How do we response to injustice?
In early February 2022, I spoke out to the Xuzhou Chained Woman Incident on my WeChat account and hoped to attract attention to this event from my families and friends, then further help the women in suffer. Surprisingly, some of my close families and friends commenting my post in the attitude of “minding your business” with some sene of normalizing sex trafficking.
At frist, I viewed the attitude as evilness in humanity and started to come up a solution from there. As my research goes on, I realized the sense of ignorance is partially driven from refusal of empathizing because the constantly empathizing pain is a huge burnout to individuals.
Interestedly, I discoverd an alternative of empathy in Buddhism tradition — compassion. Based on my observation and secondary research, I designed a experience where encouraging people intuitively understand the difference between empathy and compassion and introduce people compassion as a better emotion to response with social incidents and hopefully inspire them to make positive changes.
01｜observation
By observing the Chinese Netizens' responses the incidents, I classified their emotions into four categlories:
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02｜visualizing the emotions
Based on
my secondary research and observations, I tried to connect their attitudes and intended behaviors with defined emotion and then further visualize the emotions in a graphic language.
For most of the time, people's emotions can not be clearly defined as one or two as categorized above. They weight their abilities and the consequences of actions before feeling emotion and taking actions. Accordingly, I interpret the relationship of the four emotions as four measures on a spectrum.e text inside of a div block.
03｜insights & concerns
Throughout the research process, there are few concerns that we noticed:
Successfully saving the people in suffer
Although compassion is defined as showing a desire and action to help but they does not necessary lead to the success of free people from suffering.
To simplize the experience, we set the standard of feeling compassionate to successfully save people in pain.
Avoid the Format of Multiple Choice Questions
In other words, how can we best perform the emotion spectrum in to a physical experience? We realize leaving a "grey area" and an imperfectness of achieving one or the other are the answers.
Emotion vs. Action | Subjective vs. Objective
People often confuse compassion with empathy. To differentiate empathy and compassion in the experience. we decided to narrow our focus on their perspectives and emphasis.
Empathy is about resonating with other people and experience the emotions in a the first-person perspective. The Buddhism tradition defines compassion as understand the whole situation of people in suffer and want to help.
