I orginally got involved in studying empathy because I was raised by a single mother, with seven siblings, and felt grateful to the many people who offered their heartfelt assistance. One of these people, Ruth, a volunteer with a local nonprofit organization, became part of our lives—offering practical support like rides and babysitting, and also emotional support. She did so without judgment or expectation of anything in return. As I progressed in my education, I couldn’t help but wonder about what motivated people like Ruth.

However, I actually started my graduate student career by studying the opposite end of the spectrum—narcissism. We found that narcissism has been rising in American college students since the late 1970s. So I wondered whether empathy could also be declining across that same time period. Though I wasn’t really old enough to notice generational changes, more seasoned professors gave countless examples of the changes that they had seen in college students over the previous decades. I was skeptical: Didn’t the older generation always say this about the younger? But data suggested that this time there was evidence to back up their claims.

That data came from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the most commonly used tool that psychologists use to measure empathy. It asks people to what extent certain statements describe them. The statements include: “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” and “When I’m upset at someone, I usually try to ‘put myself in his shoes’ for a while.” Participants’ responses are calculated on a 1 to 5 scale.

A family in Korea, one of the ten most empathetic countries in the world, according to reseach. Photo courtesy of raYmon/Flickr.

In 2010 we published a research paper finding declines in empathy among American college students over time. It got a lot of press—perhaps because of those stereotypes about younger generations. A clever marketing person at my university suggested that we post the empathy survey along with the press release so that people could find out their own scores. Over 100,000 people took the quiz!

That’s when I and my colleagues Bill Chopik and Ed O’Brien thought about using the data to better understand how empathy varies across cultures.

There were limitations to our data. As you can imagine, our surveys were only posted in English, since we never expected people from all over the world to be interested in the topic. So, only English speakers would have taken the survey, and among those, we can’t be sure whether these people were orginally from that country or just temporarily living there.

Yet we had reason to believe that the data was roughly accurate. For example, lots of research demonstrates that across a wide variety of ages, higher empathy scores are associated with more giving, helping, and sharing behaviors. Using data from high quality surveys (like the Gallup World Poll), we found that higher empathy countries had higher rates of volunteering and helping. So it seemed that our data captured empathy reasonably well.

Here are the ten countries with the highest empathy scores.

When showing these results to American friends, no one seemed to be surprised to see Denmark, a Northern European country, at No. 4. Nor was anyone surprised to see the United States at No. 7. I was a bit disappointed to see that my home country, Canada, trailed behind at No. 12.

The clearer patterns, though, are the clustering of countries from the Middle East (three countries), South/Central America (three countries), and East Asia (two countries) in the top 10. My friends seemed surprised to see the Middle Eastern ones at the top. That could have something to do general lack of knowledge about these cultures, since even college educated Americans find it difficult to point out Middle Eastern cultures on the map. Or it could be owing to stereotypes that Americans may hold about people from Middle Eastern cultures.

However, there are other possible implications beyond stereotypes. Our study suggests that certain types of social structures can make people super-empathizers. In our study, we found that cultures that tend to be more collectivistic also tend to have higher empathy scores. Collectivism involves seeing oneself as being part of a larger, interconnected group of familial and other close relationships, with a priority on fitting in with others and maintaining harmony. So it’s not surprising that empathy would be higher in such cultures.

On the flip side, our study found that on average, more individualistic cultures scored lower on empathy. Individualism involves seeing oneself as distinct and separate from others, with a priority on showcasing one’s uniqueness and valuing self-expression. It is possible that when people are focused on being separate and unique, this can sometimes obscure the commonalities that we share, which could impair our willingness or ability to feel compassion for others and to imagine what it is like to be them.

The countries with low empathy scores were also a surprise. Finland, a Northern European country like Denmark, is No. 58. This doesn’t quite fit with the stereotype of Northern Europeans as places with a strong sense of social welfare. A similar result was found with Venezuela (No. 62), which doesn’t fit in with other South/Central American countries in the top 10.

