Daniel Goleman: Why aren't we so compassionate

Compassion is the awareness and empathy of something (such as someone's feelings) and the ability to empathize with the situation of others. In fact, as the pace of work and life accelerates, busy people cannot pay attention to people and things other than themselves. Due to the bias in the focus, the world seems to be covered in a layer of frost, strange and cold. However, if we stop our hurried footsteps occasionally, we may be able to see a different scenery.

Author: Daniel Goleman

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I'm a psychologist, and not long ago there was a very important study at Princeton Theological Seminary that explains why, when we have so many opportunities to help, we sometimes help, sometimes not.

Students from Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they would conduct an evangelistic internship and assigned each person a sermon topic. Some of the students got a theme about stories about benevolent and kind people: stories about a stranger who was on the side of the road helping a stranger in need.

The other half of the students were given random Bible stories, and they were told in turn that they were going to preach in another building, and on their way to that building, each of them passed by a man who was bending over and groaning, apparently in need of help.

The question is: Did they stop to help?

1. Why don't we help?

The more interesting question is: If their subject matter is a story about the kind-hearted man, does it affect their behavior? The result: no impact at all.

Deciding whether they'll stop to help strangers in need depends entirely on how busy they think they are, whether they feel they're going to be late, or whether they're preoccupied with what they're talking about.

I think that's the dilemma of our lives: we don't always help others because our focus is biased.

There is a new field of brain science: social neuroscience, which studies the neuronal circuits of the human brain, activates and new ideas about empathy from social neuroscience during interaction.

That is to say, if we feel empathy involuntarily, we will sympathize with the other party. The newly discovered neurons, mirror neurons, act like neurowired fidelity technology, activating the same areas in the brain as those in each other's brains. We can't help but "heart to heart" with each other.

If that person needs help, if he is suffering, we can't help but help him. At least that's the argument.

But the question is: Why don't we help? I think there's a range from complete concentration to paying attention to the other person, to empathy, to sympathy, and finally to empathy.

The simple fact is that if we focus on ourselves and focus more on ourselves throughout the day, as is usually the case, we are not actually fully aware of others, and this gap between ourselves and our attention to others can be very subtle.

2. The difference between paying attention to oneself and paying attention to others

One day I was paying taxes, and when I was about to list my donations, while writing a check to the Seva Foundation, I noticed my thoughts—my friend Larry Brilliant would be happy that I had donated my money to Seva.

So I realized that what I had gained from giving was self-intoxication – I was satisfied with myself, and I began to think of people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be healed, and I realized that I had gone from this self-intoxication to selfless happiness, happy to be helped by others. I think that's a dynamic.

But the difference between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is something I encourage all of us to pay attention to. You can get a rough idea of this among daters.

A while ago I went to a sushi restaurant and overheard two ladies discussing one of the brothers, who said "My brother has trouble finding a partner, so now try lightning pairing." "

I wonder if you know anything about lightning pairing? The ladies sat at the table, the men communicated with them in turn, there was a clock and a bell, every five minutes, the time came, the exchange was over, and the lady decided whether to give her business card or email address to the man for future contact.

The woman said, "My brother never got a business card. I know why. Whenever he sat down, he began to talk about his situation non-stop, never asking about the other person's situation. ”

I did some research in the Sunday Style section of The New York Times, focusing on some of the stories behind marriage because they were interesting.

Investigating Alice Charney Epstein's marriage, she said she would give the other person a test when she was dating. The test is: when they are together, how long will it take for the man to ask her a question with the word "you"? Apparently, Mr. Epstein passed the test, which is why this report was written.

It's a very small test, and I encourage you to try it out at the party as well. At TED, there are a lot of great opportunities.

There was a recent article in the Harvard Business Review titled "The Moment of Humanity," about how to actually engage with others at work. They say the most basic thing you have to do is turn off your phone, turn off your laptop, end your daydreaming, and then concentrate on communicating with the other person.

