HAVING THE CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY:

Empathy is the capability to understand and identify with someone else’s feelings, situation, and motives for action or inaction. It is a direct window into someone else’s mind where you can “put yourself in their shoes.” Except in cases of some neurological disabilities, most humans have the capacity for empathy and it is an ability with which we are born. After a moderately comprehensive research review, talking with mediation practitioners, working as a mediator, and working to understand a recent survey of mediators, I am confident in making the statement that most people have what it takes to understand what someone else is feeling and encountering via their ability to empathize. That being said, I also believe that this capacity, like the others explored in this paper, can be enhanced or suppressed through what we are exposed to or not exposed to during our lives. Empathy is an ability that many people in the conflict management profession hold up as an absolute necessity for moving conflicts towards resolution. (2)Both the people in conflict and the conflict manager must have empathy. Empathy is not sympathy, or compassion, and although empathy may lead to sympathy and compassion, it stands on its own as the mechanism for arriving at an understanding.

About empathy, Donald Saposnek writes, “This capacity for being able to understand and connect with the feelings of others is a skill that, according to research, lies on a continuum. At one extreme (as in pathologies of Asperger’s disorder and sociopathy) are people who either do not have, or are extremely deficient in, the capacity for empathy. At the other extreme are effective mental health practitioners, who are high in what Daniel Goleman (1995) refers to as emotional intelligence. This innate, intuitive capacity to understand and feel what other people are feeling and to read the emotions of others, by both verbal and nonverbal clues, is crucial for an effective mediator” (Saposnek 250). Empathy is also crucial for the parties in a dispute to have in order for them to move productively toward resolution. Daniel Goleman, through his work around emotional intelligence, concludes that “empathy is a given of biology” (Goleman 103). Daniel Batson et. al. in their studies on empathy and altruism conclude that empathy in individuals is not something that is derived from self-satisfaction but is quite selfless and altruistic. This fits into the general notion of empathy being derived for others and ties directly into our core ability to cooperate. We do not feel and act with empathy simply because we want pleasure, we do it as part of our instinct, almost like breathing (Batson 425).

(2) Batson Baril Peacemaker Survey – April 2009 shows surfacing party empathy as a key conflict engagement tool used by those surveyed. See also Chart # 1 and Appendix A.