Can Empathy Be Taught?

Irvine students learned to combat prejudice by thinking themselves into another’s position.

By Kristen Renwick Monroe

—Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

Prejudice and discrimination are ugly cousins, haunting humankind like the evil fairy who appears unbidden to curse the young princess.¹ Is education the good fairy, bestowing tools to overcome this curse? A course I taught in winter 2006 at the University of California, Irvine—one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the United States—addressed this question.²

The course, part of a pilot program funded by the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative, asked why some differences— ethnicity, race, religion—become politically significant while others—height, hair color, weight—do not. Why are linguistic differences sometimes politically relevant and sometimes not? What about gender or sexual orientation? What encourages respect for or tolerance of differences judged to be ethically and politically salient, leading some to reach out across divides that isolate others? These questions take on a poignant immediacy when we read news reports about continuing prejudice and   discrimination at home and abroad and ongoing ethnic, religious, and sectarian violence, including genocide and war. Students need to consider these questions as they enter a shrinking world that will expose them to people from diverse cultures, religions, and ethnicities.

In the course, I encouraged students to think deeply about their own attitudes toward people judged to be “different.” Students began by measuring their own awareness of prejudice toward different groups, using quantitative and qualitative measures. On the first day of the course, they explored this topic in an in-class essay, which they rewrote and expanded over the next week. Students also completed—in private—a series of implicit-association tests designed to measure the difference between conscious and subconscious attitudes toward prejudice. Students were encouraged to discuss their reactions to these tests in class, but they were not required to talk about their personal results unless they felt comfortable doing so.

The course itself considered prejudice within a political framework, asking about the political and ethical response to difference. The pedagogical premises were threefold:

1. The key to understanding prejudice and discrimination is not to think of differences as intrinsic and immutable; instead, one should think about why moral salience is accorded to some differences;

2. The psychological literature on prejudice suggests that seeing the world from another’s perspective is critical to determining why and how our perceptions of others shape our treatment of them; and

3. Differences appear to become politicized through the cognitive categorization and classification of others in relation to ourselves.³

I thus designed the course to encourage the empathic involvement that leads to seeing the world through the eyes of the “other,” hoping that this process would increase understanding and tolerance of “differences.”

Different Vantage Point

Another pedagogical premise of the course was that students learn best not by listening to lectures but by being forced to examine their own preconceptions in the light of empirical evidence. The class read traditional material on differences, such as social psychological work on prejudice, discrimination, and identity. I gave special attention to social identity theory and self-categorization theory and also assigned novels to supply the personal link that psychologists now tell us provides the emotional clout to change opinions. We read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (on the experience of Asian women, since UCI is 49 percent Asian) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (on prejudice against African Americans). One typical assignment linked philosophical work in ethics (Immanuel Kant), social psychological work on identity, and self-categorization theory to Invisible Man by asking students to describe a time when they were made to feel invisible and a time when they made someone else feel invisible. Students were encouraged—but not required—to share their essays with the class.

Because much work in ethics suggests that empathic involvement with another heightens awareness of the other’s humanity, I also required students to interview a member of a group that is often omitted in discussions of the politics of difference and that is often underrepresented or discriminated against in contemporary American society: the elderly. None of us is born into this group, each of us fears becoming part of it, but most of us—if we are lucky—eventually move into and out of it, depending on chance, situation, and the kindness of strangers. My goal was to see if empathic involvement would help students see the world through another person’s eyes and thus change the students’ views of members of this group.

Many of my students were first-generation immigrants from Asia or the Middle East. Many lived in extended families and were highly sensitized to the ways elders are treated differently by different cultures. Our study of these cultural differences attempted to disentangle what is “intrinsic” and immutable about becoming old (the loss of physical vigor, for example) from what is not. I designed the study   specifically to help students see that although some attributes exist independently of social construction, many are culturally imposed and hence are neither intrinsic nor immutable.

