Life, an online magazine that reports on evolution the way that Darwin imagined it—as a theory that applies to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life.

Frans de Waal talks in Berkeley