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Journalist Leslie Jamison on why practicing empathy is far from simple 4%
By CBC Radio0%
10/17/2025, 10:44:41 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Fundamental Attribution Error, Appeal to Emotion, and False Dilemma, with Self-Serving Bias as the most egregious example at 7% saturation with 73 hits. Analysis detected 322 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,041 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 17.6% and a BS Rank of 4% (16,238 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 96.60% of the article peer group.
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In a world bombarded by crises and shortages, empathy seems shorter in supply, but more necessary than ever.
But even if empathy is one of our highest moral callings, it’s as complex and contradictory as we humans ourselves.
Writer and journalist Leslie Jamison has thought a lot about the role of empathy in our lives.
In a book of essays, The Empathy Exams, the writer pondered how we practice empathy and our basic understanding of others.
“We can never fully know what another person is thinking or feeling.
So I came to really believe that accepting the limits of what's possible is an important part of empathy, as well, knowing that we have to maintain a certain kind of humility when it comes to understanding other people,” said Jamison, who teaches nonfiction writing in the graduate program at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
In 2025, Jamison won the Weston International Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
She accepted the award at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where she gave a talk defending and celebrating the personal essay as a powerful form of nonfiction art.
During her visit to Toronto, Jamison spoke with Nahlah Ayed about the vital components of empathy.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
As someone who teaches, can you teach empathy?
Is that partly what you're doing with your students?
I mean, yeah, you absolutely can choose practices that deepen the expression of empathy and that you can kind of learn from doing.
I think teaching practices, like trying to put aside assumptions, asking questions, listening hard rather than just thinking about the next thing you're gonna say are core constituent actions that create the conditions for deepened empathy inside a given conversation — and can kind of prompt an abstract rethinking of what empathy even is or what it entails or what it involves.
In general, I'm not a fan of fetishizing or engaging in purity fantasies about if you have a natural capacity for empathy, …either you have it or you don't have it.
And if you do have it, it means you're never driven by self-concern and you're only full of infinite compassion.
I just don't think that's what life is.
Often it's about leaning into practices that can sort of coax out better versions of ourselves and deepen the musculature of those better selves that live inside of us.
And certainly The Empathy Exams, that essay in that book is very much about trying to de-romanticize certain kinds of goodness to say, it's not just... we wake up with infinite concern for others.
It's about daily intentional choices about, am I going to listen harder?
Am I going to try to show up?
Am I gonna try to give somebody what they're actually telling me they need rather than the kind of script I had written in my mind about what they needed.
Which raises an interesting thing about your work, which is the evolution in the way you think about empathy as you write about it, and moving away from it being just this benign, beautiful thing, and talking about, as you call them, pitfalls and perils of empathy.
For me,... deepening awareness of the pitfall and perils of empathy really came from paying close attention to what was happening to me, both in my personal relationships and in my journalistic encounters.
So trying to pay close attention to those moments when I was projecting my own experiences or desires onto another person rather than trying to recognize what they were sharing with me about their own experiences.
That's certainly a kind of pitfall or peril that I would identify — the kind of tendency to want to feel virtuous and to sort of engage in empathic action or empathic conversation, because I liked how it made me feel about myself.
I think part of it is just staying aware of what's happening inside of you or what's happened inside a given encounter...
There's an essay I wrote about patients who experience something called Morgellon’s disease, which is basically a condition where patients understand or believe that there are strange, unexplainable fibers emerging from their skin...
So it's a condition of the mind, not the body.
But I became really interested in, 'well, okay, even if what's happening to these people is slightly different from their conception of what's happening to them, how are they still enduring a very real kind of suffering?'
In that sense, I was learning on the job about some of the perils and pitfalls of empathy because it was like maybe empathy isn't always just taking at face value someone's account of their own experience.
There can be certain kinds of skepticism or interrogation or resistance, even that can be part of the experience of empathy, and sometimes disagreement and friction can also be part of the experience of empathy.
But it still, to me, ultimately comes back to trying to listen hard to somebody else's account of what life feels like for them and granting some importance to that account as well.
I'm curious about maybe in some of these cases that you write about, that having someone hear and understand the story, the condition they're living, is almost more important than actually dealing with the condition itself.
Certainly, I think there's often a tremendous value to just being heard and to experiencing another human being essentially telling you through their listening, through their presence, through their close engagement, you matter and what you're experiencing matters...
And part of this is the nature of the work I do.
I don't interview presidents, I don't interview celebrities, I don’t interview people who have been asked about their lives and their experiences a thousand times.
I interview people who often feel forgotten or invisible and so there's a hunger they bring to the encounter and often a kind of solace just in being heard.
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*Q&A have been edited for clarity and length.
This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.
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