This session is offered by San Diego State University, participating with Northridge in a Professional & Personal Development Cross Campus Collaboration program.

Colleagues attending this session may hail from the Chancellor’s Office, Bakersfield, Channel Islands, Chico, East Bay, Fresno, Fullerton, Humboldt, Long Beach, Monterey Bay,  Pomona, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Marcos, Sonoma, and Stanislaus.

Empathy is often described as being able to understand another’s perspective, to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’. This may seem unrelated to the analytical logic of economics, but in this workshop, Dr. Jennifer Imazeki, AVP for Faculty and Staff Diversity and Senate Distinguished Professor of Economics, will discuss how cost-benefit analysis, a fundamental building block of economics, can help us build empathy. Participants will have an opportunity to step back and consider the assumptions we may be making, often unconsciously, about others, and how those assumptions might manifest in our interactions, policies and practices. We will then discuss how cost-benefit can be used to disrupt that bias, to get in between our immediate internal responses and our external behaviors and provide an alternative to the automatic reactions we may otherwise have when our biases take over.