Before beginning their interviews, students considered what part of the “elderly identity” relates to differences that are “real,” such as declining health and the deaths of a spouse or friends, and which differences exist mainly in the eyes of others, such as when an otherwise spry elderly person is treated as elderly simply because of white hair. Do other groups have attributes that are “real” and that threaten our identity, as the literature often suggests is the belief underlying prejudice? Or do we have more in common with, and thus less to fear from, others than we realize?⁴ Answering this key question helped students understand the importance of categorization and the according of moral salience to other groups in our society.

The importance of approaching differences this way, of course, is normative as well as intellectual. To the extent that such differences are a function of cognitive construction, their ethical and political impact can be muted and reshaped through the kind of contact and understanding we hoped to foster in this course.

Chipping Away at Prejudice

Students did extensive writing as part of the course and were trained in interviewing, editing, and the writing of narratives as a tool for understanding the psychology of another. After training in this technique, students focused closely on one person whom they would interview. Each student constructed a list of questions, conducted and transcribed the interview, edited the transcription to capture the speaker’s voice, and developed the interview into a paper that used the speaker’s voice to inform the student’s analysis of the speaker’s mindset, emotional terrain, values, beliefs, and worldview.

We began with age because it is a relatively noncontroversial difference associated with prejudice. I hoped that it would act as a wedge to open broader discussions of prejudice that might be too tough to tackle in a group of students who would not know whether they could trust either the professor or their fellow students. The process seemed to work well, and the general consensus was that “old people are just young people who’ve been around a long time.” Perhaps more important, the exercise helped us have surprisingly frank discussions about the nature of prejudice, which seemed to consist— students decided—of denying others their individuality and rights as individuals.

Prejudice, students felt, is related to fear, often of the unknown. “When we live in separate enclaves, we never get to know people as individuals. We always see them as ‘the other,’ and it’s easier to believe what people say about people you don’t know,” one African American man said. Students described the eye-opening aspect of prejudice, arguing that most people do not want to admit they have prejudice.

“Can we change it?” I asked.

Ronald (Jewish male): No. Prejudice will always be there. You can’t overcome hate with a few classes.

Arnia (Armenian female): I disagree. You can unlearn anything you want to unlearn.

Ronald: But the problem is that you have to want to change it. What is it that makes you want to change?

Arnia: Look at my case. I’m Armenian, and I lost family in the genocide [perpetrated by Turks against Armenians] early in the twentieth century. I hated Turks as a result of this. I had to confront my prejudice, learn that not all Turks are bad. I did it, so I know that people can change.

Ronald: But there is always prejudice in your subconscious.

Arnia: Maybe. But you can change the behavior, and that’s what is important.

Ronald: Well, then, what makes people want to change, if this desire is the critical factor?

Arnia had several answers to this question: First, you have to realize that prejudice limits you. It traps you

in a cycle of anger and hate and keeps you from knowing people in the despised group as individuals, some of whom might be individuals you would like, once you got beyond your prejudice and saw them as individuals. Second, empathy. Would you like someone to clump you into a group and not see you as an individual? Would you want to be discriminated against, treated badly, not for anything you had done, but rather for things other people like you might have done? Or just because you were a Turk or an Armenian? Third, you don’t want to hurt someone else. When you do that, it makes you feel bad about yourself.

“Does it help to talk about prejudice?” I asked.

Janie (Chinese female): Saying it out loud is embarrassing. It makes you ashamed of what the prejudice says about you. Opening up in class was tough at first, and it helped to have to write essays about a time when you were made to feel invisible but also when you made someone else feel invisible. Pairing the two acts this way helped me to see that everyone does it, that there wasn’t something intrinsically evil in me. And writing it, not having to talk about it first, let me think about it in private and then show it to someone I trusted—in this case, my sister—before I was ready to talk about it in class.

Sheri (Iranian female): Establishing trust was important. I now feel that I can openly talk about prejudice, my prejudice, in front of other class members, and they won’t look down on me. But I was never made to volunteer information before I was ready, and that was important.

“So a class can help in this regard?” I asked.

