From the book: "What empathy provides for the mediator is a way to create an unbiased connection with each client without reverting to a cold aloofness that is sometimes taught in mediation training."
"The impact of mediator empathy towards both parties may provide the support needed for successful mediation even when there is no ongoing relationship between the parties. A better understanding of the power of empathy could lead to increased usage of empathy in mediation. This increased usage of empathy could increase perspective-taking by the parties within mediations, leading to increased connection, collaboration, or satisfaction with the mediation process for both mediators and disputants."
Dr. Jensen claims that the findings provide a new insight into the nature of justice, with the chief implication being that empathy is a core component of a sense of justice, which in turn feeds into an understanding of punishment and cooperation.
He describes the take-home message as being that preschool children are sensitive to harm to others, and given a choice, they would rather restore things to help the victim than punish the perpetrator.
We asked Dr. Jensen what kind of practical interventions might be suggested by the study for use among teachers and parents.
Empathy has long been understood to be a healing agent. It has become the core essence in the field of therapy to heal personal problems such as, stress, anxiety, depression, burnout, shame, self-judgment, stuckness, trauma, PTSD, etc., etc. It is the core healing agent of interpersonal and social conflicts in mediation and restorative justice processes.
Even in the medical field, studies show that patients with an empathic doctor heal faster since feeling seen, heard, acknowledged and understood reduces stress and inflation, thereby, allowing the natural healing processes of the body to work more effectively.
To build a more empathic culture, we need more people trained and practiced in offering empathic guidance and support. I am expanding my empathic guide services for healing and invite you to try a 30 minute free empathic listening session. If you know of others who may benefit from this, do pass it on.
Those who tend to be attracted to law school in the first place tend to be logical thinkers (rule oriented) and have low EQ levels. Moreover, the research indicates that the training students receive in law school also causes an "erosion of empathy." Furthermore, the more empathic students tend to drop out of law school at a much higher rate. Moreover, "lawyers with 'higher levels of resilience, empathy, initiative and sociability' are more likely to leave law practice than those with lower levels of those traits."
In fact, "some US law firms have used this assessment metric (a scale to measure sociopaths on a scale of 0 to 40, with higher levels being extreme behaviour) in their hiring practice, preferring to employ lawyers with sociopathic index close to 29.
Empathy is the process that allows us to share the feelings and emotions of others, in the absence of any direct emotional stimulation to the self.
Humans can feel empathy for other people in a wide array of contexts: for basic emotions and sensation such as anger, fear, sadness, joy, pain and lust as well as for more complex emotions such as guilt, embarrassment and love.
It has been proposed that, for most people, empathy is the process that prevents us doing harm to others.
After spending most of my professional life in the conflict resolution field, I have to admit to experiencing a growing frustration with the state of the field in recent years. There have been times when I have felt that various parts of the field were stuck in their own ideologies, with the result that some interventions seemed to be based on little more than assumptions, research on efficacy of interventions was slow to accumulate, and mythology was revered while research results were ignored...
Parochial Empathy. Dr. Bruneau distinguishes various types of empathy and has articulated the concept of “parochial empathy,” which is experiencing greater empathy for ingroup members than outgroup members. Parochial empathy can explain behavior during intergroup conflict. Dr. Bruneau has found interventions that mitigate parochial empathy, including the use of certain kinds of narratives (Ah! Now we are in my field!)
Perspective-taking and Perspective-giving.Dr. Bruneau found that both sides of an asymmetrical conflict were not equally affected by perspective-taking. While the more powerful side did experience positive effects from perspective-taking, the less powerful side actually benefitted more from “perspective-giving:” speaking and being listened to (Again, my field!).
Some of the evidence that compassion can be cultivated comes from studies on “social-emotional learning” (or SEL), school programs that complement the standard emphasis on academics with age-attuned lessons in self-awareness, managing upsetting emotions, empathy, relationship skills, and smart life decisions.
One SEL program, MINDUP, increased not just empathy in elementary school students, but also upped the number of their actual acts of kindness, according to a study published in January in the journal Developmental Psychology.
If you want to learn the building blocks of empathy and a sense of justice, just look to the nearest 3-year-old.
While these two traits seem like they might require years of experience and observation to acquire, a new study published in Current Biology reveals that children as young as 3 have a strong sense of restorative justice.
Researchers in Germany observed individual 3- and 5-year-olds in a situation in which they sat at a round table with puppets and a few items, such as cookies or toys. The children had the ability to pull a rope to turn the table. One section of the table was dubbed "the cave," which was inaccessible and could hide the items....
Origins of empathy
What are the origins of this intuitive sense of empathy?
