Empathy, the ability to understand and share someone’s emotions, is foundational to
our connections with other people. Research shows that it’s crucial for moral development,
maintaining close relationships, fostering relations between groups, and inhibiting aggression.
Because of its vital role in so many social processes, it’s important to
understand the factors that promote empathy and make empathic behaviour more
likely.
Most empathy-building interventions focus on improving the ability to take
another person’s perspective. For example, someone can be instructed to imagine
the thoughts and feelings of a specific person or group, or they can be
presented with a video or letter in which another person describes their
experience. Such interventions have been shown to successfully increase empathy and promote helping.
It’s sensible to try to build empathy
by fostering an understanding of others. But there is reason to believe that,
less intuitively, having a clear understanding of oneself is
also important for the capacity to empathise.
One way that social psychologists
characterise a person’s sense of self is by assessing their self-concept
clarity. People with high self-concept clarity say that they have a clear
idea about what they are like, that their sense of who they are is stable over
time, and that their characteristics and their beliefs about themselves are
consistent with each other. By contrast, people with low self-concept clarity
have a less clear sense of who they are, including what their characteristics
or desires are. The characteristics they use to describe themselves might be
contradictory, or change from one day to the next. Perhaps not surprisingly,
having high self-concept clarity has been linked to several benefits, including
higher self-esteem, the ability to cope with
stress and relationship satisfaction.
To understand why having a clear
self-concept is also relevant to empathy, we need to examine an aspect of
empathy that’s often neglected. In order to empathise well, you need to not
only understand and share in someone’s emotions, but also remain aware that the
source of what you’re feeling is the other person, not something you are
experiencing yourself. This requires fully appreciating that you and your
experience are distinct from the other person and their experience. Some people
are better able to make this self-other distinction than
others.
Importantly, researchers have suggested that the ability to make this distinction
might be related to helpful ways of empathising. Empathic concern is an
other-focused emotional response that often leads to a desire to help reduce
the other person’s suffering. For example, imagine your distraught friend calls
you and tells you that they’ve just broken up with their romantic partner. You
might try to put yourself in your friend’s shoes to understand how they feel
and, as a result, feel somewhat sad yourself. But if you’re able to hang on to
the awareness that the source of this sadness is your friend’s break-up, not
something that’s actually happening to you (self-other distinction), you’ll
likely react with empathic concern and direct your attention to showing care
for your friend – listening, expressing that you understand how they’re
feeling, and maybe inviting them over for dinner.
Empathic concern can be contrasted
with a more self-focused, aversive emotional response: personal distress. This
kind of response could result from poor self-other distinction – losing sight
of the fact that the other person’s experience, not your own, is the source of
your emotional state. Overwhelming personal distress can actually get in the
way of effective empathic responding, leading one to withdraw from the person
in need rather than helping them. In the hypothetical conversation with your
friend, a reaction marked by personal distress could look like this: you start
vividly imagining what it must have felt like to go through the break-up, as if
you had done so yourself. As a result, you feel overwhelmed with sadness and
anxiety. Suddenly, your response isn’t really about your friend’s feelings, but
your own. You might tell your friend: ‘I don’t know how I would cope with that.
It’s so awful.’ After half-listening to your friend for a couple of minutes,
you change the subject to something lighter to avoid the feelings that result
from putting yourself in their shoes.
So what’s the role of self-concept
clarity in all of this? Having a clear sense of self should make it easier to
appreciate how you are different from other people, and to mentally separate
yourself from them. This might in turn help you to share in another person’s
emotional experience with an appropriate level of distance. By contrast, low
self-concept clarity could lead to a blurring of boundaries between the self
and others, which might make it challenging to separate your emotional
experience from another person’s, resulting in unhelpful personal distress.
To test these ideas about
self-concept and empathy, I conducted a
series of studies during my PhD with my advisor, Jennifer Bartz.
In an initial study, we had participants complete a questionnaire that assessed
their self-concept clarity, asking how much they agreed with statements such
as: ‘In general, I have a clear sense of who I am and what I am,’ or ‘If I were
asked to describe my personality, my description might end up being different
from one day to another’ (reflecting lower self-concept clarity). They also
responded to items about their tendencies to experience empathic concern (eg,
‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me’)
and personal distress (eg, ‘When I see someone who badly needs help in an
emergency, I go to pieces’).
