Before most students had all their textbooks for the fall quarter, at least 1,200 Bruins left the Westwood Block Party welcome event on Sept. 22 with a copy of a book that since then every incoming student has received: “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.”
Now, with U.S. election campaigns inflaming a partisan divide and military conflicts continuing to fuel divisiveness worldwide, this year’s Common Experience at UCLA book selection, written by psychologist Jamil Zaki, seems like a welcome salve.
Each year, a Common Experience committee of students, staff, faculty and alumni selects a title for the UCLA community to read, listen to or watch together that could inspire action. Anticipating this year’s fraught political climate, the committee focused on media that would encourage discussions around empathy and speaking across conflict. Zaki’s 2019 book challenges the idea that empathy is a fixed quality that some simply possess more of than others — and it provides guidance for growing it.
“The War for Kindness” explores empathy by weaving together academic insights, pop culture references, scientific research and personal anecdotes from Zaki, who describes his upbringing as an “empathy gym,” as he navigated the divorce of his parents — both immigrants, and with very different personalities — from the time he was 6 years old. He argues that empathy isn’t an innate and unchangeable trait but rather a skill that can be developed and strengthened with deliberate effort and practice.
“You make choices about whether to practice empathy or not all the time,” said Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. “Will you cross the street to avoid a homeless person, or pay attention to their pain? Will you dismiss someone who disagrees with you, or try to figure out why they feel the way they do? When we practice engaging again and again, we build an empathy that is deeper, broader and more muscular.”
Building empathy and compassion on campus
Zaki’s philosophy aligns with efforts across campus to foster and elevate a culture of engagement, active listening, discourse and compassion. In recognition of this, the Common Experience is partnering with the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, a multidisciplinary program dedicated to researching kindness; and an initiative that’s recently come under the institute’s wing: Dialogue Across Difference.
In the campus’s Four-Point Plan for a Safer, Stronger UCLA, Dialogue Across Difference group plays a large role in supporting respectful conversations across different viewpoints. The group is now a year into hosting workshops, antidiscrimination training sessions, community-building exercises and internships that seek to “build the muscle” of empathy, model its values, teach the rubric of dialogue and encourage a culture of change.
The group will join the UCLA First Year Experience in hosting a series of empathy-related events and aims to bring Zaki to campus in January 2025 for a series of conversations with the Bruin community.
At the Westwood Block Party, Zaki’s book was given to students at the Common Experience kickoff, presented in partnership with UCLA museums and the Student Committee for the Arts. The Hammer Museum at UCLA provided students with artful postcards with a prompt to write down their vision for a more just world. The UCLA Fowler Museum hosted a station at which students wrote and submitted sealed “letters to their future self,” which they will get back at the end of the school year at the museum.
Abigail Johnson, interim associate director of UCLA First Year Experience, said bringing students back to the Fowler not only helps to continue the empathy conversation, but also helps to build habits in which students engage more with art.
“I hope students are inspired to consider what art has to do with empathy, how we can create more empathy in the world and the ways we can exercise the empathy that we have for others,” she said.
To learn more about the Common Experience, to request a copy of “The War for Kindness” and to see a list of program events, visit the First Year Experience Website.
