Blog Post 1: EMPATHY by LORRAINE GAMMAN
My take on this first blog will be on Lorraine Gamman’s lecture ‘Empathy’. When I hear the word ’empathy’ what comes to my mind is the act of understanding and/ or appreciating someone else’s thoughts and ideas, albeit disparities in perspective. It generates a sort of feeling, that also comes with consideration, and good intention. To me, empathy feels very humane. The untold approbation of another’s mind.
Just a few minutes in, Lorraine disassembles the components of empathy according to the academics in psychology, which are: affective and cognitive/perspective-taking. As an example, she uses an argument they often use and that we all know of, stating, ‘psychopaths are incapable of emotional empathy’ and contradicts it by saying: “That’s rubbish actually, you know, most psychopaths understand absolutely how to use perspective, they just don’t care how you feel.”
It made me think about Thomas DeSimone, an American mobster, part of the Lucchese crime family, also known as Tommy DeVito in Martin Scorsese’s 90’s mafia movie Goodfellas. Tommy kills plainly out of spite, and even in front of a victim imploring for mercy, provided with absolutely no reason to kill, he pauses and laughs, he does not care.
Lorraine also adduces to Roman Krznaric’s work. Australian writer, social philosopher and expert on empathy, also board member of the *Empathy Museum. In his 2013 TEDxAthens talk on how to start an empathy revolution (of human relationships), he mentions that we are more likely to naturally empathize with people that look like us. As a result, the idea behind this revolution is to step into the shoes of the poor and the powerless, but also our enemies. To do so, we need to ‘spark our curiosity’, cultivate our curiosity about strangers. I gathered up a quote of his which I believe to be a great delineation of that. ” I believe that the thoughts in other people’s heads is the great darkness that surrounds us, and we need to have cultivating conversations with strangers to penetrate that darkness.”
Although Roman and Lorraine have different goals with their empathy studies, I find there’re similarities in their pathways. One goal being to fill out our empathy deficit aiming to generate social and political change, and the other making user-centred designs in interest to sell people things. Both require stepping out of the zone you’d made yourself comfortable with. It’s about deeply immersing yourself into a new experience, then, being able to step out of it ready to make a change.
*Empathy Museum is a series of participatory art projects dedicated to helping us look at the world through other people’s eyes. With a focus on storytelling and dialogue, our travelling museum explores how empathy can not only transform our personal relationships but also help tackle global challenges such as prejudice, conflict and inequality.
TEDx Talks, 2014. How To Start An Empathy Revolution. Available at: <https://youtu.be/RT5X6NIJR88> [Accessed 10 May 2020].