The political role of empathy sometimes comes in for criticism, particularly among conservatives. “I feel your pain” smacks of too much Clinton, too much Oprah. Empathy is dismissed as a source of naive, counterproductive public policy, which it can be…
Daily Archives: 07/06/2012
15 posts
How to correct for a bias that stop us learning from our mistakes. Research into entrepreneurs demonstrates a widespread bias in human thought. The hindsight bias is our tendency towards thinking that things must have turned out the way they ac…
A few years ago, DisneyWorld executives were wondering what most captured the attention of toddlers and infants at their theme park and hotels in Orlando, Florida. So they hired me and a cultural anthropologist to observe them as they passed by…
Humans are a daydreaming species. According to a recent study led by the Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth, people let their minds wander forty-seven per cent of the time they are awake. (The scientists demonstrated this…
There can hardly be a simpler equation for maintaining a healthy weight. Burn up more calories than you consume, right? But if it’s that simple we have to question why we in the Western world are in the midst of a huge obesity crisis. Yea…
Personally, I don’t think there has been a more profound revolution in the study of human psychology as the cognitive behavioral revolution… In a nutshell The principles of CBT are based on a very simple idea: we feel according to what w…
The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call “the problem of happiness.” — Aldous Huxley, preface to Brave New Wor…
Can treating oneself with compassion after making a mistake increase self-improvement motivation? In four experiments, the authors examined the hypothesis that self-compassion motivates people to improve personal weaknesses, moral transgressions, and t…
For some reason I’ve been having a lot of conversations about empathy recently. Empathy has been defined in the scientific journals as ‘I feel with you‘, as distinct from compassion, which has been defined as ‘I feel for you&rsq…
A viable approach to increasing STEM starts with empathy… The best technology, she says, is the kind that improves human-to-human connection, fundamentally changing the way people live. The secret? According to her, it’s all about empathy. Lat…