About this blog

This is a fortnightly blog about empathy. It acts as a global portal for empathy news and ideas from around the world, and contains advice on how to expand your empathy, the stories of great empathetic adventurers, and interviews with key empathy activists and thinkers.

Why have I called it OUTROSPECTION? The twentieth century was an age of introspection, when the self-help industry and therapy culture encouraged us to be excessively individualistic and narcissistic, unashamedly emphasising what can be done to help me. I believe that the twenty-first century should become the age of outrospection, in which we place a greater focus on discovering and fulfilling ourselves through being interested in other people, and understanding how they live, think and look at the world. Empathy is the ultimate art form for the age of outrospection.

But what, exactly, is empathy? I define empathy as the imaginative act of stepping into the shoes of other people and seeing the world from their perspective. Psychologists usually call this ‘cognitive empathy’ or ‘perspective-taking empathy’.

Here is my one-minute definition of empathy for  the Wordia online dictionary:

Empathising is an everyday activity so commonplace we often hardly realise we are doing it. Empathy involves understanding the values, experiences, emotional concerns, beliefs and aspirations that shape someone’s worldview, and is reflected in phrases like ‘I see what you mean’ or ‘I know where you’re coming from’. If you have a friend who has just been abandoned by her lover, you may naturally find yourself thinking about the pain she might be feeling or her sense of rejection and vulnerability. By doing so, you are empathising, attempting to see the situation from her viewpoint, rather than your own. Or perhaps you have a work colleague who is failing to meet his deadlines but you know that his mother is descending into Alzheimer’s and his thoughts are elsewhere, so you decide not to pressure him. Again, you are empathising.

Empathy is different from pity, sympathy, compassion or everyday kindness. If you see a homeless man under a bridge you may feel sorry for him and give him some money as you pass by. That is pity, not empathy. If, on the other hand, you make an effort to step into his shoes, to consider what life is really like for him, and perhaps have a conversation that transforms him in your eyes from a faceless stranger into a unique individual, then you are empathising.

We are often advised to follow the so-called Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. But that also is not empathy, for it involves considering how you – with your own views – would wish to be treated. Empathy requires more: imagining their views rather than your own, and acting accordingly. George Bernard Shaw understood the difference when he quipped, ‘Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you – they may have different tastes’.

This blog aims to show how empathy can become the basis for a philosophy of living and a tool for social and political change. We must learn to live by the empathetic credo, ‘You are, therefore I am.’

Have you ever stepped into shoes like these?