“Yes,” they agreed. They said a class heightens awareness of prejudice, which leads to the phenomenon

Janie noted. The process of chipping away at prejudice seemed slow, one that took some students unaware.

Natasha (Iraqi female): I didn’t take this class because it was about prejudice. I took it because it fulfilled

the upper-division writing requirement, so I wasn’t someone who knew I had a problem and thought I  needed to deal with it. The class kind of sneaked up on me in that regard. But using the example of discrimination and prejudice against the elderly was a good idea, partly because it’s not a prejudice that’s particularly ugly—not like racism or religious or ethnic prejudice. But it did kind of open things up, pried loose my set ideas and got me thinking differently.

Patty (Japanese female): I think it helped to begin by talking about something not too difficult, not too threatening. That helped build the trust and let me learn that prejudice is a widespread phenomenon. That made it easier to move on to talk about other forms of prejudice, ones that are often off limits in our society.

An African American student wrote his in-class essay, which he initially asked to have kept private, about his self-loathing as he internalized the racial prejudice in his society. Don later said, “The classes showed me prejudice is broader than race. Prejudice is more about how you respond to someone who is different.

It’s important to set one kind of prejudice in a broader context. It’s useful to focus on an ‘easy’ prejudice because it makes it safer to then examine other forms of prejudice.” Don had never read Invisible Man before this class. He decided that it was the best book he’d ever read, not just because it described so much of his own experience, but also because he identified with the character’s difficulties in dealing with his own prejudice. Ironically, he linked his experience with Ellison’s novel to reading Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, which he said helped him understand how his mother felt about getting old.

Lessons Learned

“What is the heart of prejudice?” I asked students as the term was ending. They focused on the inability to see an individual as an individual and the failure to respond to a person on the basis of who he or she is instead of according to the person’s group identity. What causes this prejudice? “Fear, anger, rejection, ignorance, repression, oppression, poverty,” the students agreed. “Prejudice essentially is denying the individuality of a person. That’s why ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was a bad policy. It lets people be homosexual, but only if they hide it. And prejudice is about identity. If we can’t be who we are, then we are diminished. Stereotypes limit your interactions and growth.” So, the class concluded, “everybody loses, not just the person discriminated against.”

“How do we establish trust in an environment?” I asked. This question was important to me as a professor wanting to do just that in a classroom setting but also not wanting to impose my own views on others. I feel strongly that real change has to come from within; political correctness was not one of the class’s goals.

Leila (Indian female): Establish a safe space. It’s very important to have other students speak up, too.

The professor should be a moderator, encouraging people to share their personal views, but not forcing them. And make sure no one is intimidated or ridiculed. Try to get the students out of their comfort zone, but do it in a positive way. The professor can have her own views—in fact, that can be good, especially if you’re willing to admit having prejudices—but she should not force them on people.

Finally, I asked the students how they felt about being asked to take pretests to examine their own prejudices. As I initially designed the course, I thought the pretests were a great idea. I liked the concept of having an independent measurement to capture any changes resulting from the course. But I found that the practical reality of asking students to take such tests made me uncomfortable. I worried that I would intrude on their privacy or make them feel bad about themselves and that the standard psychological tests might be too crude a tool to measure the subtle shifts in prejudice that mattered to me.

Natalia (Iranian female): The writing was a good idea. The tests that psychologists design, the ones to get at subconscious prejudice, these are trickier because sometimes they may not really be doing that. But it was good to be allowed to take tests that dealt with a wide variety of prejudice, from race and religion to age and even fatness, and to do this in private.

“How do we overcome stereotypes?” I asked.

Leila: Meet someone from that stereotyped group. Labeling and categorization can push individuals into that category. It’s pigeonholing.

As the course was ending, we discussed the worldwide protests that had occurred recently among Muslims in reaction to the publication in Denmark of editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. When UCI’s College Republicans sponsored an exhibition of the cartoons, the Muslim Student Union on campus organized a protest. Two people engaged in a scuffle and were ejected, but otherwise the event was peaceful. When we discussed it in class, I found that although most class members had strong opinions about the event, few knew many details about what had actually happened. Feelings were high, however; one of several Islamic students in the class had written an article about it for the student paper.

