Relationship Between Busyness and Empathy
Don’t you find it interesting that the experts who are predicting the future of work are telling us that the key skills we need to be successful, are empathy and collaboration skills, yet these are the very skills that are rapidly diminishing.
Empathy has been measured by psychologists for many years. The average person today is less empathetic that 75% of the population in 1979 and continues to decline.
According to Jamil Zaki who is a professor of psychology at Standford University empathy is a skill that needs to be rebuilt. We know that empathy is important because it is a biological imperative. It helps us co-operate with each other, produces productive relationships and works towards creating a civil society.
In the new world we are building it is not difficult to understand why empathy may be declining. For example:
- More people are living alone.
According to the ABS in 2017 2.3 million Australians live alone and this number is anticipated to increase. - The rise in social media is changing how we communicate.
We spend on average of three hours a day watching TV and just over thirty minutes a day talking to our family and friends face to face. - Political polarisation. The middle ground of compromise is being severely eroded as represented by politics.
The factor however that I find most striking is the relationship between busyness and empathy.
Have you noticed when you ask people how they are, many people automatically respond by saying “busy”? If by any chance you’re not busy your unlikely to say so as it has almost become counter cultural to admit it.
Being busy is often the reason we give ourselves not to respond to emails, ignore a helpless person on the street, go to functions you don’t want to attend, and the list goes on. I am sure almost anyone living in our modern world would acknowledge this at some level.
A famous seminary experiment conducted by the psychologist John Darley highlights how being busy has a significant impact on empathy. It is called the good Samaritan.
My interpretation of the experiment in summary is; seminary students were asked to write a sermon on kindness and the good Samaritan. Once they wrote it the group was broken into two. Both groups were told to present their sermon at the church that day, however one group were told they had to hurry, and the other group were told they had plenty of time.
Both groups went to the church and at the church door there was an actor pretending he was in distress. He needed a good Samaritan. The group that was in a hurry mostly rushed by the actor in distress, too busy delivering a sermon on being a good Samaritan than to help. In contrast the group that was not in a hurry was more empathetic to the stranger at the church door.
I realised how relevant this experiment was when I was busily writing this article on the loss of empathy on my regular two-hour commute to Brisbane. I was just like the busy people, in the good Samaritan experiment head down engaging with no one yet writing about the importance of it.
Faced with my own hypocrisy I decided to stop, look around the train carriage. Yes, I actually looked up. Except for two women talking and two people sleeping, everyone else was engaged in their own technological pursuit.
What was interesting was the two women. They were in their mid-thirties, clearly on their way to work and they were both chatting and to my surprise crocheting. I really enjoy crocheting myself and by observing them, it brought back happy memories of my sister and I doing the same thing many years ago.
After a while I leaned over and said how much I enjoyed crocheting. We engaged in a brief conversation. They smiled and said how much they liked their train ride to work and as there were four seats would I like to join them?
This small interaction reinforced to me the importance and often the simple pleasure of taking the time to interact with others. It is so easy to put our heads down and fall into the alluring well of technology and the busy trap. It’s harder than we think to suck ourselves out without first awareness and then conscious effort.
Interacting with each other in person is often the best way to develop empathy for others. It is a skill. If we limit our human interactions, we will diminish those skills over time. The result will be the very thing we need to help us succeed; will be the very thing we will lose.
My new motto is: Heads up.