A lonely bench in Finland, one of the least empathetic countries in the world, according to research. Photo courtesy of Alexander Kosolov/Flickr.

We don’t have enough information to explain these variations. Perhaps there’s something in the history of Finland and Venezuela that make them different from their neighbors, or perhaps people in the cultures that appeared less empathetic feel uncomfortable overtly saying that they are kind and caring people, which would affect responses to our measure of empathy.

Which brings us to the bigger question of what respondents to our survey, around the world, thought they were doing. Empathy is a morally laden topic. In some cultures it might be important to demonstrate that one is morally good. In others it might be more important to measure one’s “real” nature—regardless of how “good” that nature is. So, when they answered questions about their own empathy, some respondents may have been demonstrating, while others were measuring. This could lead to biased responses.

There’s also the question of the recipient of empathy. Unfortunately the measure of empathy that we used doesn’t separately ask questions about empathy directed toward family and close friends, versus empathy directed toward strangers or people from different backgrounds. We don’t know whether people from the most empathetic regions of the world are mainly thinking about their loved ones when answering the questions, or if their empathy is more universally applied.

Perhaps the biggest take-home point from our data is this: Deep cultural knowledge of specific countries is likely to be more important, in further research, than applying a broad brush across many cultures. Most of the quantitative social science research on empathy so far has been conducted in what psychologists call “W.E.I.R.D.” cultures: Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, and Democratic. This is a problem because we don’t know how empathy operates within cultures that have different assumptions about the world, views of the self, and values. And cross-cultural psychology research mainly focuses on differences between Western countries and East Asian countries, with very limited research on Eastern Europe, South America, or the Middle East. Overall, we have a fragmented picture of the complex contextual factors at play.

We need to do a lot more research. In particular, we need culturally sensitive measures that are designed by people from other geographic regions to better capture what empathy means to them. We need to distinguish different recipients of empathy, such as close others versus strangers. For now, our study remains the largest study on empathy that exists, but hopefully future researchers will help us to paint a more careful picture of the world’s mosaic of empathy.

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We began working through Taylor’s dense argument, and I worried that we’d soon lose each other in the dark forest of his prose. Reading Taylor requires that, like Hansel and Gretel, you bring breadcrumbs to trace an argument that has you bouncing from late medieval monasticism to German philosophy to lyrics from torch singer Peggy Lee.

But to my students’ astonishment (and mine), as they made their way through the book, lights went on for them, illuminating the world they live in in a new way. “It’s like he’s reading our mail,” one student said. If you’ve grown up in post-1960s North America, A Secular Age, which was published in 2007, is like an episode of “This is Your Life” or “Finding Your Roots”: It’s the backstory to the fractured world in which we find ourselves. For people who have strong beliefs, as many of my students do, living in a world that is secular is to experience belief haunted by doubt, almost daily. And then that doubt is itself haunted by an enduring longing for something more—what Taylor, a practicing Roman Catholic, calls a “fullness,” a sense of significance that has the punch of transcendence about it, even if we believe this world is all we’ve got.

What did this octogenarian philosopher help my millennial students see, and what did they see in him?

Well, for starters, he helped explain why their generation considers “authenticity” the predominant virtue. In Taylor’s telling, the way humans see and imagine the world—what he calls our “social imaginary”—shifted in modernity from being religious and largely Christian to become “the modern moral order.” Rather than being obligated to God or “higher” eternal norms, today our obligations are for the mutual benefit of society. My moral obligations are to my neighbor, and everyone is my neighbor—so my obligations are universal. While we might no longer be haunted by God or eternity, in a sense the stakes are raised even higher: I’m responsible for everyone, all the time. There is no end to my obligation, no parameters for my responsibility. In a sense, we have to fill the vacuum left by God’s death. Those are big shoes to fill.

