The War for Kindness by Jamil Zaki

THE WAR FOR KINDNESS is written by Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He explores “building empathy in a fractured world,” as also described in his interview with The Washington Post. In THE WAR FOR KINDNESS Zaki begins by discussing his own parents’ divorce and says, “that two people’s experiences could differ so drastically, yet both be true and deep, is maybe the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.” He then describes the different ways we respond with empathy, given that the “diameter of our concern … [now] encompasses the planet.” I was struck by his comments about the recent shift to a majority of people living in cities and in shrinking households so that “we see more people than ever before, but know fewer of them.” Employing a conversational tone and using many examples (ranging from convicts participating in a program called Changing Lives Through Literature to hospital employees avoiding burnout), Zaki continues with some of his subsequent chapters discussing The Stories We Tell, Caring Too Much and The Future of Empathy. There is an extensive website which accompanies THE WAR FOR KINDNESS. Videos there address five challenges: reverse the golden rule; spend kindly; disagree better; employ kind tech; and be a culture builder. 

Just under a third of the text is devoted to appendices, notes and index.  It is worth mentioning that one appendix deals with “Evaluating the Evidence” and includes a summary of each of the over four dozen claims made in the book, plus a rating on the claim’s strength and (for those with weaker ratings) a brief description of that reasoning. I found this section  - also available online - to be an extremely helpful summary; our Psych teachers and students will no doubt find it fascinating and inspirational to their research. In fact, I would suggest considering this title as a One School/One Book selection at the high school or college level with the option of including lesson plans like the related one posted by The New York Times or from Teaching Tolerance.  THE WAR FOR KINDNESS is excerpted in NPR’s recent review which praises Zaki’s compilation of research, and concludes: “To build empathy, one must have courage, engage in self-reflection, and harness the will to venture beyond isolation to the great unknown that is others.”  Huge, but worthwhile tasks for adolescents and the rest of us.