Less Empathy, More Kindness

You’ve probably encountered the idea that you can feel overwhelmed by the suffering of others. This is sometimes called “burnout,” a term coined in the 1970s. But it’s not a new insight; the concept has many origins, including, to my surprise, Buddhist theology.

I first learned about this from a conversation with Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and neuroscientist, described by many as “the happiest man on Earth.” Our meeting was by chance; we were checking into a hotel outside London for a conference where we were both scheduled to speak. I recognized him at the reception desk (saffron robes, beatific smile, hard to miss), introduced myself, and we met later for tea.

It was an interesting encounter. He genuinely radiates inner peace, and he told me he spends months each year in complete solitude, finding deep pleasure in it. That conversation actually led me to adopt meditation practices, though somewhat different ones. At some point, he politely asked what I was working on. It turned out that telling someone like Ricard you were writing a book against empathy was rather like telling an Orthodox rabbi you were writing a book in favor of shellfish, and I felt awkward describing my project. But I did, and his reaction to my clumsy explanation about empathy surprised me.

He didn’t find it shocking; instead, he found it obviously correct and went on to describe how well it aligns with Buddhist philosophy and his own collaborative research with Tania Singer, a prominent neuroscientist.

Consider first the life of a bodhisattva, an enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to remain in the cycle of life and death to help the unenlightened masses. How does a bodhisattva live?

In his book on Buddhist moral philosophy, Charles Goodman notes that Buddhist texts distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.” The first should be avoided because it “will exhaust the bodhisattva.” It is the second that is worth pursuing. Great compassion is more distant and measured, and can be sustained indefinitely.

This distinction between empathy and compassion is fundamental to the argument I make throughout my book Against Empathy. And it is supported by neuroscience research. In a review article, Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki describe how they make sense of this distinction: “In contrast with empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of another; rather it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern, and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for the other and not feeling with the other.”

The neurological difference between the two was explored in a series of fMRI studies using Ricard as a subject. While in the scanner, Ricard was invited to engage in various types of compassion meditation directed toward people who were suffering. To the researchers’ surprise, his meditative states did not activate the parts of the brain associated with empathic suffering; those are normally activated by non-meditators when they think about others’ pain. And Ricard’s experience was pleasant and invigorating. Once out of the scanner, Ricard described it as: “a positive and warm state associated with a strong pro-social motivation.”

He was then invited to place himself in an empathic state and was scanned while doing so. Now the appropriate empathy circuits were activated; his brain looked like that of non-trained people who were asked to think about others’ pain. Later, Ricard described the experience: “Empathic resonance… very quickly became intolerable for me and I felt emotionally exhausted, much like being drained. After almost an hour of empathic resonance, I was given the choice to engage in compassion or end the scan. Without the slightest hesitation, I agreed to continue scanning with compassion meditation, because I felt very depleted after empathic resonance.”

A similar contrast appears in ongoing experiments led by Singer, in which ordinary people, non-meditators, were trained to experience either empathy or compassion. In empathy training, people were instructed to try to feel what others were feeling. In compassion training, sometimes called “loving-kindness meditation,” the goal is to feel positive and warm thoughts toward a series of imagined people, starting with someone close to you and moving toward strangers and perhaps enemies.

There is a neural difference: empathy training led to increased activation in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Compassion training led to activation in other parts of the brain, such as the medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum.

There is also a practical difference. When people were asked to feel empathy with those who were suffering, they found it unpleasant. Compassion training, by contrast, led to better feelings on the part of the meditator and kinder behavior toward others.

In a summary of her research, Singer makes the following point:

When experienced chronically, empathic suffering likely gives rise to negative health outcomes. Compassionate responses, on the other hand, are based on positive feelings, oriented toward the other, and on the activation of pro-social motivation and behavior. Given the potentially harmful effects of empathic suffering, the discovery of existing plasticity in adaptive social emotions is encouraging, especially because compassion training not only promotes pro-social behavior but also increases positive affect and resilience, which supports better coping with stressful situations. This opens many opportunities for the targeted development of adaptive social emotions and motivation, which may be particularly beneficial for people working in helping professions or in stressful environments generally.

This connects well with the findings of David DeSteno and his colleagues, who discovered in controlled experimental studies that being trained in mindfulness meditation, as opposed to a control condition in which people are trained in other cognitive skills, makes people kinder and more willing to help. DeSteno and his colleagues argue that mindfulness meditation “reduces activation of brain networks associated with simulating the feelings of people in distress, in favor of networks associated with feelings of social affiliation.” He cites Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa: “the training allows practitioners to move quickly from feeling the suffering of others to acting with compassion to relieve it.”

Less empathy, more kindness.

These studies challenge the claims of those psychologists and neuroscientists who believe that compassion and empathy are necessarily intertwined. In critical responses to an earlier article I wrote, Leonard Christov-Moore and Marco Iacoboni asserted that “affective empathy is a precursor to compassion,” and Lynn E. O’Connor and Jack W. Berry wrote: “We cannot feel compassion without first feeling emotional empathy. In fact, compassion is the extension of emotional empathy through cognitive processes.”

It is hard to know what to do with these claims, given all the everyday situations in which we care about people and help them without engaging emotional empathy. I can be concerned about a child who is frightened of a storm and reach out to comfort them without experiencing their fear in any real way. I can be worried about hungry people and try to support them without having any vicarious experience of hunger. And now the research we have just discussed supports an even stronger conclusion. Not only can compassion and kindness exist independently of empathy, but sometimes they are at odds. Sometimes we are better people if we suppress our empathic feelings.

This article was originally published at Garrison Institute