The Culture of Empathy

William Filler, the developer of The Empathy Circle Game, has been working with Edwin Rutsch and others to help build a culture of empathy since 2017. Edwin developed the Empathy Circle practice, based on Carl Rogers’ Reflective Listening.

Most of us are conditioned to respond to others, asserting their own ideas. In an Empathy Circle, we reflect what the other person has said in order to understand them. Empathy Circle practitioners go to political rallies, both Right and Left, to listen to everyone, and attempt to get both sides to listen to each other.

We have also developed an online training that we’ve conducted since 2020 (empathycircle.com). During the height of the pandemic, the first trainees were medical workers in Brooklyn, NY, who were dealing with overwhelming sickness and death. They reported that even five minutes of reflective listening as they changed shifts had a profound positive effect on the rest of their day. Since then, we have trained over 500 people from all over the world and have made over 500 new friends.

Instead of finding intractable differences between people from different cultures, we found that we all share a common humanity. Empathy doesn’t mean that everyone agrees on everything, but, through reflective listening, we find that we share many of the same core values, such as love of family and community. The Empathy Circle practice seeks to create a foundation of trust on which to build inventive solutions to the problems we face today.