Common Read
Fall 2021 Common Read Event
November 16 at 4 p.m. PT
The First Year Experience hosted a virtual discussion with Dr. Jamil Zaki, the author of Cal Poly Pomona’s Common Read selection for 2021-22: The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.
Watch the Recording (CPP Login Required)
2021-22 Common Read
The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki shares cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that can be strengthened through effort. He also tells the stories of people who embody this new perspective, fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don’t succumb to burnout.
Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action. The future may depend on whether we accept the challenge.
About the Author
Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Using tools from psychology and neuroscience, he and his colleagues examine how empathy works and how people can learn to empathize more effectively. His writing on these topics has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two daughters.
Kindness Challenges
To put the book’s principles into practice, Jamil Zaki developed a series of Kindness Challenges. There are 5 challenges you can use in your classroom to see what it’s like to work at being a little kinder.
FYE Student Project: IGE 1020H
Students in the IGE 1020H course partnered with staff from the Disability Resource Center and Information Technology & Institutional Planning to gather information for accessible pathways on the CPP campus.
“As a class we read the book ‘The War for Kindness’ by Jamil Zaki by exploring our textbooks. The last step was this class project on taking action that can help change our community,” said Assistant Professor Hyeryung Hwang.
Read More on the Poly Post