Tag: empathy skills

Empathy & Perspective Taking: How Social Skills Are Built

Understanding what other people want, how they feel, and how they see the world is becoming increasingly important in our complex, globalized society. Social skills enable us to make friends and create a network of people who support us. But not everyone finds it easy to interact with other people. One of the main reasons is that two of the most important social skills — empathy, i.e. being able to empathize with the other person’s emotions, and the ability to take a perspective, i.e. being able to gain an information by adopting another person’s point of view — are developed to different degrees.

Researchers have long been trying to find out what helps one to understand others. The more you know about these two social skills, the better you can help people to form social relationships. However, it still not exactly clear what empathy and perspective taking are (the latter is also known as “theory of mind”).

Being able to read a person’s emotions through their eyes, understand a funny story, or interpret the action of another person — in everyday life there are always social situations that require these two important abilities. However, they each require a combination of different individual subordinate skills. If it is necessary to interpret looks and facial expressions in one situation, in another it may be necessary to think along with the cultural background of the narrator or to know his or her current needs.

To date, countless studies have been conducted that examine empathy and perspective taking as a whole. However, it has not yet been clarified what constitutes the core of both competencies and where in the brain their bases lie. Philipp Kanske, former MPI CBS research group leader and currently professor at the TU Dresden, together with Matthias Schurz from the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and an international team of researchers, have now developed a comprehensive explanatory model.

“Both of these abilities are processed in the brain by a ‘main network’ specialised in empathy or changing perspective, which is activated in every social situation. But, depending on the situation, it also involves additional networks,” Kanske explains, referring to the results of the study, which has just been published in the journal Psychological Bulletin. If we read the thoughts and feelings of others, for example, from their eyes, other additional regions are involved than if we deduce them from their actions or from a narrative. “The brain is thus able to react very flexibly to individual requirements.”

For empathy, a main network that can recognise acutely significant situations, for example, by processing fear, works together with additional specialised regions, for example, for face or speech recognition. When changing perspective, in turn, the regions that are also used for remembering the past or fantasising about the future, i.e., for thoughts that deal with things that cannot be observed at the moment, are active as the core network. Here too, additional brain regions are switched on in each concrete situation.

Through their analyses, the researchers have also found out that particularly complex social problems require a combination of empathy and a change of perspective. People who are particularly competent socially seem to view the other person in both ways — on the basis of feelings and on the basis of thoughts. In their judgement, they then find the right balance between the two.

“Our analysis also shows, however, that a lack of one of the two social skills can also mean that not this skill as a whole is limited. It may be that only a certain factor is affected, such as understanding facial expressions or speech melody,” adds Kanske. A single test is therefore not sufficient to certify a person’s lack of social skills. Rather, there must be a series of tests to actually assess them as having little empathy, or as being unable to take the other person’s point of view.

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The scientists have investigated these relationships by means of a large-scale meta-analysis. They identified, on the one hand, commonalities in the MRI pattern of the 188 individual studies examined when the participants used empathy or perspective taking. This allowed the localisation of the core regions in the brain for each of the two social skills. However, results also indicated how the MRI patterns differed depending on the specific task and, therefore, which additional brain regions were used.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Matthias Schurz, Joaquim Radua, Matthias G. Tholen, Lara Maliske, Daniel S. Margulies, Rogier B. Mars, Jerome Sallet, Philipp Kanske. Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind.. Psychological Bulletin, 2020; DOI: 10.1037/bul0000303

Cite This Page:

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. “Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 November 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201110090427.htm>.

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The Challenge of Scaling Soft Skills – Lynda Gratton

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It is becoming increasingly clear that for most working people, a proportion of the working tasks they currently perform will be either completely replaced by machines (AI if the tasks are cognitive, robots if they are manual) or augmented by a human-machine interface.

While there is less clarity about the types of tasks that will remain within the human domain, we can make some predictions. We know that, right now and in the foreseeable future, machines are generally poor at understanding a person’s mood, at sensing the situation around them, and at developing trusting relationships. So as the World Economic Forum report on future skills argued, it is human “soft skills” that will become increasingly valuable — skills such as empathy, context sensing, collaboration, and creative thinking.

That means that millions of people across the world will have to make the transition toward becoming a great deal better versed in these soft skills. But that’s far from easy. The paradox is that while we understand a lot about how to develop the “hard skills” of analysis, decision-making, and analytical judgment, we know a great deal less about the genesis of soft skills.

Perhaps more important, much of the context of how people learn and perform is currently skewed toward hard skills. Understanding the obstacles to developing soft skills and then addressing them is crucial for our schools, our homes, and our workplaces.

Three Barriers to Developing Soft Skills

It seems to me that there are three major barriers to scaling the development of soft skills.

Schools are too much like factories. The basic foundations for most schooling systems were laid down after the Industrial Revolution. The aim by the early 1900s was clear: to take a population that was mainly engaged in craft or agricultural work and prepare it for work in factories — and, more recently, offices. Though some schools have moved the curriculum to soft skills and creativity, in many schools, these traditions hold firm. Children are trained to stay still for hours at a time (as they would on a factory production line), to engage in rote learning, and to be compliant and follow rules. The pity of this is that these skills are ones at which machines are highly competent. More important, these conditions do little to nurture in children the skills of compassion, inventiveness, and being able to interpret people correctly.

The home is saturated with technology. There is mounting evidence that technology use is affecting the development of human soft skills. When children and adults spend a significant amount of their time engaged with virtual online games and social media, for instance, there is some evidence that their face-to-face social skills begin to atrophy. Short volleys of social interaction do little to support social skills.

This is important, because the evolutionary benefits that humans have developed in empathy and collaboration need to be reinforced in subtle individual learning. Contrast, for example, a child’s conversations with the Amazon Alexa virtual assistant and with an actual adult. In interacting with Alexa, the child may be tempted to bark instructions and possibly be rude to the machine. Alexa simply replies back in a steady, dignified manner. If a child mimicked such an interaction with an adult, he or she would likely be reprimanded for rude behavior.

That is not to take away from the fact that technology could play a significantly beneficial role in the development of soft skills. Over the last decade, there have been major developments in technology-based learning, including online programs that tens of thousands of people can participate in.

The primary focus of the majority of these programs has been on helping people develop hard skills. These programs are very competent at teaching content, simulating decision-making, and testing for knowledge. But what these learning technologies have not yet cracked at scale is how to support the development of soft skills across thousands or millions of people. Those that do teach these skills tend to be small-scale initiatives that involve face time and mentoring.

 

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