Oct 13, 2021
Technology offers increasing opportunities for people to connect, but recent polls show that the majority of adults feel that society is more broken and divided. Mental health issues and loneliness are on the rise. Deep fractures are surfacing between communities and individuals, divided by politics, race, gender, finances and belief systems. From climate doubt to vaccine fears, we find it increasingly hard to show empathy, especially for those whose beliefs, experiences or identity is ‘other’.
Welcome to the Empathy Crisis.
These are not new problems, but in the physical isolation of the last 18 months, our online echo chambers have only affirmed our own world views and deepened existing societal divides.
In the most extreme circumstances, some will be left without the will, need or ability to understand anything outside of what, or who, they already know and care about. Garnering support in this new and isolated world is going to be an uphill battle. We need empathy now, more than ever.
Let’s be clear on what we mean by empathy. According to Merriam Webster, “sympathy is when you share the feelings of another; empathy is when you understand the feelings of another but do not necessarily share them”. But in reality it’s never as clear cut as that. Professor of Psychology Judith Hall prefers the broader definition of empathy as “something to do with what other people are going through and being concerned about them”.
According to psychologists, people have a hard time empathising with the concerns of a group of people they don’t know. This is often termed ‘the identifiable victim effect’. “We feel greater empathy, and an urge to help, in situations where tragedies are about a specific, identifiable individual, compared to situations where the victims are a larger, vaguer group of people.”
Another barrier is known as the ‘psychological numbing’ phenomenon. The idea that “the more people die, the less we care”. This may be because we get increasingly desensitised once more people become affected by an issue, making it harder to maintain a personal connection when all we see is rising numbers.
The widely ridiculed and criticised virtue signalling from business leaders and pop culture, and the ultimate weaponisation of woke to mean quite the opposite of the values it truly represents, shows just how effective these natural human traits can be in both suppressing and diverting true empathy.
Walk With Yeshi incorporates AI and a conversational, multimedia interface to invite individuals to participate in a young Ethiopian woman’s story. Built for Facebook Messenger, Walk With Yeshi takes individuals on a 2.5 hour journey, matching the length of the average walk for water. Yeshi represents millions of young African women who walk for hours each day to collect water - she shares the sound of her footsteps, the music of her village, the sights of her path, and the wisdom of her hardship.
Another example is USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony, which uses AI to enable people to ask questions that prompt real-time responses from pre-recorded video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide. The goal is to ensure that now and far into the future, museum-goers, students and others can have real-time conversations with these eyewitnesses to history to learn from those who were there.
We’re here because we’re here was developed by conceptual artist Jeremy Deller to commemorate WW1. “On 1 July 2016 more than 1,400 participants in First World War uniform appeared unannounced in locations across the UK. Each volunteer represented an individual soldier who was killed on July 1 in 1916.”
Paul Slovic, Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon
The ‘Red Line’ podcast, hosted by a geopolitical think tank in Australia, brings together government officials, expert academics, geopolitical analysts, and journalists from around the world to produce quality, in-depth analysis of key global issues. In doing so, the Red Line purports to reveal “the underreported angles”, finding the in-depth human stories that mainstream media can’t cover and prompting broader thought on all sides of these key issues.
The Prison Within - a documentary about restorative justice, which takes a look at the Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG) developed by the Insight Prison Project. “In an astonishing feat of empathy, the VOEG program pairs an offender with a “surrogate victim”, who is a person hurt by a similar crime, whether it be rape, robbery or murder. In tearful conversations, the offender and victim share their experiences and find common ground. In that way, restorative justice serves victims as well as the offenders, helping both heal from trauma to better reintegrate into society”.
TikTok makes it clear in its research that the company believes that “mindset matters more than age.” Platforms like Aging2.0, Gen2Gen and Cerkel are also working towards building intergenerational communities, with Cerkel creating a “community of professionals ages 20-70+ who connect for two-way career support and mentorship.”
CharitySoWhite aims to open up conversations about racism in the charity sector, and tackle the image of the “white saviour” that has triggered backlash in many charities. Their call to action is simple: “have candid and critical conversations about racism, rooted in honesty, humility and hope; publicly acknowledge that institutional racism exists in their organisations; prioritise anti-racist work”
Call-In Culture has arisen as a response to cancel culture. Rather than simply ‘call out’ people in order to “publicly shame and humiliate people”, Professor Loretta Ross teaches people to ‘call in’. “A call in is actually a callout done with love and respect. Because you're really seeking to hold people accountable for the potential harm that they cause, but you're not going to lose sight of the fact that you're talking to another human being.”
Earlier this year London based drag queen Shayshay schooled instagram on the benefits of calling in instead of calling out, and how to do it well. “When we call in instead of call out we all have a better chance of learning and growing together.”
Walk with Yeshi demonstrates just how powerful immersive storytelling can be when we harness art and science, and highlights the increasingly critical role technology plays in building connections. How can you use these tools to elevate and focus your storytelling, and help people develop a far deeper human connection to your cause? What would an immersive, multi-sensory world need to look like for people to experience first-hand the causes you support?
How can you prompt the right conversations and share the right information in order to foster much greater empathy in groups of disconnected individuals? How can you find the intersections between groups to create bridges for connection?
Authentic empathy means having good conversations: actively listening to who you’re engaging with, and letting their concerns shape how you then respond. As causes grow, and the communities you support / support you evolve and change, it becomes increasingly more important for you to listen with wide open ears and respond with action based in thought and empathy.