Photo credit: Sarah Deragon
For the last 15 years, I’ve been obsessed with three questions: How do people connect with each other, what do those connections do for us, and can we learn to connect better? This has driven me deep into the science of empathy — people’s responses to each other’s emotions. I’ve probed empathy using everything from brain scans to surveys, in psychiatric hospitals, schools, theaters, and police departments. I’ve squirted oxytocin up people’s noses to see if it would help them understand others, and forced people to wander Stanford’s campus without their phones to see if they’d connect better with strangers. It’s been an adventure.
One of the fun, and vexing, things about studying empathy is that everyone wants to talk about it. According to Google ...