A Whole New Mind- Chapter Seven-Empathy

Pink tells about Paul Ekman’s research that people of different backgrounds from different countries read facial expressions in much the same way. This worldwide uniformity for reading faces could also relate to reading works of art in the same way, no matter what the person’s background is. For example, I think Edward Munch’s The Scream (1893) would be interpreted the same way no matter where someone comes from.

Pink points out that women are more hard-wired for empathy than men are, and that men are predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. If this is true, then is it possible that women might make the best teachers on the lower grade levels, whereas men would make the best instructors on the upper grade levels, because younger students might need teachers with more empathy.

Testing empathy is discussed in this chapter, which motivated me to take an empathy test I found by searching for one online. Since women and men are not hard-wired the same for empathy, I thought it would be interesting to take the test both as a woman and a man. I answered the questions exactly the same on both tests, yet scored higher for empathy as a “female.” (I thought it might have been the other way, since women could be expected to score higher.) That test had a built-in bias for more empathy in women.