Be the change you wish to see in the world. 

― Mahatma Gandhi 

The focus of the lesson for this chapter is something we might call “community positive psychology.” Psychology sometimes gets stuck in only focusing on individuals, as if we were completely isolated from our social network and the world around us. There is an area of psychology called “community psychology” that focuses on the effects of the broader community on the behaviour of individuals and the effects of individuals on the community. 

In this chapter and the next, we are going to make the bridge from individual to community well-being because the health of the community and how we participate in it strongly affects our individual happiness and well-being. In fact, it may be that most of what brings us happiness is rooted in and related to our place in the larger community and world. 

If anything is the foundation for our connection with others, it is our capacity for empathy. Empathy may be what enables us to connect with others and what can make it difficult for us to be truly happy when those around us are suffering. In the earlier chapter on social intelligence, you learned about how our brains have mirror neurons that fire the same way when we see someone else does something as when we do the same thing. In fact, one of the neuroscientists who has studied them, Vilayanur Ramachandran, has called them “Gandhi neurons” because of how they connect us with each other. 

The psychologist Paul Wong has identified different kinds of empathy that involve these mirror neurons and other aspects of our biology, such as oxytocin, the hormone involved in social bonding. Here are the five kinds of empathy that Wong has identified: 

First, he says we have an “instinctual empathy” that is hardwired, we share with other species, and you see when animals of one species respond to the distress calls of another. 

Second, we often experience “relational empathy” that refers to the stronger feeling of empathy we have for those we are in a close relationship with, know well, or care about. 

Third, there is the “experiential empathy” that we have for those we share a common experience with, such as being depressed or having been abused or assaulted. It could also involve sharing a good experience, such as when people in a city celebrate together when their home team wins a championship. 

Fourth, there is what Wong calls “basic empathy” that involves learning a set of skills such as when a counsellor or therapist learns how to do active listening and pay more attention to non-verbal cues. 

Finally, there is “advanced empathy” that involves a detective-like Sherlock Holmes ability to make clever inferences and put together seemingly trivial and unrelated clues to better understand another person. You might experience this with a good friend or counsellor when they say something about you that makes you feel like they know you better than you know yourself. 

The bottom line is that we not only have a hardwired, inborn capacity for empathy with humans and other living beings; we also often have stronger empathy for those we are close to and who have similar experiences. And finally, we can do much to train ourselves and learn ways to increase our empathy and extend it to the larger community. 

One example where I saw this happen was with my wife who grew up not having any experience with dogs. When she first began living with our playful and affectionate German Shorthaired Pointer, she was surprised to find that this dog seemed to have very real feelings and even seemed to have the empathy to comfort my wife when she was upset. 

Another powerful example of our capacity to grow in empathy is provided by Steven Pinker who reviewed the incidence of human violence over the past several hundred years and concluded that it was generally on the decline. Using the phrase coined by Abraham Lincoln, he titled the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence is on the Decline. Pinker thinks that one of the main reasons that violence has declined is that our capacity to empathize was extended by the great increase in literacy, which made it possible for us to read about and thereby understand the lives and experiences of many more people. 

If this has been the case for reading, then it may be much more now because so many people can connect in real time around the world using computers, smart phones, and social media platforms. Of course, social media can also have a dark side that capitalizes on our tendency to categorize people as us vs. them or as being in the in-group or the out-group. This evolutionary tendency is similar to our negativity bias that focuses on apparent threats while missing many of the good things around us. Just as we evolved to pay so much attention to those threats, we may have also evolved to first mistrust those who seem strange or different to us. 

But Pinker thinks that “the better angels of our nature” – through empathy – have been growing stronger. When we think about the implications of positive psychology for our life together, extending our capacity for empathy to ever larger circles may be a promising direction and challenge for the future. The video you will watch for this chapter called the “empathetic civilization” is by the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin and may give you a better idea of what Pinker is saying and where positive psychology may enable us to begin to go. 

In light of Pinker and Rifkin’s work and the findings about the central importance of empathy, one of the most important choices that the positive psychology community may have to make is how much to focus on solely helping individuals become their best in competition with each other or to also focus on building healthy institutions and communities. So often psychology has mirrored the Western world and focused on helping individuals assumed to be competing in a zero-sum game with only winners or losers. 

Not long ago, I went to a conference in California honouring the career of one of the co-founders of positive psychology as he was retiring – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He was in his early 80s and despite a long and fruitful career studying things like creativity and flow, many people spoke about how he never forgot the social, economic, and political repression that he, his family, and others suffered when he grew up in Eastern Europe. 

After his final talk near the end of the conference, the first person who raised his hand asked him what he wanted his legacy to be and what his hopes were for the future of positive psychology. Csikszentmihalyi said that as much as he knew that things like creativity and flow could make individuals successful, more than anything else he hoped that people would use what he discovered about creativity and flow to make ours a “win-win” world for everyone. 

I think this may be one of the most important lessons we are learning from positive psychology about our relationship with the larger community. Because of our capacity for empathy and how important relationships, engagement, and meaning are to us, we may not really be happy unless we become our best as individuals and also work to bring out the best in the people and communities around us. 

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter 

The tasks for today are designed to help you think about and experience what we are discovering about how to create a better life together: 

First, there is a special video called the “Empathetic Civilisation” by Jeremy Rifkin for you to watch and then reflect on the experiences that you may have had that enabled you to extend your empathy beyond your immediate family and social network. This video presents one of the most compelling visions of what a “community positive psychology” might towards in the future. 

Second, there is a task that involves doing one of the kind acts for a stranger from the top 10 list you created in the last chapter and answering questions about what you did and how it may have affected you and the other people involved. Doing kind acts both for people you know and don’t know will help you understand how their effects on you may be similar and different.

Third, the next task involves making a list of the groups of people or communities that you are most grateful for and writing something about why you are grateful for them. This will help you understand how important these larger groups and communities may be to us in addition to other individual people and our smaller circle of friends and family members. 

Fourth, there is a task that begins with making a list of the causes or things that you could be involved with that might have a positive impact on the larger world. There is also a place where you can rate their potential importance and your willingness and ability to do something to support one or more of them. This task may help you find new causes that you may value and enjoy being involved and finding ways to use your strengths to support.