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Learning to be with others: Using sport to develop empathy
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If empathy is this ability to put oneself emotionally, physically and cognitively in another’s position, sport and physical activities can be very valuable for its development.

In the 1990s, I had a project on understanding why underage youngsters in prison became delinquent. I met a lot of young people who talked to me about themselves, their crimes and their future when they got out of prison… but never about how their victims had suffered. As if, when they committed a crime, their empathy was temporarily out of action. I thus became interested in this, and how to restore it – through sport/the body – then, gradually, in thinking about the type of education beforehand, before it needed repairing. I then went into school to develop education programmes – through the body and movement – to produce empathy.

Empathy is initiated when people practice a sport activity together.

Empathy is the capacity to put oneself in another’s position. Because it requires “a change of perspective […] travelling in the other body”, as the French neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz puts it, it is deeply based in the corporeal experience. It is therefore “first a question of movement, feelings and the body”, according to the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron. That is why sport and physical activities can represent a valuable means of building a link with others, and, incidentally, of learning to empathise, especially for younger children. For it is by feeling in one’s own body the gestures and emotions perceived in another person doing sport that one can start to appreciate the internal landscape of that other. These perceived gestures and emotions operate like a symbolic language, in the sense that the other is recognised as an alter ego. In a word, empathy can be initiated when people do a sporting activity together.

All things considered, to feel empathy implies to let the other prevail over the self, to be able to think “oneself as another[1]. Is this not the state of mind encouraged in sport and physical activities? It is precisely this skill which is developed when a player tries to anticipate what the opponent or teammate plans to do – in other words to put themselves in their place – to extend the pleasure of playing or to win. Still quoting Berthoz, empathy demands “the change from the first to the third person, which requires cooperation and competition between several networks in our brain and that of the other, in a dynamic interaction”. Is that not the very essence of a number of sports? Studies reveal the possibility of a link between empathy and pro-social behaviours. So, there are several reasons why developing this capacity in children and young people to take another’s perspective represents a good route for sport which likes to see itself as educational and a vector of community values. We need to convert the try by training more PE teachers, sports instructors and coaches… to teach children and young people “to have the sense of the other as a moral value”[2], in order to make a good society.

 

[1] Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre. Paris, Le Seuil, 1990

[2] Omar Zanna, « Avoir le sens de l’autre comme éthique », In Marsollier Ch., L’Éthique relationnelle, une boussole pour l’enseignant, Paris, Canopé, 2016, pp-39-46.

Omar Zanna, Doctor of Sociology and Psychology, lecturer in the science of education, University of le Mans.

This article is from the latest edition of the Sport and Citizenship journal (no. 53), which can be accessed on their website.

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