I love the definition of empathy that you give in your book. It's really beautiful to me and very stirring. You talk about empathy as being our emotional and psychological entanglements with one another. You also define three different types of empathy. And I'm wondering if we can actually just walk through each one in detail to give people a sense of what each of these different type of empathy means. Emotional empathy is the evolutionarily and developmentally oldest type of empathy.
For a long time, scientists believed our capacity for empathy remains more or less fixed throughout our lives. But research by Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor at Stanford, shows that empathy is actually a skill we can cultivate. Jamil explains that there are different types of empathy — three, to be exact! — and we can learn to be more discerning about when we apply them. Maya and Jamil also discuss the dangers of caring too much, and how we can show compassion for others while avoiding burnout.
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