Researchers get grant for empathy studies

IDS Reports

The University of Chicago awarded a team of IU researchers from the humanities, life sciences, information sciences and social sciences a grant of $199,617 on Wednesday to study the virtue of empathy.

The project, “Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives,” is one of 19 chosen from nearly 700 in a competition sponsored by the university and is part of a $3 million research program exploring a “New Science of Virtues.” According to an IU press release, the larger project is designed to “examine how the humanities and the sciences might cooperate to develop understandings of virtue in modern societies.”

The John Templeton Foundation will support the two-year initiative.

Richard Miller, professor of religious studies and director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, is leading the project.

“This funding supports an ambitious collaborative and interdisciplinary study of an emotion that is as widely valued as it is under-theorized,” Miller said in the press release.

In the project, the eight-member IU research team plans to study empathetic qualities as a virtue, which Miller defines as “a disposition of good judgment, feeling, and action.” They will also examine the intellectual roots of empathy in Western and East Asian thought as well as it’s potential to connect people to past and future generations.

“These outstanding researchers from a number of fields will bring a variety of perspectives to a fascinating set of questions,” said IU Bloomington Provost and Executive Vice President Karen Hanson in the press release. “This interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature and import of empathy promises to shed light on important moral matters and to serve as a model of work that bridges the sciences and the humanities.”

— Bailey Loosemore