Empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably. But what if I tell you they are not the same?
Empathy and compassion are innate human emotions that help us to connect with others and to feel their pain and suffering. When someone is going through something, empathy is what we can offer to them. Empathy can be regarded as the ability to recognise and understand the emotions of another person so that we can respond to their emotions. Empathy sounds like an absolute good. But in his book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom, a researcher at Yale, argued that empathy does more bad than good. Empathy is the momentous feeling that can lead to an immediate and strong response to any painful event, but it usually diverts attention from long-term consequences. Let’s imagine you are about to give a presentation in a seminar; you are feeling nervous and experiencing fear at that moment. Your friend is with you. Now, in the context of empathy, your friend should also feel the fear and nervousness you are experiencing, but do you really want to share those feelings with them? The answer is obviously no, because it will do no good to you, nor to your friend.
Then there is compassion, which takes a step forward and, along with understanding someone, encourages us to offer help to the person suffering. Take the example mentioned above: feeling anxious about a presentation. The thing that matters in such a situation is not mere empathy, but rationalised compassion. If you are feeling nervous at that moment, what your friend can do is motivate you and help lessen your fear. So the thing needed is to step back, analyse the situation, and make a rational decision that brings some good and proves to be helpful. Empathy is no doubt a powerful force, but compassion helps to execute it in a positive way.
Empathy is an innate emotional state that we are born with, but compassion — or, I would say, rationalised compassion — can be cultivated, can be learned, and can be practised. Because compassion, along with kindness for others, when combined with empathy, can bring “good consequences” which empathy alone cannot offer.
Social Influences on Emotion
Humans are complex creatures. Our psyche is not only shaped by inherited emotions; there are many other factors that interweave together. For example, there are many social factors that shape our feelings of empathy and compassion towards others. There has been a lot of discussion and research in social psychology about how our social learning, experiences, and the communities we live in shape our decision-making besides our emotions. Research conducted by Forgiarini and colleagues found that when Caucasian people were shown images of people of their own race experiencing a painful stimulus, they showed greater psychological arousal as compared to when they were shown pictures of African people experiencing the very same stimulus. People experience an aroused emotional state when the people they watch suffering are their nearest and dearest ones, leading to an immediate and strong reaction, as compared to when people are not connected to them.
That is a brief outlook on the constructs of empathy and compassion. In such times of fragility, when every day there is a new headline of people suffering at the hands of their families, society, authorities, or any other factor, just having an emotional connection to the victims and being able to feel their pain is not sufficient. Sometimes we have to step back, think rationally, and make guided decisions that will not only make sufferers feel that they are being seen, but also that they are being helped.