We took the opportunity to discuss the matter, acknowledging that the issue was not simply free speech, but also what the university should permit to be said on its campus.

I was impressed by how nuanced the discussion became. Is a university endorsing views, even implicitly, when it provides space for speakers and events? Does a university have an obligation, then, to make sure the speakers are bona fide? What does that mean? What is the role of student groups? Is there a difference between a kind of Hyde Park speakers’ corner and a debate hosted by a university in one of its buildings? How far does free speech extend, and when does it become incitement to action or hate?

We developed a long typology beginning with the general: I am a gay person, a Muslim, a religious Jew, and so on. The next step was slightly more opinionated: I don’t like a certain group. Eventually, the typology extended to the point of inciting action: we should kill gays, Muslims, religious Jews, and so on. Ironically, the students tended to cluster at the classic lines of tolerance. Most “speech” was acceptable to them, and they felt it should be permitted by a university on its campus. But as speech moved toward inciting action, student support for permitting it on campus declined.

Would they have had this position before the class? Did the class permanently change anyone’s views? I’m not sure. The students told me the class had helped them learn more about “others” and that they would now have more compassion for the plight of others. But I was giving them grades and feared they might have told me what I wanted to hear. Still, I took heart from one young woman, an American of Irish descent, who came to tell me that she didn’t understand one of the essay assignments.

“I know I’m supposed to talk about a time I was made to feel invisible, and a time I did that to someone else,” she said. “But I don’t see how that’s related to the readings. I mean, I see the Invisible Man link, but I don’t see what this has to do with Kant.”

“Well, what did you use for your personal example?” I asked.

“I talked about my parents’ divorce. I was pretty bummed out, but my dad would give me really nice presents and so would my mom, so I felt like they understood how upset I was and were trying to make it up to me. Then, later, I realized dad just wanted to make mom feel bad, because she hadn’t done something that nice for me. And mom was using the presents to make dad feel bad. You know. They were just using me to get to the other parent. The presents weren’t really about me at all.”

“How did that make you feel?” I asked.

“Invisible, like the book. I get that. But what has that got to do with Kant?”

“Well, can you think a minute about what Kant’s trying to tell us, in general terms about ethics and how we treat others?”

She thought a minute. “Hmm. The categorical imperative, the idea that we all should ask if our actions can be generalized. Otherwise, we shouldn’t take them.”

“Is there anything else to the categorical imperative?”

This time I could see the wood burning. “Well, we’re not supposed to use . . . Oh!” Her eyes suddenly flew wide open. “That’s what Kant’s talking about when he says we’re not supposed to use people as a means only. That’s what my parents were doing to me! They were using me as a means to get to each other.  They didn’t care about me at all, not then. And that’s what Kant is saying is wrong!”

Maybe it was the eyes. But I like to think that this young woman now knows in her bone what Kant was telling us, and that she will think long and hard before treating another human being the way her parents treated her, because she knew how bad it had made her feel. Empathy. ¨

Notes

1. My thanks to my students in the winter 2006 “Politics of Difference” class and to members of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues program. Back to text.

2. In 2005, the 20,061 undergraduates at UCI identified themselves as Asian (49 percent), African American (2 percent), Chicano (12 percent), Caucasian (26 percent), other (8 percent), and foreign (2 percent). Other statistics are not available, but approximately one-third of the undergraduate class that I was teaching was Muslim, and two-thirds were female. Back to text.

3. For a fuller description of this psychological process, see my 1996 book, The Heart of Altruism, and my 2006 book, The Hand of Compassion. Back to text.

4. This kind of contrast is evident in many areas, including immigration: “Will immigrants steal American jobs or enrich our economy?” people ask. Back to text.

Monroe is professor of political science and philosophy and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Ethics and Morality at the University of California, Irvine. She is teaching one course and running a summer internship for her Irvine’s Difficult Dialogues initiative. She can be reached at krmonroe@uci.edu.

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