When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.
– Julius Caesar, 3:2:90
It made everything feel so much more real. Since I was trying to emulate her in the story, her story temporarily became mine. I just remember thinking, ‘she is so strong.’
– First-Person Narrative and Story Meaningfulness: Promoting Empathy via Storytelling
There is a hitherto unseen level of premium on human connection. A large part of human connection is empathy. When asked if they would accept a robot, an interactive one to be sure, as a friend, student response was categorical. They said a robot cannot have feelings and will not be able to feel as they do.
While back-end, repetitive work might be automated, client-facing ones where whether dealing is done could depend on the strength and feel of a handshake or the steadiness of a gaze, will remain. Even if students were technically inclined, odds are they would face the machine in a team and even if they did not, some aspect of their work would require cooperating even in a sometimes, competitive setup.
Human connection, be it interpersonal or intra-team would take understanding what the world looks like through another pair of eyes. Many times, when put together in a team, working well with others means, being silent or agreeable for the sake of harmony. How can one hear or be heard and/or disagree or be disagreed with, without affecting goodwill?
That empathy goes a long way in short-circuiting fraying tempers and the negative tit-for-tat passive aggression (in a long-term cooperative situation) and more overt manifestations of anger (where cooperation is deemed no longer possible) that are consequences of taking a I, me and my perspective, would find ready agreement.
What is empathy? According to Coplan (2004) as cited in Shi (2021) it is a “complex imaginative process involving both cognition and emotion, which creates a psychological experience for people to connect and respond to the world and those in it”.
So, can empathy be taught or is it something we are born with? It turns out that the language classroom lends itself to the development of empathy, which according to McKenzie (2013), the head of a bank described as the most important 21st century skill.
Shi (2021) has found that students can develop empathy through the writing they do in language classrooms. This is done through perspective taking, where they become someone else.
We can see how this is possible in Situational Writing. Students have to become person X in Situation X and write to person Y. To get this done right, the tone struck is crucial. To strike the right tone, a student must at once know what it feels like to be Persons X and Y.
Some may have wondered why students need to put in so many hours of training to write compositions when narrative writing may not be as relevant in students’ post-schooling lives.
Apart from being deeply cathartic, narratives help us express ourselves which is a fundamental human need. Stories are what make us human.
Some have warned of the narrative fallacy and that is not unwarranted. Some like, Dagny Taggart of Atlas Shrugged, have said numbers cannot lie and others have said, follow the numbers to find the story. We know this is not entirely true and this is why there is now a push to merge humanities with STEM.
In sum, compositions are worth the time and effort because stories will always be relevant, to connect with others and also ourselves. Shi (2021) investigated if “first-person narration”, that is, to write with the personal pronoun, “I” would increase empathy for and connection with others.
Some students find it easier to write in the first person with “I” and for some reason, it does feel better sometimes when we read such stories. Many a time, though they write in the first person, the story is imagined. The same can be said of oral examinations. Students often ask if it is alright to make something up during the stimulus-based conversation. Writing in the first person while imagining being someone else in their true story is what develops empathy.
Shi (2021) conducted an experiment in the following way. She paired students up. Each in the pair had to tell the other a true, personal story which they did or did not consider particularly meaningful. Both, now having heard the other’s personal story, had to write it in the first-person – with “I”. She found that students did feel more empathy for and connected to the ones whose stories they adopted as their own.
This was evident in their qualitative responses. For example, one said, “I felt more connected to the emotions they probably felt” and another said, “Using the first-person narrative really helps you put yourself in your partners (sic) shoes and relate to their story and their experience more.”
This is a simple and powerful way to understand others. Parents can listen to their children and write the story shared in the first-person. They can become their children and heal any generational gap if such a thing exists. Children can hear their parents and become their parents. Friends can do this. Team members can do this. Employers and employees can do this. Teachers and students can do this. Parties to a conflict can do this.
Empathy does not have to mean capitulation but it can and does blunt the sharp edges.
Now, narratives are powerful also on an intra-personal basis. Here too, the choice of pronoun makes a world of difference. However, when trying to understand ourselves, it may be better to for once, reverse the aforementioned process of perspective taking and select the third-person pronoun.
People tell themselves stories all the time. Some of these stories are buried deep in the subconscious. In these stories, the protagonist can cast herself or himself as heroine or hero or as victim.
If in one such story a person forms about himself, the protagonist is the victim or he thinks that he had not acted like he wished he should have, he may become hyper-vigilant to fight the dissonance. Every remark might sound like a specially targeted insult. This is a scientifically documented phenomenon. The truth is everyone has their own, exclusive context which does not include us.
In such circumstances, it will be difficult for the person involved to achieve the level of detachment necessary to calmly analyse the events which had transpired. Therefore, the third-person pronoun would be immensely helpful. If the person involved continues with the first-person narrative, connections would fray along with tempers.
If she or he becomes I and I become him or her, we become us.
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