The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

phubbing, or ignoring the people around you in favor of your phone.

had first started talking to friends and strangers on the internet via AOL Instant Messenger in the early 2000s. I’d rush home from middle and then high school every day to message people I may or may not have even made eye contact with in the halls. I’ll admit I was a bit of a fanatic early adopter, but I wasn’t alone—there were always at least a

Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself.

When I hear about a new app, gadget, or tech-based service, I try to ask myself the following questions: How might this improve my life or experience, or those of others? What is the potential for it to be manipulated, and are there safeguards? Is there incentive for the people in charge to monitor this—do they have skin in the game? And ultimately

Journalist and conversational expert Celeste Headlee has some ideas. In 2017 she published a whole book about fixing conversations, called We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. When I called her to discuss it, she wanted to make one thing clear up front: “We are about to get a whole bunch of books and think pieces that blame tech

Studies show that teaching traits like kindness, compassion, and empathy, in an explicit and intentional way at a young age, can make a difference. A 2011 meta-analysis of social-emotional learning, which many US curricula have embraced in recent decades, suggested that it led to higher graduation rates and safer sex, even eighteen years later.

millennials. One of the most prominent voices sounding the alarm about the connections between technology and a lack of empathy is probably Sherry Turkle, a researcher, writer, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has compared the impact of technology on our ability to communicate and empathize with one another to environ

we can’t ever really know what it’s like to be someone else. We can only know what it’s like to imagine being someone else.

cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).