Rational Compassion
Applied Empathy (imho Compassion)
The heart of any solution to conflict lies in creating the conditions for empathy between the antagonists at a micro level through action, where talking arises from mutual action and respect not mediation.
- John Ford, Empathy and the Art of Tracking: How Mediators Follow the Trail of Emotion, Mediate.com, 2026
- John Ford, Empathy Requires Us To, EmpathySet, 2021
- Ford et al., What do displays of empathy do in palliative care consultations?, ResearchGate / Loughborough University, 2019
Neuroscience
- Empathy triggers internal pain.
- Compassion drives proactive resilience.
My favourite bits:
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Compassion training restored positive affect to baseline and lowered negative affect, even though the distressing video content stayed the same
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Consistent with prior findings: compassion/loving-kindness training raises daily positive affect (Fredrickson et al., 2008) and short-term compassion training has measurable experiential/neural effects (Klimecki et al., 2012)
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Suggests compassion is a distinct emotion-regulation strategy from suppression/reappraisal (Gross, 2002) — it builds positive affect rather than actively down-regulating negative affect, without denying the suffering or changing the negative reality
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Possible implication: unlike effortful regulation, which shows amygdala rebound effects (Walter et al., 2009), compassion may avoid rebound since it doesn’t rely on denying the negative event — untested hypothesis
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Acknowledging others' negative experience (vs. suppressing it) may be key to prosocial motivation — short-term compassion training has been shown to increase helping behavior (Leiberg et al., 2011)
Macro-Policy Breakdown
- Empathy ignores collective math.
- Empathy breeds out-group hostility.
The Human Exploit
- Individual salience blinds systems.
- Architectures commodify human reflexes.
Political views
- Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power, 2025
- Value-based pragmatism