Love Lost: Can We Close Society's Compassion Gap?
*Article from Lexington Lines Spring/Summer 2023 Issue, pages 6-10
Check out the full issue here
Have you ever felt anxious or upset and tried to explain it to someone who is not anxious or upset? Their response might’ve been “Don’t be upset” or “It’s not that big of a deal.”
It is nearly impossible to understand what someone else is going through without going through it yourself. Unconsciously, your mind generates biases that might prevent you from being empathetic.
“Tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger,” wrote 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume.
However, Hume felt imagination can drive empathy; if you can imagine someone else’s pain and suffering, you can begin to experience it yourself. This leads to becoming a more compassionate person.
In a world that is plagued by racism, gender discrimination, religious inequality, and political strife—all while being digitized—we are facing a measurable decline in empathy.
“It’s fair to conclude we have a serious empathy deficit,” says Washington Post Op-ed Writer Jennifer Rubin. “[We have] a collective inability (or refusal) to see the world from other’s perspectives, to understand people’s fears and hopes and our shared humanity.”
In 2010, the University of Michigan students conducted a study concluding that American people have become far less empathetic than they were 30 years earlier.
Coincidentally, Instagram launched in 2010, and just a few years earlier in 2006, Twitter—significantly contributed to the decline in empathy.
Regarding the lack of empathy in the world Reverend Monsignor James Vlaun asks society: “Where did it go?!”
Monsignor Vlaun is the President of the Emmy-award-winning Catholic Faith Network and host of the Religion and Rock podcast. He performs services at the Diocese of Rockville Centre.
“It results in an individualized lifestyle that barely cares about the other, be they close and known or far and unknown,” says Monsignor Vlaun.
The term “compassion gap” was coined by New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff in 2014 when he published an Op-ed article calling attention to the need for early childhood intervention.
“Plenty of successful people see a picture of a needy child and their first impulse is not to help but to reproach,” he writes. “To break cycles of poverty, we have the tools to improve high school graduation rates, reduce teen pregnancies, and increase unemployment. What we lack is the will to do so.”
Monsignor Vlaun says the compassion gap exists in all areas of life, and can be changed if we all learn to feel.
It might seem like the obvious answer is to throw your money into charities or donate your old clothing to Goodwill every few months. But performing small acts of service is not the same thing as having compassion.
Real compassion requires a changed mindset—and how do you change the minds of those who, preoccupied by their own suffering, are willing to trust their own assumptions about people whose lives are nothing like theirs?
Empathy is the precursor to compassion, according to Dr. Jacinta Jimenez, an award-winning psychologist and public speaker.
“Empathy is our feeling of awareness toward other people’s emotions and an attempt to understand how they feel,” she writes in an article for Better Up. “Compassion is an emotional response to empathy or sympathy and creates a desire to help.”
A compassion gap, therefore, suggests an empathy gap.
“The empathy gap is not only a bias that makes us unable to predict our own behavior but also makes us less likely to understand the behavior of others who are in a different visceral state,” says The Decision Lab.
Monsignor Vlaun feels that these unconscious biases sound something like this: “What matters is me and my circle, the rest of creation is on its own.”
Nearly every day I walk by people in New York City who are vulnerable and begging for someone to be compassionate.
And every day, I think to myself: “Why are you still walking? Wouldn’t you want someone to take a chance on you?” Wouldn’t you want someone to help you?”
This might sound like the case of a guilty conscience, and maybe it is. But I also think that many people who consider themselves empathetic or compassionate also continue to walk by.
So, I asked some.
I surveyed 103 people via email, social media, and text and included people of various races, genders, ages, and sexual orientations to better understand why society has become less empathetic.
65.5% of the surveyed group said they rarely offer to help those in need on the street. 13.8% of the respondents said they never help and 20.7% answered that they do often.
The ratio of those who do not offer help homeless people on the street to those that do sometimes is overwhelmingly significant.
But why?
