Foundational Values for Civil Service

Empathy refers to the capacity to imagine oneself in someone else’s position and understand how he/she is feeling, what he/she is thinking and emotionally engaging with him/her. It is a key element of emotional intelligence, the link between self and others, because it is how individuals understand what others are experiencing, as if they were feeling it themselves. Studies show that empathic skill is highly correlated to improved relationships, more caregiving behaviour, less anxiety, greater cooperation, greater belonging and greater likeability.
Given the diverse description of empathy, there are many approaches for understanding it. However, there are three fundamental elements that underlie the concept of empathy, which include:

• Affective understanding: It describes the skill of knowing how others are feeling. Some researchers test for empathetic skill through the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ task, in which a subject looks at pictures of people’s eyes and tries to guess what they are feeling.
  • For instance, in a two-person interaction, someone has to effectively communicate how he/she feeling, and the other person has to correctly interpret these signals. To correctly interpret these signals, an understanding of non-verbal signals, like facial expressions, gestures, tone, and posture are often more reliable signals than the words a person uses.
• Emotional contagion: It describes the phenomenon where one starts to feel what people around him/her are feeling it is what makes one cry at sad movies, feel happier when surrounded by happy people, or wince when one sees other people get hurt.
  • For example, one displays emotional contagion by sharing the joy and celebrating a friend’s success in clearing the civils services examination.
• Cognitive perspective-taking: It is akin to stepping into the other person’s shoes and understanding his/her perspective of the situation or circumstances.
  • For example, a manager in a corporate organization practices cognitive perspective-taking by assigning tasks and responsibilities to members based on their workload and challenges faced by them.

Due to the advent of the digital age, it is the component of empathy that has seen one of the sharpest declines. The need of the hour is to motivate parents, schools, and communities to support programmes that help people of all ages enhance and maintain their ability to empathize with others. Researchers believe that people can choose to cultivate and prioritize empathy. People who spend more time with individuals different from themselves tend to adopt a more empathic outlook towards others. Also, studies find that reading novels and meditation can help foster the ability to understand others better.