The Compassionate Instinct

Reading can be an escape—a ride on an emotional roller coaster. But we can also read and go to the theater to extend our sympathies. In Romeo and Juliet, we can feel for the adolescent Juliet as she finds herself in love with someone her parents hate because he belongs to the wrong family. In The Tempest, we can feel for the aging Prospero as he nears the end of his career. Our feelings are for these characters, but they are our own feelings. In the hands of writers like William Shakespeare or George Eliot, we can perhaps understand these feelings better than if they were caused by events in our own lives. Works of fiction draw on our skills of empathy and allow us to practice these skills. Then not only do they extend our individual experience, but they can become topics of discussion with others, who can show us even further implications of our emotions than what we had perceived ourselves.

A DIFFERENT VIEW

Alfie Kohn

FRANZ KAFKA once described war as a “monstrous failure of imagination.” In order to kill, one must cease to see individual human beings and instead reduce them to an abstraction: “the enemy.” Even in popular entertainment, the bad guys are never shown at home with their children. It’s easy to cheer the death of a caricature, not of a three-dimensional person.

But to step outside one’s own viewpoint and consider how the world looks to another person is one of the most remarkable capabilities of the human mind. Psychologists call this skill “perspective taking,” and it offers a foundation for morality. People who can—and do—think about how others experience the world are more likely to reach out and help those people—or at a minimum are less likely to harm them.

Taking another person’s perspective means realizing that in war, each person underneath our bombs is the center of his universe, just as you are the center of yours: he gets the flu, worries about his aged mother, likes sweets, falls in love—even though he lives half a world away and speaks a different language. To see things from his point of view is to recognize all the particulars that make him human, and ultimately it is to understand that his life is no less valuable than yours.

Less dramatically, many of the social problems we encounter on a daily basis can be understood as a failure of perspective taking. People who litter, block traffic by double-parking, or rip pages out of library books seem to be locked into themselves, unable or unwilling to imagine how others will have to deal with their thoughtlessness.

Developing the skill of perspective taking is a challenge; it’s something people need to practice from the time they’re young. So it’s imperative that we try to cultivate it in our kids.

There are different levels of perspective taking, of course, and more sophisticated versions may elude very young children. The best we may be able to hope for in the case of a 4-year-old is the rather primitive ethics of the Golden Rule. We might say (in a tone that sounds like an invitation to reflect, rather than a reprimand), “I notice you finished all the juice and didn’t leave any for Amy. How do you think you would feel if Amy did that?” The premise of this question, probably correct, is that both kids like juice and would be disappointed to find none available.

But George Bernard Shaw reminded us that this sort of assumption doesn’t always make sense. “Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you,” he advised. “Their tastes may not be the same.” And, we might add, their needs or values or backgrounds might not be the same either. Older children and adults can realize that it’s not enough to imagine ourselves in someone else’s situation: we have to imagine what they’re feeling in that situation. We have to see with their eyes rather than just with our own. We have to—if I may switch metaphors—ask not just what it’s like to be in their shoes, but what it’s like to have their feet.

So how can we promote perspective taking in our children? How can we help them to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how things look from points of view other than their own? First, we can set an example. After a supermarket cashier says something rude to us, we can comment to our child who has witnessed this: “Huh. He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood today, did he? What do you think might have happened to that man that made him so grouchy? Do you think someone might have hurt his feelings?”