How Babies Develop Empathy By Imitating Others
Next time you’re near a playground, watch what happens when a child gets upset and starts crying. Often, one of their playmates will express sadness, and will run to fetch the child’s parent for help. This ability to mirror another person’s emotion and understand what they desire is a product of empathy. Empathy is generally defined as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s position and to understand what they are feeling, and it plays a vital role in our social lives.
Research has shown that empathy develops over time, with infants reaching ‘empathy milestones’ as they grow older. While very young infants often don’t respond to others’ emotions appropriately, by age two their greater understanding of others’ experiences motivates them to act in helpful or caring ways. This capacity to understand how others are feeling is key to navigating our complex social world, from the classroom to the office. But how do babies learn to empathize with others in the first place?
The ‘Like Me’ Theory
Being empathetic requires the understanding that others are separate from — but similar to — oneself. In the 1970s, the developmental psychologist A.N. Meltzoff proposed a theory called the ‘Like Me’ developmental framework, which suggests that infant imitation enables babies to see the behaviors of others as similar to their own, and that this in turn provides the basis for the development of empathy. Meltzoff suggested that there are three steps to this process:
This understanding of the connection between the self and the other, described by Meltzoff as the ‘Like Me Bridge’, allows infants to understand the feelings of others—and the first building block of the bridge is imitation.
Baby See, Baby Do
Nothing is more imitative than a human baby. Babies imitate spontaneously from the moment they come into the world. In a classic study, Meltzoff and Moore tested newborns ranging from just 42 minutes to 32 hours old, and found that newborns imitate gestures such as mouth opening and tongue protrusion.
The fact that this behavior arises so early on suggests that humans have an innate capacity to imitate, and that even newborn infants can map the actions of others onto their own bodies. This capacity to imitate provides a basis for communication that goes beyond funny facial movements — it underlies our ability to connect with and understand others.
For young children, the emotions that adults display are cues for how they themselves should behave. A study from the 1960s found that children display more aggressive behaviors after observing aggression in adults. And the babies of mothers with high levels of anxiety have been shown to smile less than the average. As babies imitate adults throughout infancy, they form templates for their own behavior and emotional responses.
To test this for yourself, try sticking your tongue out at a newborn baby. The likelihood is that they will stick their tongue out right back. Next, try smiling at a baby—after a few months of development, babies exhibit reciprocal smiling, or the ability to smile when smiled at, one of the first demonstrations of emotion sharing.
Mature empathic experiences don’t arise until children are 2–4 years old. But the foundation of empathy is emotion sharing, a phenomenon that is observed in very young infants. While most babies go through the normal ‘empathic’ developmental milestones, a lack of emotion-sharing behavior may signal a divergence from normal infant development, and is often related to conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. As experiencing lower levels of empathy in adulthood has been linked to issues like substance abuse and even lower income, it’s important for infants to develop the foundation for empathy at a young age. Luckily, there are things parents can do to promote and encourage empathy development — including in children on the autistic spectrum.
“Empathy is caught, not taught”
Mary Gordon, who founded the classroom program “Roots of Empathy,” coined the phrase “Empathy is caught, not taught” — in other words, you can’t formally teach empathy. Instead, empathic reactions evolve over time as children learn through imitation, caring relationships, communication, playing games, and storytelling. But there are a few things that you as a parent or caregiver can do to help your child along the way:
- Model empathy. Instead of covering over the child’s emotional responses with ‘quick fixes’ like ‘everything’s ok’, reflect what the child is feeling back to them. For example, say ‘I understand that you’re feeling sad’ and tune into their emotional needs, providing a model for the child to imitate.
- Be open about your own feelings. Your capacity to put your own emotions into words will help the child to recognize and react to the feelings of those around them.
- Identify emotions. Help the child to name difficult feelings such as anger or frustration, and encourage them to open up about why they’re experiencing those emotions.
- Encourage empathy for others. Ask the child about how their friends and peers are feeling. If the child experiences conflict with someone, ask them to consider the other person’s perspective.
- Empathy-play: as you play with the child, use the opportunity to talk to the child about feelings and their causes. For example, you might say that the toy lion doesn’t want to share his food with the toy tiger. Then ask the child: what do you think the tiger is feeling? And what should the lion do about it?
Key takeaway: The road to fully-fledged empathy is a long one, but children embark on it as soon as they emerge into the world. By imitating adults and caregivers, babies learn that others are distinct from but similar to themselves, and begin to understand the nature and origin of others’ emotions. While there are a few things that caregivers can do to help children along this path, such as modeling empathy and talking about one’s own emotions, it’s also important to be patient — learning this crucial aspect of being human takes time.
References:
Ornaghi, V., Conte, E., & Grazzani, I. (2020). Empathy in toddlers: the role of emotion regulation, language ability, and maternal emotion socialization style. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2844.
Meltzoff, A. N. (1999). Born to learn: What infants learn from watching us. The role of early experience in infant development, 1–10.
Meltzoff, A. N. (2005). Imitation and other minds: The “like me” hypothesis. Perspectives on imitation: From neuroscience to social science, 2, 55–77.
Decety, J., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2011). Empathy, imitation, and the social brain. Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives, 58–81.
Bandura, A. (1965). “Influence of models’ reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1 (6): 589–595.
