At a compassion education conference in 2018, Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa presented scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness and benefits of compassion training. He posed a challenging question: despite the rising popularity of these programs, why was there so little visible change in the world? Compassion, he observed, was not effectively scaling up. He emphasized that to achieve real systemic change, we must look beyond our own circles and seek expertise from those who understand complex systems.
Applying Epidemiology to Compassion Science
In global health, addressing complex challenges involves scaling up programs through an understanding of intricate systems. Guided by the science of epidemiology, researchers study how and why diseases are distributed, questioning why they cluster in specific populations or regions. This same methodological rigour, when applied to compassion, could provide the insights necessary to nurture it on a societal scale. While psychology and neuroscience have focused on individual capacities, the strength of epidemiology lies in analyzing institutional and population-level patterns.
Integrating epidemiology into compassion research initially faced significant hurdles. Epidemiologists often perceived compassion as a concept too abstract to quantify, while scholars warned that measuring such a human emotion might compromise its authenticity. To bridge this divide, interdisciplinary collaboration was essential. The Task Force for Global Health initiated exploratory discussions, culminating in a special issue of the International Journal of Wellbeing in March 2026, titled 'Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion,' which invited scholars from various fields to contribute their insights.
Navigating Fundamental Questions
Applying epidemiological principles to compassion requires confronting several foundational issues. There is ongoing debate over whether compassion is strictly an individual human trait or if organizations and communities can also possess the capacity for it. While individual intent is central, it is clear that organizations differ significantly in how they acknowledge and respond to suffering. Understanding these variances could provide a roadmap for cultivating more compassionate institutional cultures.
Measurement remains the most critical challenge. A study by psychologist Cassandra Vieten and her team identified over 500 different measures of empathy and compassion, highlighting a lack of scientific consensus. While lab-based measures of brain activity are useful, they are often impractical for large-scale population studies. Some researchers, such as Brendan Ozawa-de Silva and Jennifer Mascaro, suggest that institutional policies and actions can serve as proxies for compassion, though this remains a point of contention for those who define compassion solely through individual intent and warm-heartedness.
Gaining Momentum and Future Directions
The concept is rapidly gaining traction, with recent scholarship featuring dozens of experts from diverse disciplines. New conceptual frameworks are emerging that describe how compassion flows between individual, collective, and societal levels. Experts like Ace Simpson, Monica Worline, and Jane Dutton have identified specific organizational processes—such as compassionate leadership and communication networks—that facilitate the alleviation of suffering within workplaces.
Looking ahead, the field must broaden the conversation by incorporating perspectives from Indigenous communities, sociologists, evolutionary anthropologists, and spiritual leaders. The tools of infectious disease modeling and social epidemiology offer promising avenues for understanding how compassion spreads through populations. Researchers are also calling for an integrated 'positive epidemiology,' applying the rigour of health sciences to human flourishing. As the world becomes increasingly polarized, leveraging the systems perspective of epidemiology to study compassion could prove vital in building more resilient and caring institutions, helping to answer Thupten Jinpa’s call to finally scale up compassion.
