How to Feel More Empathy (With the Host of Bad Women: The Ripper Retold)
Dr. Laurie Santos discusses cognitive biases like the fundamental attribution error and just world bias with historian Hallie Rubenhold, host of "Bad Women." They explore how these biases prevent empathy for victims of injustice, past and present, and share strategies like loving-kindness meditation and RAIN to cultivate compassion and manage emotional fatigue.
Deep Dive Analysis
12 Topic Outline
Introduction to 'Bad Women' Podcast and its True Focus
Sociological Factors Behind Ripper Victims' Vulnerability
Victorian Poverty Cycle and Limited Opportunities for Women
The 'Final Injustice': Blaming Victims for Their Fate
Psychological Bias: The Fundamental Attribution Error
Harsh Daily Realities of Poor Women in Victorian London
Psychological Bias: The Just World Bias
Challenges to Historical Narratives and 'Ripperologists'
The Internet's Impact on Empathy and Online Behavior
Leveraging Historical Empathy for Present-Day Compassion
Strategies for Building Empathy: Perspective Getting
Coping with Compassion Fatigue and Negative Emotions
5 Key Concepts
Fundamental Attribution Error
This bias describes how people tend to explain their own behavior by situational factors (e.g., having a bad day), but attribute other people's behavior to their personality traits or moral failings (e.g., being absent-minded), ignoring the circumstances.
Just World Bias
This is the deep-seated belief that the world is a fair place where good things happen to good people and bad things happen for a reason. This bias can lead to rationalizing misfortunes by assuming victims must have done something to deserve their fate, rather than acknowledging that terrible things can happen by chance.
Perspective Taking
This method of empathy involves trying to imagine someone else's experience from one's own current environment. However, it can often be inaccurate because one might not fully grasp the true circumstances and daily realities of the other person's life.
Perspective Getting
A more effective approach to empathy, this involves actively seeking out and listening to other people's stories directly. By asking about and understanding their specific circumstances, one can gain a more accurate and empathetic view of their experiences.
Compassion Fatigue
This refers to the emotional exhaustion that can arise from constantly engaging in empathy, especially when dealing with profound suffering or injustice. It highlights the need for strategies to protect one's own well-being while maintaining compassion.
7 Questions Answered
The 'Bad Women' podcast, hosted by Hallie Rubenhold, focuses on the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, exploring the sociological factors that put them in harm's way and the psychological reasons why people struggle to empathize with them, rather than being a typical true crime show.
Poor working-class women in the 19th century faced extremely limited opportunities, lacked access to education and professions, and if they didn't have a man to support them, they often fell into a poverty trap, relying on workhouses, begging, or very menial, low-paying jobs.
This tendency stems from psychological biases like the fundamental attribution error, which attributes others' behavior to their personality traits rather than circumstances, and the just world bias, which assumes bad things only happen for a reason, leading to victim-blaming.
People often have a significant personal investment in existing narratives, and when new evidence challenges their core beliefs, they may resort to discrediting the new information or the messenger (e.g., calling them a liar) rather than re-evaluating their biases.
The internet can undermine natural empathic urges because it removes face-to-face interactions, making it easier for people to be mean or critical online without the normal social cues that would typically inhibit harmful speech.
By examining the granular details of human experience in the past, social history allows us to understand the universal human experience and the specific circumstances that shaped people's lives, fostering greater empathy for individuals facing similar struggles today.
Perspective taking involves imagining another's experience from one's own viewpoint, which can be inaccurate due to a lack of understanding of true circumstances, while perspective getting involves directly asking people for their stories and understanding their circumstances from their own perspective.
18 Actionable Insights
1. Attribute Behavior to Situations
When observing others’ behavior, especially actions you might morally condemn, consider the situational factors rather than immediately attributing it to their personality traits or moral failings.
2. Reserve Judgment, Examine Factors
Instead of immediately asking “what did they do to deserve this?” when a bad thing happens to someone, step back, reserve judgment, and actively listen to and examine the other contributing factors.
3. Connect to Pain for Happiness
Embrace connecting with and empathizing with other people’s pain, as this can lead to increased social connection, acts of helping, and ultimately, a path to your own well-being and happiness.
