We have been faced with the problem of low social trust for years. From the 2018 research conducted by the Centre for the Public Opinion Research we know that only 22% of Poles believe that they can trust other people. According to Michigan State University, which researched 63 countries around the world, Poland is placed toward the bottom of the list when it comes to measuring the level of citizens’ empathy. Social diagnosis composed by the Social Monitoring Council in 2015 suggests that consequences of our lack of trust and general reluctance towards each other are the rise in antidemocratic attitudes, social polarization and hostility towards minorities, immigrants, or representatives of opposing political parties.

We will address these problems by collaborating with experts on creating scenarios and tools for the empathy workshops that will be open for participants from across Poland. The pilot workshops will see testing of audio-visual tools, such as recording histories and experiences of individuals with differing worldviews and methods for developing communication and collaboration between different groups. These initial workshops will allow us to fine tune and organize a series of trainings on empathy as emotional intelligence, development of kindness and experiencing of that, which is different. We will evaluate these meetings and methods and will measure changes in attitudes of our participants. Based on the results, we will design a final scenario for the empathy workshops. The results of our work will be presented during a conference with specialists interested in the topic of empathy – psychologists, coaches, and social workers.