Based on these reports, we found that
self-concept clarity was positively associated with the tendency to experience
empathic concern and negatively associated with the tendency to experience
personal distress. This suggests that people with a clearer sense of self are
more likely to react to others’ distress with feelings of concern and are less
likely to get overwhelmed by their own emotions. Of course, it’s possible that
people were not accurately reporting how they generally react in
empathy-inducing situations. To address this, we conducted a follow-up study in
which participants were confronted with a person in need.
Participants listened to an
experimenter-generated recording that was described as an episode of a
university radio broadcast. They heard an interview with a young woman, Katie
(in reality, an actor), who had lost her parents and one sibling in a car
accident, leaving her with no money and two younger siblings to look after.
Katie described struggling to support her siblings while also trying to finish
her university degree. After listening to the interview, participants rated the
extent to which different adjectives described their emotional reactions. Some
of these represented feelings of personal distress (for example, ‘disturbed’,
‘alarmed’, ‘worried’) and others represented feelings of empathic concern
(‘sympathetic’, ‘compassionate’, ‘tender’). Participants completed the
questionnaire about self-concept clarity as well.
We also wanted to test our hypothesis
that the link between an unclear sense of self and personal distress can be
explained in part by a lack of self-other distinction. To this end,
participants rated the extent to which a series of personality traits described
them – and rated Katie on these same traits. The amount of overlap in a
participant’s ratings of themselves and their ratings of Katie was one measure
we used to assess their degree of self-other distinction.
Consistent with our earlier study,
participants with high self-concept clarity felt more empathic concern and less
personal distress when listening to Katie’s story. And, consistent with our
predictions, people with low self-concept clarity seemed to have trouble
distinguishing themselves from Katie, which appeared to help account for their
greater personal distress.
Perhaps more importantly,
self-concept clarity was also related to helping behaviour. After listening to
the interview, participants had the opportunity to donate money to Katie. We
found that people with lower self-concept clarity donated less money, which
could be partially explained by their increased personal distress and lower
empathic concern. So, not only might an unclear sense of self make one
vulnerable to experiencing more self-focused distress and less concern for
another person’s welfare, these emotional reactions could have tangible
consequences for a person in need.
These findings could have
implications for close relationships. Typically, the people we love are
incorporated into our identity, which helps explain why we tend to
feel the most empathy for the suffering of those closest to us. But, our
findings suggest that close identification with loved ones should be
complemented by a clear sense of self in order to allow for empathic concern.
Otherwise, people might feel their loved ones’ distress too personally and
intensely, making them (ironically) less likely to be helpful.
This work echoes theory and insights from developmental psychology. A critical
milestone in human development occurs between around 15 and 18 months, when
toddlers begin to recognise their own reflection in a mirror.
This is understood as a marker of self-awareness and as evidence that the
toddler has developed a sense of self. What’s interesting is that the ability
to show care for another person and the desire to help them seem to appear only
after the development of this self-awareness. Developmental psychologists take
this as evidence that empathic responding meant to help a person in need hinges
on the development of a sense of self. Our studies suggest that this continues
to be true well into adulthood.
Our findings also raise the
possibility that people could improve their ability to respond empathically to
others by getting to know themselves better. One way of establishing a clearer
sense of self is by identifying your values – the qualities that are important
to you in life, such as honesty, spontaneity or ambition. Values help to answer
the question: ‘What are you all about?’ Figuring out what matters to you is not
always easy, however. For many, it can be helpful to work with a
psychotherapist in trying to develop a clearer sense of self.
While empathy interventions commonly
aim to help people see the world through another person’s eyes, our research
indicates that the impact of these interventions might be limited when someone
lacks a clear sense of who they are. In these cases, it could be beneficial to
focus first on learning more about one’s self. Being clearer about who you are
could make it easier to sense where you end and another person begins – and to
respond to their feelings in a helpful way.
Why
self-understanding could be important for empathising well | Psyche Ideas
