Public leaders should build a culture based on compassion, not confrontation
October 2023 Issue
Bryce Fuemmeler, Research Associate, Leadership & Happiness Laboratory
In our world it seems that confrontation has won the day. In politics, confrontation and the conflict generated by it draws hungry eyes, fuels shrewd but convincing narratives, and exacerbates in-group silos. What if public leaders instead built a culture based on compassion?
Our team at the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory proposes that cultivating compassion, rather than rewarding confrontation, will serve leaders and their constituents alike. It is our belief that in a lonely, fractured, and unhappy world, leaders who prioritize their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their constituents, friends, and family will be uniquely placed to improve communities, culture, and society.
Throughout the past year, we have taken our cues from the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, a global figure from whom our happiness and compassion-centered mission has been inspired. In March 2023, we spent time with His Holiness for guidance on the nature of compassion and how leaders can build a happier world. The Dalai Lama is fond of describing the human race as one, and that leading with compassion is the most salient method by which to melt away differences.
In The Way to Freedom (1994), His Holiness tracks a variety of religious and political movements and pins their leadership failures on the confrontation-compassion dichotomy. Take, for example, His Holiness’s view of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP):
“After gaining power, [the CCP] created political rivalries and now often fight against each other. Although socialism has the noble aim of working for the common welfare of the masses, the means for achieving that end have antagonized the community, and the attitude of the people has become confrontational. In this form, Communism has become so destructive that all the energy of the government is directed toward repression rather than liberation.”
Or, perhaps, we could view the confrontation-compassion dichotomy through His Holiness’s view of Marxism:
“When we look at Karl Marx’s own life and the actual origin of Marxism, we find that Karl Marx underwent great sufferings during his lifetime and advocated constant struggle to topple the bourgeois class. His outlook was based on confrontation. Because of that primary motive, the entire movement of Communism has failed. If the primary motive had been based on compassion and altruism, then things would have been very different.”
In the Lab’s audience with His Holiness, he reaffirmed these points. “We are born the same,” he said, “and we die the same. All our differences occur between the two. If we consider our natures the same, we will come to the conclusion that the only way to live is to be compassionate to one another.”
Naysayers might consider this a naïve view of reality. True, we are born and die identically, but it is impossible to avoid confrontation when faced with our considerable political, social, and class differences. When we suggested this point of view, His Holiness harkened back to his exile from Tibet in 1959. His story is well-known: Amid the crackdown on the Tibetan people by Mao Zedong and the Chinese government, His Holiness was forced to flee to India. Since his exile, His Holiness noted that he begins each morning with a prayer for the Chinese. But, extraordinarily, he does not pray for Chinese policy on Tibet to change. He instead prays that the Chinese officials—the very ones who persecuted his people—have a warm and healthy day with their friends and family. He recognizes that they, like the rest of us, have sufferings and misfortunes, and he intends for his prayers to help heal their pain. This is radical compassion.
It is no wonder that journalist and historian Thomas Laird considers the Dalai Lama and Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion among “humanity’s noblest and finest achievements.” Alexander Norman, a preeminent writer on Tibetan history, puts it well in The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama: “When we place Tenzin Gyatso in the context of the history of Dalai Lamas, a striking religious, political, and cultural picture emerges: A friend to everyone, offering comfort to the victim in us all, a spiritual teacher who reassures without requiring repentance, who consoles without demanding contrition, a politically correct god in a godless world.” It is this ideal for which public leaders should strive.
Social science provides robust support for His Holiness’s worldview. Scholars writing in the Clinical Psychology Review define compassion as a two-step process. First, compassionate people recognize suffering and feel empathy for the sufferer. Second, they take mindful action with the sufferer’s needs and their own abilities in mind. Through this compassionate prism, we can logically understand sufferers’ adverse circumstances without transferring their pain onto ourselves, which then allows us to alleviate their suffering with a clearer mind. Empaths—people who put themselves in the sufferers’ shoes to feel their pain—only complete the first step of the compassion process. They have a tendency to become overwhelmed by shared pain and are thus less effective problem solvers.
In his column at The Atlantic, Director of the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory Arthur Brooks has written on the scientific benefits of compassion and the dangers of empathy, and how leaders often place the latter before the former. Although bite-sized empathy can be worthwhile in friendships, romantic relationships, and the workplace, evidence shows that too much empathy contributes to harsh in-group bias, perversions in jury trials, and poor parenting strategies. Put another way, an over-emphasis on empathy can lead to soft confrontation (e.g., helicopter parenting) or outright confrontation (e.g., hostility toward outgroups).
Compassion, alternatively, has the benefits of empathy without its costs. In one 2014 study, turning one’s empathy into compassion led to a decrease in “empathetic stress,” the emotional burden of feeling another’s pain. A different study in the journal Emotion showed that participants who developed greater compassion for victims had a sustainable boost in altruism, which in turn increased the length of time they helped the sufferer. As such, compassionate leaders not only feel less stress; they also have greater emotional capacity to help sufferers beyond the short-term.
