Empathy and compassion are essential to personal well-being. They are also skills we can develop that help us to resolve conflict nonviolently.
On today’s show we talk with Mica Stumpf and Peijman Kouretchian of Emergency Peace Teams about their research on Empathy—what it is and what it is not. Learn about their work on an “empathy app” for smart-phones, and get some good ideas for nonviolence workshops by listening to them model the practice of empathy.
“Empathy erosion” is used to explain how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another.In his book The Science of Evil. On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen uses the term “empathy erosion&rd…
Our model of compassion, and how it has evolved to help us face our fears. “We need compassion because life is hard.” This deceptively simple idea really hit home. Compassion is a human capacity that has evolved with our species to fulfill a sp…
Mirror neurons represent the hard-wired brain circuitry that animals possess for the function of empathy. Empathy is not an emotional faculty. It’s a feature of our motor skills. Our brains are designed to allow us to know how other beings might be fee…
The two mutually supportive predominant instincts that define human behaviour are survival and empathy. …The empathy model also conjures up many assumptions that have to be challenged.The empathy model is leftist, socialist, Marxist and ant…