There is a newly coined word in the English language that uses a situation where someone we're talking to suddenly pulls out their phone or answers a call, and then all of a sudden we don't exist. The word is "pizzled", which is a combination of "puzzled" and "pissedoff". I think that's quite appropriate.

It is our empathy that distinguishes us from sociopaths.

My brother-in-law was an expert on fear, and he was trained to be a scholar of Chaucer (An English novelist and poet, born in London, England), but he was born in Transylvania, and I think that had some influence on him.

At some point, anyway, my brother-in-law made up his mind to write a book about a murderous demon who committed a series of crimes. The man in the book brought panic to our lives years ago. He was the Santa Cruz Strangler. Before his arrest, he murdered his grandparents, his mother and five girls at St. Ta Cruz.

So, my brother-in-law went to interview the murderer. When he saw him, he realized that this guy was truly terrifying. On the one hand, he was nearly seven feet tall. But that's not the scariest thing. The most terrifying thing is that he has an IQ of 160, an absolute genius.

But there is no relationship between IQ and emotional empathy, which refers to empathy for understanding the feelings of others. They are controlled by different parts of the brain.

So, on the one hand, my brother-in-law plucked up the courage to ask a question he really wanted to know the answer to, namely: How can you do this? Don't you have the slightest sympathy for the victim? These were very intimate murders, and he strangled them.

The strangler replied very plainly, "Uh, no. If I felt miserable, I wouldn't do it. I don't have to think about that. I don't have to think about that. ”

I find this annoying. In a sense, we pay attention to our own words in the activity, and when there are other people, we don't pay attention to ourselves.

Imagine shopping and imagine the possibility of sympathetic consumption. Now, as Mike Donner points out, the items we buy and use have potential consequences. We are all uninformed victims of common blind spots.

We didn't notice, and we didn't notice the toxic molecules emitted from the carpet or chair fabric. Or we don't know that the fabric is a technical or manufacturing nutrient. Can it be recycled or thrown into a garbage dump?

In other words, we have neglected the ecological, public health, and socioeconomic justice of the products we buy and use, in a sense, the room itself is the "image of the house" (a well-known but ignored issue) that we do not see.

So we become victims, victims of the systems that lead us elsewhere.

There's a good book titled Materials: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects, which talks about behind-the-scenes stories such as T-shirts, where cotton is produced, the fertilizers used and their consequences for the soil, for example, cotton is very difficult to dye with fabrics, and about 60% of it is washed away with wastewater.

Epidemiologists know that children living near textile factories have a high chance of developing leukemia.

There's one company, Bennett and Company, which supports Polo.com websites. The CEO of Victoria's Secret knows this and has set up a joint venture in China to ensure that wastewater is properly treated before it flows to groundwater.

Right now, we don't have the ability to choose this ethical T-shirt over other unethical product opportunities. So how can this be done?

3) Notice that problems are the key to inspiring compassion

Well, I've been thinking about that.

There is a saying in the field of information science that eventually everyone will know everything. The question, however, is this different? In the '80s, when I was working at The New York Times, I wrote an article about a new problem in New York—the homeless people on the streets.

I spent weeks working with a social work agency that served the homeless. I realized that most of these homeless people are mentally ill and they have nowhere to go. They have the conclusion of the diagnosis.

This woke me up from the trance of the city people, and when we passed a homeless, someone who was on the edge of our vision, we didn't notice, and we didn't take any action.

One day not so long after that, it was a Friday, and I was about to walk down the subway station after work. It was during rush hour when tens of thousands of people were pouring down the steps. Suddenly, as I was walking down the ladder I noticed a man lying on his side, shirtless, motionless, and people stepped over him, hundreds of thousands of people stepped over him.

Because this "trance of the city people" had abstained, I stopped to understand what was wrong.

I had just stopped when six or seven passers-by noticed him. We found out he was Spanish, he didn't speak English, he was penniless, he had been wandering the streets for days, hungry and eventually fainting. Someone immediately went to buy orange juice, someone brought a hot dog, someone brought the police. After a while, the man will be able to stand up. All you need to do is pay attention.

So I'm still optimistic. Thank you.