After watching the TEDTalk by Sam Richards about empathy, I have taken away that empathy is not simply a feeling that may be drawn out in certain situations; it is a skill that it can take many long years to perfect. When mastered, empathy can give one the ultimate degree of omniscience, seeing as they can place themselves in any situation and see every side. Empathy could have an enormous impact on the future, as it could help settle disputes and misunderstandings. I also discovered that one of the main barriers of empathy is ignorance. Richards spoke constantly in his speech about how Arab people might misconstrue American actions due to misinformation and generalization. If this is true, then education could be the gateway to an empathetic world. Greatly impactful on these situations are programs like foreign exchange and semester at sea, which allow students to enter new worlds in a friendly atmosphere and to learn customs and normal actions. The next generation should take advantage of these opportunities and make an attempt to unify the world’s cultures. Richards had an extremely emotional way of speaking, emphatically using inflections of anger, hope, incredulity, and persuasiveness. His tempo of speech was quick, for he clearly had a lot to say about the issues he was addressing. Richards’ goal was to convince the audience to allow him to manipulate their minds and place them in the lives of the enemy, working to switch their perspective on the motives of Iraqi insurgents. In his presentation, Richards integrated many pictures and phrases pertaining to his empathy experiment, including shots of soldiers in which the audience member first used their American perspective and then their Iraqi one. He also used animated gestures throughout his speech, which lent to the implication that empathy could have a huge impact on the future. My initial interest in this video was prompted by Daniel Pink himself. He mentioned empathy as a right-brained trait that would therefore be useful soon. However, I don’t think empathy merely applies to the future; I believe that it goes far back in time, back to the beginning of people and understanding one another. For example: the Civil Rights Movement. Today in my Honors U.S. History class, we watched a movie about a third grade teacher who had her class discriminate against one another using the color of their eyes. First, she started with blue-eyed people being superior; then, she switched it to brown-eyed people the next day. The children got a taste of being both on top and on bottom, and, in the process, gained an impressive sense of empathy. The teacher asked them if they thought someone should be judged by their eye color; then she asked if one should be judged by skin color. Fortunately, all of the third graders realized that they would not want to wish their experience as outcasts on anyone, and therefore managed to display sufficient amounts of empathy. A large factor in this experiment was the age of the children. Children older than eight might be too ingrained in their ways, or their parent’s ways, to process the morality issue at hand. Returning to the topic that Richards centered on, the American/Iraqi conflict, one can see that the two worlds are far enough apart in any aspects of life that we cannot imagine being in the other’s shoes. Yet, there is a common ground that any two countries, no matter how drastically different, can agree one, and Richards identified this dream in his TEDTalk—every person on Earth hopes for a better life for themselves and their family. We must understand this need, and recognize the motives of achieving it. A thief who steals food at gunpoint to feed his starving family is far from one who rapes or kidnaps a child, but we still label them both as felonies. Instead of labeling Middle Eastern countries as terrorists or extremists, we should consider them as people with jobs, and families, who go to church and eat food and play sports and do plenty of things that Americans do but refuse to acknowledge. Empathy is not seeing the differences but noticing and appreciating the similarities, rather than judging on what we don’t approve of, or understand. Sam Richard’s insight could be a first step in America ending it’s conflicts with other countries over hatred, which would lead to our country becoming a role model for a world of acceptance. -- Grace M.
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