UMKC Using Arts Management to Improve Empathy & Encourage Prosocial Behavior Essay Towards Empathetic Communities In this essay, students will employ thei

UMKC Using Arts Management to Improve Empathy & Encourage Prosocial Behavior Essay Towards Empathetic Communities

In this essay, students will employ their knowledge gained from texts we have covered in

class on theories of community, discourse, social engagement and empathy and apply them on

one of the communities they have access to. This project is mainly concerned with Segal’s idea

of “prosocial behaviors” and how such empathetic prosocial behaviors can be translated to

prosocial actions. In other words, how can we as human beings, active in different communities,

develop a consciousness to perceive the concerns and problems of others outside our

communities and try to use our communities’ potentials to help those people in need?

Segal in her book poses a few key questions with regards to empathy, social distance and

social well-being of all members of the society as she writes:

“The human tendency to be less empathic and more prejudiced toward people who are

different presents a major obstacle for social cooperation and facilitating social well-being. How

can we understand the needs of others if we maintain the empathic distance that has come with

our historical evolution? How can we close the empathy gap between ingroup and outgroup

membership? How can we encourage voters and policymakers to extend resources and services

to people who are different from them?” (100).

Following this general idea, in this project, students will examine the effective ways their

communities can help other people in the society in a much more meaningful and empathetic

way. Students can ask themselves: What real problems people outside my community might

have no matter where on earth they are, and how can my community can help to reduce those

people’s hardships and pains? What actual ways can I suggest to my chosen community to cut

the empathetic gap/distance between the ingroups and outgroups and take an empathetic

prosocial action? While responding to these questions, the students will in fact try to imagine

ways to recruit people in their communities to join them and help other people in need, an in any

parts of the world, an example of which is charity works and volunteering for different people in

need. This project attempts to make the students ponder about the needs of other people outside

their communities and how they, in theory, can they employ their potentials to take empathetic

action for the well-being of others.

Students are advised to use their communities they analyzed in their first projects but can

still change their communities if they have sufficient justifications to do so. The community can

be of any kind, actual, virtual, social or discursive. Students will employ their observations and

findings gained from their first project to compose this project with sufficient quotations.

Students are encouraged to utilize library’s resources to their best advantage and add more

academic sources to their projects.