Family environment and cognitive development, according to Dr. Norma Feshbach. There must be a family context that allows and encourages empathy for it to flourish. And cognitively, children must have a physiological readiness that allows them to see someone in an emotional state and elicit a similar response. This also enables them to see the world from another perspective, and feel and experience those emotions.
Why do people tend to care for upholding principles of justice? This study examined the association between individual differences in the affective, motivational and cognitive components of empathy, sensitivity to justice, and psychopathy in participants (N 265) who were also asked to rate the permissibility of everyday moral situations that pit personal benefit against moral standards of justice.
Counter to common sense, emotional empathy was not associated with sensitivity to injustice for others. Rather, individual differences in cognitive empathy and empathic concern predicted sensitivity to justice for others, as well as the endorsement of moral rules.
Would police be more empathetic if they were subject to forcible arrest techniques?
In Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's telling of the fatal arrest of Freddie Gray, one thing in particular stands out: the complete lack of empathy and compassion allegedly shown Gray by any of the six officers charged in his death, including one woman who was specifically sent to check on his well being following two citizen complaints.
The officers put Gray into a police van face-first on his belly with his hands and feet bound, Ms. Mosby said, leaving him to roll around like loose change. They ignored his pleas for medical attention while he could still make them and continued to do nothing for a time after he couldn't, she said.
Incidents of police violence and discrimination against people of color evoke our raw emotions -- pain, frustration, fear, hopelessness and anger. Sometimes our emotions overwhelm us. But they can also help energize us and fuel our work for social ...
While mindfulness is rooted in Buddhism, its techniques have been embraced by a range of secular professions, from mental health to Silicon Valley, including the Navy SEALs. It is also finding its way into police departments, such as in Oregon, and thecriminal justice system as a whole. When practiced over time, mindfulness may help police officers develop their ability to more accurately read the emotions of suspects, discern threats, withstand high pressure encounters, reduce on the job stress and reduce the role of personal biases in policing practice.
By strengthening non-judgmental awareness of emotions, mindfulness can strengthen empathy and compassion in police-community interactions. It may ultimately reduce unwarranted use of excessive force.
Our country’s justice system can be understood as a Punitive Justice System.
When someone commits a crime it is committed against the state, and the state intervenes to determine what punishment a person deserves because of what was done. Victim’s needs are often forgotten except for their use as witnesses. Similarly, the greater community is often affected by the unjust act as well, and the community’s needs are overlooked in the same way that the victims often are.
Sotomayor said she attempts to bring empathy to her decisions by seeing herself “in the other person’s shoes.”
“It is that empathy, in my judgment, that is necessary for judges to have in their written opinions,” she said.
She cited as an example a case involving a 13-year-old girl who successfully sued her school after she was subjected to a strip search because she was reported to have taken an aspirin. During arguments, some justices questioned how such a search was any different from undressing in a locker room.
That prompted Ginsburg to later comment that some of her male colleagues might not understand the sensitivity 13-year-old girls have about their bodies, Sotomayor said.
“It’s not the conclusions we draw but how we express ourselves,” she said. A ruling should not demean the losing party even when the court disagrees.
Encouraging Empathy and Compassion in Today’s Lawyers - Rhonda Magee
Insight Meditation, Buddhist Insight Meditation, The Traditional Meditation of Insight, contemporary development, contemplative pedagogy, Buddhist Insight Meditation, Compassion and Meditation, Developing Insight into our Anxieties,
A Line to our own Insight, Thinking Minds, Buddhism, Guided Meditation, The Science of Meditation, Meditation, the Science of Concentration, Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, Buddhism Meditation
Putting myself in another’s shoes so that the fit is comfortable for both of us requires knowing myself and knowing you. Empathy that matters involves action that accurately and immediately takes into consideration the significance of what both of us intends while managing to portray that understanding in a mutually tolerable fashion. I’m going to unpack this as a paradigm case of mutual empathetic engagement in the service of the improvisational practice of moral dialog and negotiation. As a social practice this involves at least two people deliberately revealing, observing, and critiquing theirs and their partner’s values and status.
Empathy involves appreciating how others make their judgments. Self-knowledge requires knowing how I make my judgments. Speaking practically, self-knowledge and empathy are two sides of the same coin.
John Gibbs is a professor of developmental psychology at The Ohio State University and the author of Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. John says, my interests pertain to cross-cultural sociomoral development, parental socialization, empathy, prosocial behavior, and antisocial behavior.
I have, with students and colleagues, developed assessment measures of moral judgment, moral identity, social perspective-taking, self-serving cognitive distortions, and social skills. Together with Martin Hoffman he wrote an article, Hillary has a point: In defense of empathy and justice.