But there is a flip side to this: If we’re all we’ve got, Taylor says, it means we’re always “on” not only because we are always responsible but also because everybody’s watching. So we live in what Taylor calls an age of “mutual display” in which we show our individualism and virtue by making sure others see it. If God is dead, the only audience left to confirm our virtue is one another. David Foster Wallace got at this dynamic in a famous essay on television that is only more true in our internet age. What television did to us, Wallace argued, was turn us into watchers who expected to be watched. He, too, told a philosophical story about this, asking readers to imagine a “universe in which God is Nielsen.” Today, as my students explained, everyone is Nielsen, rating you.

Taylor helped them make sense of the almost paralyzing self-consciousness that has descended upon them with the constant display/watch dynamic that attends social media. They know the exhaustion of what it means to always be “on,” and they are well aware of the judgmentalism they experience when they don’t “display” the right things in the right way. And they start to wonder if the all-seeing God might not have been a little more forgiving than the non-stop monitoring of Snapchat and Instagram.

But Taylor also helped them understand a spiritual dynamic they experience. What makes ours a “secular” age, writes Taylor, is not that it is defined by unbelief but rather that belief is contestable and contested. Belief of every sort is “fragilized,” as Taylor puts it, destabilized by rival accounts and doubts. For more traditional “believers,” this means their faith is attended by doubt as a constant companion. “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) is a prayer they understand well.

But Taylor explains that it’s not only believers who suffer from doubt. In our secular age the unbeliever can find herself tempted to believe. She may take up yoga, or sacrificially devote herself to causes of justice, or find herself strangely attracted to the Dominican nuns down the street who keep inviting her to spiritual retreats. The doubter’s doubt is faith. (As the novelist Julian Barnes admitted in his memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”)

Unlike the world described to my students by religious fundamentalists, this is a world that they recognize. Taylor did justice to the complexity of their experience and the messiness of their spiritual lives, giving voice to their doubts, to be sure, but also giving them permission to admit they also still wanted to believe something more. There is a kind of sincerity about Taylor’s philosophical analysis that allowed them to step out of the cage of ironic cynicism.

Taylor is the first to admit that A Secular Age is an heir to Romanticism: He is trying to offer a philosophy that gives due attention to what it feels like to live in the world—a theoretical account that acknowledges the importance of our affections, our embodiment, all the visceral ways that we grope through the dizzying existence of our late modern world.

My students found in Taylor’s work a kind of “hitchhiker’s guide” to a secular age. But not everyone has the luxury of spending four months working through it. Which is why I decided, after that semester, to write a book about a book in an attempt at bringing Taylor’s insights to a wider audience. The response has been quite overwhelming—people from all sorts of walks of life have told me that Taylor’s analysis gave them their bearings in the confusion of a secular age. Some religious believers told me it gave them permission to voice their doubts, to be honest about how hard it is to believe. Skeptics and atheists tell me Taylor puts a finger on the rumbling spirituality they can’t shake. So this big philosophical tome ends up doing what David Foster Wallace used to say a good novel is supposed to do: Give us a sense that we aren’t alone. Someone understands us and has given names to the landscape we live in.

Taylor’s book makes me think of an image by the Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich called Monastery Graveyard in the Snow. Stark, skeleton-like trees frame the ruins of a cloistered community. You can feel the chill of north winds blowing across the scene like the gales of enlightened disbelief blowing across Europe. The gravestones point to the dead who used to believe. (Fittingly, all we have is a black-and-white image of the painting, which was destroyed during World War II.)

But then, when I look closer at this image, I notice that amidst those grave markers is a tiny band of monks, obstinate but haunted, still looking for something. Is it force of habit that propels them? Or has the enlightenment they were promised proven unfulfilling? Better to pray in the ruins than settle for disenchantment. Charles Taylor suggests that many of us are like this band of seekers: We see the ruins, we know the world has changed, we know there’s no going back. But we also can’t shake a hunger, a longing, a haunting that we welcome.

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