The Psychology of Compassion: How Culture Shapes the Way We Care

For some people, compassion means sitting with another person's pain, listening, and emotionally connecting with their distress. For others, it means helping someone feel better by offering hope or a silver lining. And for some, it means doing both. But what if our understanding of compassion depends on culture?

In this talk, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Associate Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, explores what people in the United States, Ecuador, Mexico, China, and Germany consider a compassionate response to suffering. Drawing on research using both hypothetical scenarios and real experiences of bereavement, she shows that cultures differ systematically in whether they favor sharing in someone's pain, helping them toward more positive emotions, or balancing the two.

These differences persist even in real experiences of loss, suggesting people from different backgrounds may genuinely need different kinds of support while grieving. The larger lesson is that true compassion means asking what support looks like for this person, in this moment, within their own cultural world.