Tied at 48.5%, the respondents said that they either don’t have anything to give or that they worry the person might have a drug or alcohol addiction.
“If the emotional costs are deemed too high, such as when individuals feel overly threatened, insecure, or not personally accountable for offering help, they will be far less inclined to exhibit adaptive helping behavior,” reveals Psychology Today.
The notion that someone might have a drug, alcohol, or another type of addiction can cause bypasses anxiety.
“We hesitate to help when we believe the person in distress could have prevented the problem through a proactive and decisive action of his or her own (Batson, 2010),” reports Psychology Today.
Assumption leads quickly to opinion, and people often mistake hasty opinions for real knowledge. This type of self-deception prohibits people from taking actions that could lead to small, incremental change.
During his commencement speech at San Fransisco University High School in 2007, education Bill Bullard expounded on the relationship between opinion and empathy.
“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge; it requires no accountability, no understanding,” Bullard said. “The highest form of knowledge, according to George Eliot, is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound, purpose-larger-than-the-self kind of understanding.”
But people fail to help for reasons that go beyond the implicit faith in their own biases.
Another 12.5% of the surveyed group responded that they are less inclined to help someone in need based on their appearance.
It is no secret that everyone makes assumptions about others based on the way that they look. It happens in every rom-com; the dashing football player realizes that underneath the glasses and braces, the nerdy girl is actually really cool.
Though films like this can be charming, they are mostly fantasy. It’s all too common for people to mistake their own snap judgments for real knowledge, feeding the cycle of indifference and decline in empathy.
“Social traits tend to be related to emotions, they are connected to how people display their emotions and respond to others’ emotions,” says Psychology Today.
So if we see someone that looks angry or in distress, we might make the assumption that they somehow brought it on themselves and are not worthy of our help—and continue going about our day.
We live in a world that has become overrun by appearance. It is the main focus of every brand and influencer on social media. This largely contributes to “cancel culture” and racial and gender inequality.
Earlier this year, Seattle Public Schools filed a lawsuit against tech giants such as TikTok and Instagram due to their impact on its students’ mental health.
“It blames them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and cyberbullying, making it more difficult to educate students,” reports NPR. “and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional training to teachers.”
People of color and those who identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community are at higher risk for mental health issues. Without empathy, compassion, and action, generations to come are more likely to suffer from disorders such as anxiety and depression.
The ways companies choose to present themselves on social media can also lead to distrust and disappointment.
69% of the surveyed group felt that brands that claim to host philanthropic events or give back to those in poverty, disabled persons, and indigenous peoples are doing so only to keep up appearances.
And while it’s true that some companies only practice performative help, another problem lies within the cynical assumption that all acts of compassion serve an individualistic purpose.
Therefore, society has become desensitized to true displays of suffering as it has to the effectiveness of any compassionate response. Monsignor Vlaun gives the example of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“The lack of empathy and compassion [in the world] allows us to be distant and unengaged in a situation where death and destruction of history are happening,” he says. “Then to our very homes, where we don’t connect as much as we could with our loved ones, and so a distance forms that keep us uninvolved with our friends and families.”
So, every day, the gap widens a bit more.
There might not be a “quick fix” to this issue. However, it all starts with awareness; if we are aware that our society is suffering from a loss of empathy, we can open our minds to who, and what needs help.
Compassion might look different to everyone. Maybe it’s carrying an extra granola bar to work just incase someone is hungry. Maybe it’s leaving positive comments on someone’s Instagram post. Or maybe, it’s donating $100,000 to a charity that promotes racial equality.
The world is in dire need of compassion and empathy. So, whatever you can give, please do.
When coining the term compassion gap, Kristoff was suggesting that learning to be empathetic should start during one’s childhood—and we need more resources to teach it.
These same resources can apply to the adult world as well; Rubin suggests that we can educate adults through workshops in the workplace.
What we need is not only a willingness to teach but a willingness to learn as well. Whether you’re five or fifty, if we open our minds a little bit more, the world can become a more compassionate place.