Teaching

In his compelling 2015 book Humans Are Underrated Geoff Colvin quotes Meg Bear from Oracle as saying that “empathy is the critical 21st- century skill.” This is in the context of understanding what computers, robots and AI are evolving to do, and as an answer to the question, essentially, of what humans will still be “good for” once robots have taken over many of our tasks (including a fair bit of thinking).

Humans will still be valuable – even increasingly so, says Colvin, because we will be “freed up to build relationships, lead, and relate to others” with increasing attention. We will be liberated to attend to our “deepest social natures.”

Sounds promising, but there is a problem. If Colvin and Bear are right (and he cites many other examples as well) that the soft skills – especially cognitive empathy – are what we should be focusing on cultivating in students and employees, that those skills will be in greatest demand, their assertion then runs into another piece of important research that suggests an uphill battle. Sara Konrath and her associates at the University of Michigan conducted one of the largest studies on the prevalence of empathy across generations and reported the following: “We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000… college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

So assuming both Colvin and Konrath are correct, we end up with a scissors chart – an increasing demand for a trait that is in increasingly short supply.

I, in concert with others, have devoted some time to thinking about this dilemma, and to the question of whether or not a particular form of role-playing – a pedagogical technique I use in the classroom and in my consulting work –might play a part in increasing empathetic responses in students, managers, and leaders. Based on our observations from the classroom and workplaces, I started arguing for a particular kind of “affective education,” one which uses innovative role-playing techniques coupled with insights from the evolutionary and social sciences to help those who would seek to increase the capacity for empathy (again, particularly cognitive empathy, but occasionally emotional empathy as well) in those they work and study with. Some pilot studies and my observations from years in the classroom corroborate, unfortunately, Konrath’s findings that empathy is in relatively shorter supply these days. There is, for example a scenario we use that brings out a tendency in participants to default to firing people (or at least to want to) as a response to a subordinate who presents challenges unfamiliar to a young manager, even when the subordinate is experiencing severe distress or trauma beyond that person’s control. We have seen, too regularly, that there is a growing inability to empathize with those who can’t but help “bring their problems to work.” We think the work we’ve been doing will help explain this phenomenon in specific, relatable ways, and then give reasons (including scientific ones) for managers and educators to consider what a more “affective,” i.e., emotionally engaging, training for prospective mangers and leaders might accomplish. Stay tuned.