Hillary Rodham Clinton had a point when she recently urged: "The most important thing each of us can do... is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors' eyes, to imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams"....
we emphasize that empathy and justice are co-primary or mutual. If justice serves empathy, the reverse is certainly also true ...
Morality is most objective and compelling when justice and empathy align. That is, the moral prescription to act is strongest when victims are both wronged and harmed.
Insight Prison Project (IPP) has been awarded a grant from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide a program inside Ironwood State Prison and Chuckawalla State Prison...
This is a unique and critical element to VOEG, as it provides the opportunity for offenders to be accountable directly to a victim of violent crime. It also allows survivors to see and hear accountability, remorse and empathy directly from offenders.
IPP believes that meeting face to face with victims is the single most important factor in transforming harmful behavior. Inmates hear victims describe how violent crimes impacted them, and they develop empathy by interacting with them.
My interest in the concept had to do with my not understanding how so-called mediators and peacemakers could claim to be empathic people and yet make hateful comments regarding homosexuals and same-sex marriage.
I by no means expected all mediators and peacemakers to agree with the Supreme Court's decision; however, one does not have to agree in order to be empathic. What I found confusing was that self-proclaimed empathic people made such hateful comments. I needed to understand whether it was possible for an empathic person to make hateful statements. The reason this was so important to me was conveyed in my article as follows: "The first sentence in Martin Golder's article titled 'The Journey to Empathy' is 'In conflict resolution empathy is a central tool and way of being.'" You see, I am in complete agreement with Mr. Golder. As set forth in "The Power of Empathy," empathy is an emotional skill and an essential part of emotional intelligence.
In actuality, empathy predominantly involves learning about someone else's worldview. Furthermore, that learning process is shaped to a very great degree by one's personal relationships.
Despite the fact that it has long-been known that empathy is a learned skill, the results of this study are incredibly meaningful and important. This is especially true, considering the information contained within Harvard University's Making Caring Common Project's report titled "The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults Are Sending About Values" that was published in 2014. The report stated in pertinent part as follows:
Many of us struggle with finding effective ways for our children to learn lessons from their wrongdoings. There are so many discipline techniques and no single type works for every child or every situation.
Compare these two approaches to discipline:
Blame/shame (reactive):
Focus is on the past
Preoccupied with blame
Punishment is selected to keep a child from repeating misbehavior
Relational/restorative (proactive):
Focus in past, present and future
Emphasis on repairing harm done and personal accountability
Consequences are related to the behavior and encourage making amends
Maybe toddlers should replace judges. Young children apparently have an innate sense of justice, and they're more interested in setting things right than in punishing wrongdoers, researchers have discovered.
Children 3 and 5 years old who watched different scenarios involving puppets, toys and cookies quickly determined whether or not a "master puppet" was being mean and who was the rightful owner of certain toys or cookies, according to a new study at the University of Manchester in England. And they were much more concerned with restorative justice than with retributive justice. They tended to restore order by returning an item to its owner rather than doling out punishment to thieves or cheaters, said researchers
Then I think of the philosophical approaches known as restorative and transformative justice.
By viewing potential conflict situations with an emphasis on peacekeeping, rather than using force to punish wrongdoing, the goal is to find root causes for societal problems and seek alternatives to imprisonment as the solution. It is a cultural evolution as well as a tactic for restoring peace. What I witnessed on the western shores of Canada was a small event, but representative of a larger cultural difference in how criminal justice is understood.
To cite just one dramatic statistic, there have been a total of 75 people killed by Canadian police since 1932. In contrast, U.S. police killed 111 people in March alone.
In collaboration with the International Section of the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR)
This presentation follows the presenter’s research into Empathy and Compassion as tools in mediation and negotiation. Empathy is often listed as the primary skill of any successful mediator and there are many tools in the mediator’s tool box to help us towards the goal of true empathy.
What then is empathy and how do we get it?
Is it a learnable skill?
Is it just walking in someone else’s shoes?
At its simplest it can be described as very focused and attentive listening followed by a kind response. It could also be thought of as the conscious projection of ‘good will’.
The essence is based on ancient traditions from India, often now associated with Buddhism but undoubtedly predating it, called metta bhavana, which translates as the cultivation of loving kindness.
“It is a culture that dehumanizes and victimizes African-Americans and others,” says Taylor.
Taylor says that the leadership from the mayor and police chief in Charleston, South Carolina, has been good in this case so far.
“The chief had a great deal of empathy, and he allowed it to be said that no one is a winner here. He felt horrible for his officer, he felt horrible for the family, he felt horrible for the city. That is the right path, and this is where we begin to heal,” says Taylor.
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