Could You Learn to Be as Compassionate as the Dalai Lama? With Paul Ekman | Big Think

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Psychologist Paul Ekman has spent over 60 hours with the Dalai Lama trying to understand "global compassion" and whether it can be taught. He’s searching for a western psychological corollary to ancient Buddhist meditative practices designed to increase empathy for total strangers.

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PAUL EKMAN:

Paul Ekman is the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement.

His research on facial expression and body movement began in 1954, as the subject of his Master’s thesis in 1955 and his first publication in 1957. In his early work, his approach to nonverbal behavior showed his training in personality. Over the next decade, a social psychological and cross-cultural emphasis characterized his work, with a growing interest in an evolutionary and semiotic frame of reference. In addition to his basic research on emotion and its expression, he has, for the last thirty years, also been studying deceit.

In 1971, he received a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health; that Award has been renewed in 1976, 1981, 1987, 1991, and 1997. His research was supported by fellowships, grants and awards from the National Institute of Mental Health for over forty years.

Articles reporting on Dr. Ekman’s work have appeared in Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Psychology Today, The New Yorker and others, both American and foreign. Numerous articles about his work have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and other national newspapers.

He has appeared on 48 Hours, Dateline, Good Morning America, 20/20, Larry King, Oprah, Johnny Carson and many other TV programs. He has also been featured on various public television programs such as News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Bill Moyers’ The Truth About Lying.

Ekman is co-author of Emotion in the Human Face (1971), Unmasking the Face (1975), Facial Action Coding System (1978), editor of Darwin and Facial Expression (1973), co-editor of Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (1982), Approaches to Emotion (1984), The Nature of Emotion (1994), What the Face Reveals (1997), and author of Face of Man (1980), Telling Lies (1985, paperback, 1986, second edition, 1992, third edition, 2001, 4th edition 2008), Why Kids Lie (1989, paperback 1991), Emotions Revealed, (2003), New Edition (2009) Telling Lies, Dalai Lama-Emotional Awareness (2008) and New Edition Emotions Revealed (2007) . He is the editor of the third edition (1998) and the fourth edition (2009) of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998). He has published more than 100 articles.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Ekman: I’ve now spent about 60 hours in one-on-one conversations with the Dalai Lama. It’s a real gift because he’s a very, very interesting man. He’s very bright and he loves to argue without rancor. I love to argue without rancor also. It’s over those six years of conversation that he has shifted some of my interests into compassion. My interest has now become on what I call global compassion where you feel compassion not just for members of your family, not just for people who have the same skin color, not just for people who speak the same language, but for all human beings. And your wish is to reduce the suffering of all human beings on this planet. Regrettably that’s rare and yet I believe that survival of the world requires that we get a lot more global compassion.

Is global compassion — and some people do have it — is that a gift like being a great athlete or a great musician? We don’t say why can’t everyone be Beethoven or Paul McCartney. We know that only some people have that gift. Is that what global compassion is, a gift? Or is it within all of us, but it’s only been awakened in some of us. There are some Buddhist meditative practices that are designed to increase compassion. They’re hard work and they don’t work with everyone. I’m looking for other ways. Although there are now a few hundred scientists studying compassion, very few of them are studying how to bring about more global compassion and that’s what we need.

Psychologist Paul Ekman has spent over 60 hours with the Dalai Lama trying to understand "global compassion" and whether it can be taught. He’s searching for a western psychological corollary to ancient Buddhist meditative practices designed to increase empathy for total strangers.