Can you teach people to have empathy

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Can you teach people to have empathy? Article from BBC website.

It features a quote from Simon Baron-Cohen and his seeing the minds eye test. I flunked that test when I was assessed for ASD. It made my eyes water. I hope I never have to take it again.

Can anyone be taught empathy? Even an Aspie?

To an extent...

It is a misconception that aspies don't have empathy in the first place; Aspies (generally, of course) do feel empathy, the dificiency lies in the way we express it.

This expression is teachable, like most other life skills; you can teach/learn how you are expected to act in certain situations, although it'll never be natural.

Feeling empathy is not teachable, but if you don't even feel empathy, you also have a dash of psycopathy, a different (but related) condition to autism

I don't think you can be taught to have empathy. But you can certainly learn to show it if you don't intuitively know how. And you can learn what situations people typically want you to show it, as was how they want you to show it.

I believe you can learn to give the appropriate response to things even if you do not feel them. It isn't something that can be learned on a genuine level in my experience.

That's a very bad article, first time I don't like something from the BBC. It mixes different things. It also assumes that lack of empathy is always a psychological issue.

Empathy cannot be learned because it's an intuitive grasp and requires certain neurological hardware we aspies don't have. Compassion can be developed to a certain extent, but it's a different thing.

Intuitive empathy can be substituted to a limited extent by experience of similar situations, intellectual (as opposed to intuitive) insight, keen observation. Like someone without eyes can learn to find their way somewhere but they can't learn to see.

Empathy is not how you act, it's what your antennae grasp. Compassion is what you do with that intuitive message you received from your antennae.

Experiencing life teaches people to have empathy.

That's the only way I acquired it.

Yes, experiencing life, and creating emotional bonds with people.

I spent quite some time researching the autism and empathy issue. As in a couple of years. I feel pretty confident that the misconception that autistic people have reduced or no empathy is because they are a minority population and it is hard for a minority to empathize with their majority oppressor. It is hard for a person of color to empathize with a white person or for a woman to empathize with a man. We can SYMPATHIZE, which is different, but just as useful.

Empathy=I have some idea of what you are feeling and thinking and this makes me feel or think the same things
Sympathy=I see or hear of what is happening with you and it makes me feel or think a certain way, which may not have anything to do with your state of being

A good example of this might be watching an autistic person who is overexposed to a noise and covering her ears to block it out. If I am feeling empathy I might suddenly be more aware of the noise and how it might be painful to hear, it starts to bother me as well, and I feel compelled to help her. If I am feeling sympathy I notice the other woman acting strangely and feel sorry for her evident distress, whatever it is, and feel compelled to help her. As you can see, it doesn't really matter whether I am feeling empathy or sympathy because they both tend to have the same result.

Yes, I think you can learn to empathize as you learn more about the person or type of person you are asked to empathize with.

If the truth be known, Aspies have a lot more genuine empathy than many NTs - it's just that they don't tend to express it outwardly in ways that conform to societal 'norms'. In fact Spectrumities often feel so much empathy that they find it overwhelming, almost traumatic. This is probably the cause of many a meltdown.

What passes for empathy among neurotypicals is often no more than an insincere social ritual.

I think that all people who have empathy have had to learn/develop it, autistic or not. There may be some built-in foundational/instinctive bits to it that are hardwired in (or not hardwired in) at birth, but if you only had those bits and didn't learn anything at all on top of them, you would be screwed -- autistic or not.

Part of empathy is identifying or being able to figure out, to some extent (or guess, with some degree of accuracy) what another person feels or thinks, and why. That part, at the very least, can be learned/developed even if you don't personally feel/think/experience the same/similar things and find other people's inner experiences to be bizarre and baffling.

The emotional part of "feeling what another person feels" can be learned/developed, too, for some people, if they feel their own emotions as part of recalling/imagining experiences and are also able to learn how to draw parallels between their own experiences and the experiences of others -- or if a person thinks about emotions by feeling them.

It has been shown that toddlers have enough empathy to try to save somebody from a dangerous situation.

Hmm....it seems empathy has multiple definitions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Definition
I'm going with it being the ability to discern what another person is feeling, because that's what I hope folks mean when they say autistic people lack empathy, and I guess the question of "can it be taught?" presupposes that the subject doesn't have it already.

I'd say yes, it can be taught to some extent, if the student is interested. There's a lot known about facial expressions and body language, and the simple realisation of the importance of empathy to friendship and other human relations might be expected to encourage the learner to get into the habit of scanning people for their feelings. The speed of the empathy might never be as fast as it is in NTs, but better than nothing, and my own observations seem to suggest that not all NTs bother to use the empathic skills they're said to be born with, in the same way as many folks don't use the brains they were born with, so I would think that an ASDer wishing to learn empathy would stand an excellent chance of ending up at least as good as the average person.

There's also some stuff out there suggesting that ASDers have too much empathy rather than too little. I gather the idea is that we feel the emotions of others so intensely that we learn to somehow avoid them, lest we burn out, which gives the impression of lacking empathy. If that turns out to be generally correct, I would think the solution might have to be something rather different to the learning of empathic techniques.

I'd also think that the study of autism urgently needs to find out and achieve a consensus on what exactly is going on with empathy.

I remember that as a teenager I found adults utterly baffling. I got along great with younger kids, but grownups were completely mysterious and unpredictable to me. Kids my age weren't much better.

I wouldn't say the same today, at all, and it's partly from life experience and partly because I'm an inveterate reader. Especially helpful have been fiction of all kinds, from sf to Victor Hugo, and memoirs and autobiographies – anything that puts you inside the head of another person.

I may never understand the sort of people who get sucked into cults, though … who willingly submit to a group or a charismatic leader. Weird.