grandchildren. Women are somewhat more likely than men to donate their kidneys (58 percent of living donors versus men’s 42 percent).15 The Yad Vashem archive of data on non-Jews honored for rescuing Jews shows that although men and women helped in equal numbers, among unmarried people, more women helped.16 At work, women predominate in the caring professions: they make up 98 percent of kindergarten teachers, 79 percent of social workers, and 92 percent of registered nurses.17 Maybe because women can have babies, evolution gives them an empathy advantage, or maybe it is because the culture encourages empathy more in girls than boys, or maybe both.
But that does not mean men do not help other people. In fact, many other studies concluded that, without being asked, men perform more public altruistic acts than women.18 They offer directions to the lost, give up their seats in the bus, and give money to strangers for the subway. Men received 91 percent of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awards given between 1904 and 2008, and 87 percent of the Medal of Bravery awards given out by the Canadian government.19 So while men are not the biggest empathizers, they often save the day.
WORDS, MEANINGS, CAUSES OF EMPATHY
We say we “stand in another’s shoes,” but what are we doing, feeling, and thinking when we stand this way? We see through another’s eyes. We feel interested. We come to feel as they do. We say to ourselves, “What has happened to you could happen to me.” And as we imagine this, we are often doing such things as looking someone in the eyes and listening closely. We feel curious. Or we come to feel empathy for certain categories of stranger that we learn about by word of mouth or by newspaper, television, a film, a play, or a book.
Empathy differs from feeling, or being held as, responsible for another.20 A nephew might pay a dutiful visit to a grumpy uncle but lack empathy for him. In All Our Kin, Carol Stack describes “kinscription,” whereby some members of poor black families were delegated to care for others.21 The child of an ill parent may be sent to live with a childless aunt. A neighborhood orphan is taken in by his grandmother’s friend from church. A family looks after a lonely neighbor. One accepts the continual possibility of a kin assignment and empathy is expected to follow.
But empathy does not always follow, nor does it always lead to, rescue or care. A 27-year-old, single photographer I interviewed described his feelings upon learning that his dear friend had received a diagnosis of cancer. He was grief-stricken but did not feel it was his role to help. “I wasn’t the first person Steven called,” the photographer remembered. “That was his sister, and then a female friend of his, and then the two women competed over who could take the best care of him, and called on their families to help. I wasn’t part of that.” Maybe he would have done something if others had not, but as things stood he felt empathy, but no call to action.
So empathy is related to doing things, but it is not the doing of those things. We console a bereaved colleague. We talk over the day with a partner. We pet a dog tied up outside a coffee shop. We leave coins in a homeless man’s cup. We pray for others. These are acts of kindness that usually go with empathy, but empathy itself is an act of feeling for another person.22 Our hearts can go out to Sudanese war orphans or Congolese rape victims, but we may do nothing to help them. As the philosopher Joan Tronto points out, caring about a person differs from caring for a person (such as arranging for care of an elderly parent), which differs from taking care of a person (feeding and dressing the parent).23
How do we distinguish empathy from other things like “understanding,” “projection,” or “identification"? Empathy is less purely cognitive than understanding, because it requires imagining what another is feeling. We also sometimes project the idea of ourselves onto another person, mistaking the one for the other. A recently bereaved widow, for example, recounted a friend’s well-meaning attempt to comfort her:
I knew Adrianne loved me and wanted to comfort me. But I knew my loss reminded her of her loss. In the living room that afternoon, I felt the presence of my husband and was trying to absorb all the marvelous recollections friends had shared of him. But Adrianne began rubbing my hand back and forth as if she were sanding it, and told me she knew how upset I must be feeling. But that was her upset, not mine.
The good side of projection, of course, is that we take flight from ourselves; we do not remain aloof or uncaring.24 The bad side of it is that we mistake ourselves for the other person. We see the other as like our generous mother, depressed sister, or judgmental colleague, when he or she is not any of these. Projection distorts empathy. Again, we may identify with another person and, over a long period of time, gradually incorporate him into our personality. (We say, the young boy laughs just like his dad.) Empathy does not have to stick like that.25
This is because empathy is an art. It is the art of the surveyor, the draftsman and the reader of the empathy map.26 A surveyor gauges the height of the mountain, depth of a sea, expanse of the desert. She discovers a reality that exists in places where, generally, she is not. By means of aerial, radar and sonar testing the surveyor gathers information about where things are, climates, and the possibilities of life. She needs a steady hand to hold her surveying instruments. As the surveyor of an empathy map, one learns to hold “a steady hand”—that is, to manage to some degree the anxiety, outrage, grief, or other emotion that the misfortune of another might evoke, so that the empathizer stays tuned into what the other is feeling.
A draftsman carefully draws a map based on the surveyor’s report, and the reader reads the draftsman’s map. So all told, the empathizer develops the skill of noticing, remembering, and imaginatively reproducing the feelings of another, and accepts in her—or his—own heart the feelings evoked by all that was seen. Empathy maps are not given to us: we develop the art of making them.
Some maps are mere sketches. A recovering alcoholic I talked to explained the simple suggestion of empathy she received from a “buddy” through Alcoholics Anonymous. “They assigned me a buddy who had been through the same struggle that I face. He called me every day and told me a short story. I responded with a story. No questions were asked. I didn’t get to know him really well, but he reminded me that I wasn’t alone.” Other maps can offer rich details of the topography of another person’s self.
When we draw a map, we draw boundaries around high-empathy, low-empathy, and no-empathy zones. We feel deeply for the people within a high-empathy zone, and refuse empathy to those in the no-go zone. We imagine individuals or categories of people as eligible for empathy and others, not. To widen the criteria for entrance into an empathy zone, we try out empathy on a wide variety of people. So we come to know how it feels to be an abandoned baby, a prize-winning student, a heartless murderer. We know these things because we have cultivated the art of imagining ourselves into other people’s minds.
Cultivating this art is to open channels and keep them open. We can feel spontaneous empathy for a person or even a group, as we shall see, and in such cases the art lies in countering the forces which would—also spontaneously—inhibit empathy.
FEELING RULES AND ZONES OF EMPATHY
For in empathizing with another, we are guided by various tacit moral rules governing our idea of the “right” sort of person to be—the standalone individual or the helper-cooperator. To some, it is shameful to depend “too much” on others; so at the slightest sign of dependency, one is quickly disparaged as “a clinging vine,” “a perpetual child,” or “a welfare bum.” The moral rule carries with it a feeling rule: Do not feel sorry. Do not empathize.27 Others hold different ideas about needs, feeling that it is natural to have them and good to seek help from others. So for them, the feeling rule is: Feel compassion. Empathize. Which moral rule we hold dear determines who we feel empathy for, and how hard we try to feel it.
Our social class, race, gender, sexual
