The Evolution and Social Dynamics of Compassion
By Paul Gilbert. 2015
187 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The inner processes that make compassion possible arose from the evolutionary advantage of caring for others, especially offspring, kin and in-group allies. This paper explores issues in defining compassion and its link to similar concepts such as altruism. It also explores compassion as a social motive and social mentality that choreographs social interactions and how the successful enactment of compassion is dependent on certain competencies such as sympathy, empathy, perspective taking, and distress tolerance (among others), as well as social contexts. As a motivational system, compassion has to compete with other socially choreographed motives, such as tribalism and individualistic competitiveness – much darker sides of the human psyche that have been harmful in human history. One of the challenges for compassion is to explore not only how it can promote personal well-being but also how it can counteract the destructive sides of our other motives and social mentalities.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/872f145f7fb05faae0a33efaf2906f37a6c0f088
How researchers see this paper
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
In Social Psychology
- M. Matos
- José Pinto-Gouveia
- C. Duarte
- Paul Gilbert
- Joana Duarte
- Jaskaran Basran
- Laura Ceresatto
- J. Stubbs
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Borderline Personality Disorder (2016, unknown): “As regards psychotherapy in general, existing treatments for BPD patients that have proved to be effective—dialectic behavioral therapy, transference-focused therapy, mentalization-based treatment, as well as newer developments including metacognitive interpersonal therapy and compassion-focused the”
- The development of compassionate engagement and action scales for self and others (2017, background): “Yet others may have all of those competencies, but lack the courage to act [42].”