Archival Intimacies: Empathy and Historical Practice in 2023

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Abstract

This article explores the use of empathy in historical research. Using evidence collected from a number of academic historians working in UK higher education institutions in 2022, this article uses empathy as a window into historians’ attitudes towards the professional self, the appearance of objectivity and their relationship to the historical subject. It explores the role of empathy in learning history, teaching history, in historical research including the selection of sources, and in the communication of historical research to different audiences. It discusses empathetic historical approaches, suggesting that these can be categorised into three distinct taxonomies: historical empathy, where the researcher engages with the historical subject using professional detachment to manage their affective response; historicised empathy, where the researcher employs deep knowledge of historical context to understand and appreciate the worldview of their historical subject; and empathy as historical approach, so person-centred (rather than system-centred) accounts of history. Finally, this article tests its hypotheses by exploring histories in which empathy is absent.

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Dispossessed Lives : Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Marisa Fuentes (2016)

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Are women the more empathetic gender? The effects of gender role expectations

Charlotte Löffler, Tobias Greitemeyer (2021)

The present research aimed to extend the state of knowledge regarding the relationship between self-perceived empathy and traditional gender roles and placed particular focus on the contextual conditions under which gender differences in empathy are present, can be created, or eliminated. Across two studies, women rated themselves higher in empathy than men in all experimental conditions, whereas an objective female superiority in emotion recognition was only evident in one condition. In Study 1 ( n = 736), using the term ‘social-analytic capacity’ instead of ‘empathic capacity’ increased gender differences in self-reported empathy and resulted in women performing better in the Eyes-test than men. In a neutral task (verbal intelligence), gender differences (in this case, a male superiority), were only found when participants believed that this task had an association with empathy. In Study 2 ( n = 701), gender differences in self-reported empathic capacity, but not in performance in emotion recognition, increased when motivation for empathy was raised. Further, gender-role orientation mediated the association between gender and self-reported empathic capacity, whereas it did not account for the association between gender and emotion recognition. Overall, the present studies provide strong support for the idea that empathy is influenced by contextual factors and can be systematically biased by gender roles and stereotypical beliefs.