4. Practice Perspective-Getting
Enhance empathy by actively engaging in “perspective getting,” which means directly asking people about their stories and circumstances to hear their experiences firsthand.
5. Reframe Others’ Hostility
When encountering hostility or meanness, reframe the situation by considering if the person might be “hurt” or struggling, which can instantly shift your emotional perspective and activate compassion.
6. Process Criticism with Empathy
When facing attacks or criticism, especially in public life, try to process it with empathy by recognizing that people’s anger often stems from their own issues and may have little to do with you personally.
7. Build Compassion Muscles
View compassion as a skill that can be developed through practice, which includes actively thinking through others’ struggles and intentionally wishing well and extending compassion even to critics or difficult people.
8. Practice Loving Kindness Meditation
Engage in loving kindness meditation by extending wishes of happiness, well-being, safety, and joy first to loved ones, then to strangers, and finally to difficult people, to build compassion and reduce compassion fatigue.
9. Practice RAIN Meditation
Utilize the RAIN meditation practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) to process negative emotions by acknowledging them, letting them be, exploring their physical sensations, and then engaging in self-nurturing activities.
10. Regulate Negative Emotions
Develop strategies to regulate negative emotions like sadness, anger, and frustration, especially when confronting the world’s injustices, as these feelings can be overwhelming and lead to burnout.
11. Understand Circumstances for Empathy
When analyzing human struggles or telling human stories, strive to understand the specific circumstances that led to events, as this allows for empathy while maintaining impartiality.
12. Study Social History
Engage with social history to understand the granular details of past human experiences, as it helps unpick present-day habits and belief systems, fostering empathy and informing what to keep or discard.
13. Boost Empathy with History
Engage with historical stories, especially those of people in circumstances very different from your own, as a powerful way to practice and boost your empathy for people in the modern world.
14. Focus on Victims’ Stories
When examining cases, especially true crime, shift focus from the perpetrator’s story to the victims’ stories to gain a more complete and empathetic understanding.
15. Connect to Human Experience
Actively seek to connect with and understand diverse human experiences, as this is fundamental to understanding ourselves and fosters a sense of shared humanity.
16. Practice Perspective-Taking
To promote empathy, consciously take time to work at seeing situations from other people’s perspectives and understanding their specific circumstances.
17. Connect with Homeless Individuals
When encountering homeless individuals, go beyond just giving money by taking a moment to speak with them, asking how their day is going, to foster a deeper human connection and empathy.
18. Foster Empathy Through Interaction
Recognize that natural empathic urges are stronger in face-to-face interactions; therefore, engage in direct personal interactions to cultivate and strengthen your empathy towards others.
6 Key Quotes
It's a bad habit we have. We tell the tale of the murderer, and not the murdered.
Hallie Rubenhold
Every time a woman goes out at night and is murdered, the first question that is asked is, well, why was she out? What was she wearing? What did she do to incur this? And that shouldn't be the question we're asking.
Hallie Rubenhold
When we attribute other people's behavior to things, we don't tend to think in terms of the circumstances, we tend to think in terms of their personality traits.
Laurie Santos
You're not dealing with another agent who's mean and awful and trying to be a jerk to you. You're dealing with this person who's hurt. And it so instantly turns on compassion.
Laurie Santos
Victimology is not as seen as sexy as suspectology.
Hallie Rubenhold
Our natural instinct, our brain's instinct is to pretend that bad things don't happen to good people. Right. There just must be bad women. Right. There's not bad things happening to good women. There's just bad women.
Laurie Santos
2 Protocols
RAIN Meditation Practice for Emotional Regulation
Laurie Santos (attributing to Tara Brock)- Recognize the emotions that you experience.
- Allow them to be present.
- Investigate what they feel like in your body.
- Nurture yourself in response.
Loving Kindness Meditation for Building Compassion
Laurie Santos- Think about someone who is really close to you and extend compassion, saying, 'May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you find joy.'
- Over time, extend that compassion and loving kindness to more and more difficult people, such as a stranger or an internet troll.