Are you Empathetic?

Merriam Webster defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”  Say what?

WordNet, brought to us by Princeton University, puts it nice and sweetly, defining empathy as “understanding and entering into another’s feelings.”  Well,  according to a recent study from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, current college students are not nearly as good at understanding and entering into another’s feelings as college students of the 1980s and 1990s were.  This, you might think, doesn’t bode well for the nonprofit sector, but I am not so sure it matters in the least.

Let’s begin with the questions.  And, please, do not get me wrong:  I am a long-time fan of the work of the Institute for Social Research and believe that the Institute and folks affiliated with it do great, great work.  But some of these questions are ridiculous, and in some cases violate the rules of constructing good questions.  And I know it is a little late in the game to be quibbling over the questions, because if these are the questions used 30 years ago, then these are the questions that have to be used today if comparisons to the past are to be made.  I fully understand that, as a point of logic and as a researcher myself.  But how do you ask if they have tender and concerned feelings about people less fortunate than they.

I confess, I do not generally have tender feeling towards them, but I am always greatly concerned about them, to the point that I will and do take action.  I cannot answer that question with a 5 (out of 5).  Does that make me not empathetic?  And when I see someone being taken advantage of, unless they are in some ways incapable of helping themselves, I do not, as the question asks, feel protective of them; I do, however, feel enraged and want to take action to prevent such behavior happening again.  Once again, I could not answer this question with anything close to a 5 (out of 5).  And I cannot answer “correctly” (by which I mean the right answer for an empathetic person) the question that asks whether I am “quite often” touched by things that I see or the one inquiry as to whether I am “soft hearted.”  Yet, in answer to the question that asks directly, how well does the statement “I am a very empathetic person” fit you, I can answer that question, in a heartbeat, with a 5 out of 5.  I have now taken the survey three times, each time getting a different score (which should NOT happen in good research), ranging from below the well below the average of current college students–51 out of a possible score of 70­­–to an equal spread above current college students.  Take the survey yourself.

Taking the survey for the first time and seeing where I fell, which was above the current college student average, I began to wonder.  I’ve spent my whole career working in the nonprofit sector, working to help others; and this work began in elementary school.  Have I gotten less empathetic with age?  Or, does empathy, as measured on this standard of empathy measurement, not really mean much when it comes to how we actually conduct our lives?

So, I asked the seven other folks who work at The Nonprofit Center to take the survey and let me know their scores (anonymously, if they preferred).  I wanted to check things out:  did I need to be worried that the future generation of leaders as represented by current college students isn’t going to be interested in helping others? would they abandon the good works of the nonprofit sector?

The score I received on my third taking was the lowest score among the staff here.  The score from my first taking, however, was neither the lowest nor highest, and by a considerable margin in some instances.  The lowest score was shared with me with an off hand comment to the effect of, “I must not be very empathetic.”  But when I responded to this person by saying, “But I know you would do anything for a person in need,” I was told the following story.  Driving down the street one night, this employee, let’s call her Carla, saw an elderly woman fall.  She and her friend got out of the car to help the woman but could not lift her.  A man, let’s call him Joe, walking down the street stopped, helped lift up the woman and got her to Carla’s car.  In driving the woman to her house, Carla, who had been very unhappy with how the fallen woman had eyed the man who stopped to help, made sure to converse with her friend, in a voice loud enough for the fallen woman to hear, something to the effect of how you can’t judge books by their covers.  Upon arrival at the woman’s house, Carla helped her up the steps, made sure she was settled, asked if there was anyone—friend or relative—who she could call, and then left.  And yet Carla’s empathy score fell below that of the least empathetic college generation in 30 years!

The demonstration of empathy is not how we score on a test; it is how we chose to live our lives, day in and day out.  Fifty-one out of 70:  you don’t scare me!

But just in case, here’s a link on how to increase your empathy.