Understanding the nuance between compassion and empathy, we too can understand the psychological make-up of the confrontational leader. Empathetic confrontational leaders, burdened by their shared pain for the sufferer, tend to lash out in ad hominem fashion at any perceived opposition. But not all confrontational leaders are empaths. The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders, a book that studies the profiles of 87 heads of state and 122 political leaders, uncovers three main predictors of confrontation. Leaders who (1) distrust others, (2) have significant in-group bias, and (3) have the need for power—all of which predict reckless responses to stress—are more likely to adopt a confrontational style of leadership. Although not properly defined empaths, these leaders draw heavily on emotion and narrowly on compassion. Guided by confrontation, they generally fail to take the mindful action naturally encouraged by compassionate leadership.
In the public square, the confrontation-compassion dichotomy is not trivial. Both styles of public leadership seek to alleviate suffering, but their means of alleviation are antithetical. The confrontational leader, guided by empathy or emotion, generates conflict with the opposition on behalf of the sufferer (“You don’t care about the marginalized because you don’t know their struggle and disagree with my policies”); the compassionate leader dissipates conflict with the opposition on behalf of the sufferer (“We each care deeply about the marginalized. How can we align our policies to help them?”). Political psychologists writing in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy consider this a difference in “conflict orientations,” the degree to which a person is “conflict-approaching” or “conflict-avoidant.” To achieve their desired ends, a confrontational leader approaches conflict while a compassionate leader avoids it—but not to the latter’s detriment. In the above study, individuals with conflict-avoidant orientations were able to persuasively argue for their political positions: “The deliberative process of political talk did not disadvantage the conflict-avoidant; instead, it led to a deeper understanding among participants of their own political beliefs and relationship to the…community.”
For public leaders in America, the time is ripe for compassionate leadership. A 2020 Pew Research Center poll (figure below) found that the American public considers the strongest conflict in U.S. society to be between partisans—not between class, race, age, or the urban-rural divide. Meanwhile, by 2022, the share of Americans holding unfavorable views of both parties had risen from 21 to 27 percent—which, compared to 1994 levels (6 percent), was nearly a fivefold increase. These data suggest that Americans sense a pervasive culture of confrontation in our political class, and, crucially, that Americans are tired of it. Public leaders who replace confrontation with compassion thus have an increasingly deep well of free-agent constituents available to join their cause.
Perhaps most importantly of all, compassionate leadership does not mean disavowing one’s principles or bowing obediently to the opposition. It would be absurd, for instance, to suggest that the Dalai Lama’s prayers for his persecutors make him subservient to the CCP. His compassion has not made him weaker. Rather, it has made him uncommonly persuasive. In the last sixty years he has become one of the world’s most respected religious leaders and a spotlight for the violation of Tibetan rights, the political issue closest to his heart.
As such, public leaders who suggest that compassion is political cowardice either fundamentally misunderstand its power or are engaging in demagoguery. To heal our worsening political culture—and to find healthier, more long-lasting ways to help our brothers and sisters who are suffering—public leaders should rebuild a culture based on compassion, not confrontation.
Whether you are an aspiring, new, or veteran public leader, only two steps are required to initiate the rebuild:
1. Transform your empathy into compassion.
Much literature demonstrates that compassion can be developed from the foundation of empathy. Remember, compassion is superior to empathy because it provides us better mental agility to help the sufferer. In his column on compassion, Arthur explains:
“To be tougher in the face of another’s pain doesn’t mean feeling it less. Rather, you should learn to feel the pain without being impaired to act…Empaths can’t help others commit to difficult resolutions, because their assistance stops at the victim’s feelings. But compassionate people, toughened up to act, can do hard things that the person suffering might not want or like—but that is for their good. Compassion can be tough love, giving honest counsel that is difficult to hear, saying goodbye to an employee who is not a suitable fit, or saying no to a disappointed child.”
In public leadership, developing compassion can take a similar shape. This might mean not overpromising lavishly to one’s most marginalized constituents and instead giving honest predictions about what is possible. Or it might mean working in good faith with a political opponent, even if they are in a minority position.
2. Do not fear backlash from your side.
In the age of America’s culture wars, to show an inkling of respect (let alone compassion) for the other side is tantamount to treachery. We mustn’t forget that His Holiness the Dalai Lama shows compassion for exiled Tibetans (the sufferers) and Chinese officials (his opponents). As a public leader, it is possible to be compassionate to both sufferers and opponents—and, if true to one’s principles, the aforementioned Pew data shows that a growing swath of the American electorate is eager to support candidates who are compassionate rather than confrontational.
In his 2019 book Love Your Enemies, Arthur argues that true moral courage is not standing up to the people with whom we disagree; it is standing up for the people with whom we disagree. Compassionate leadership moves us closer to this ideal, and, if the popularity of the Dalai Lama’s message is any indication, it is a persuasive strategy for a better culture.