The Quiet Thread Linking How We Treat Ourselves to How We Treat Everyone Else

There is an old intuition, common to a lot of moral traditions, that the way we treat ourselves and the way we treat others are somehow of a piece — that a person who is harsh and unforgiving inside will carry some of that hardness outward. It is a nice idea, and like a lot of nice ideas it has mostly floated free of evidence. A recent study tries to give it some empirical bones, mapping how self-compassion links up with attitudes toward other people, and pinpointing the piece in the middle that seems to do the connecting.

The trait at one end is self-compassion: the habit of meeting your own failures and rough patches with a bit of warmth rather than a lash. At the other end is something social psychologists call social dominance orientation, a measure of how much a person prefers a world sorted into higher and lower groups, with some dominating others. Between them sits empathy. The researchers, Michael Juberg at the University of Auckland and Polina Beloborodova, wanted to know not just whether these things correlate, but how they are wired together [1]. Their analysis was published in the journal Mindfulness in 2025 [2].

The study drew on a sizable pool of undergraduates — an initial group of 1,034, narrowed to 979 in the final analysis — surveyed across two waves, in 2019 and again in 2020 [1]. That timing turned out to matter, and I will come back to it. To make sense of how the traits relate, the team leaned on a method called psychological network analysis. Instead of picturing a single tidy arrow from cause to effect, network analysis treats a set of traits as a web of interconnected nodes and asks which connections are strongest and which sit at the center holding everything together. It is well suited to a question like this one, where the honest answer is probably that everything is tangled up with everything else.

Within that web, two findings stood out. The first is that social dominance orientation had its strongest negative tie to empathy [1]. The preference for hierarchy, in other words, sat farthest from the capacity to feel with other people; the two pulled against each other more than almost any other pairing in the network. The second is a subtler point about what kind of empathy carries the weight. Empathy is not one thing. Psychologists often split it into perspective-taking, the cognitive act of imagining another's point of view, and empathic concern, the warmer, more emotional pull of caring about someone's welfare. It was empathic concern, the feeling rather than the reasoning, that showed the stronger link to egalitarian attitudes [1]. Understanding where someone else is coming from mattered less than actually being moved on their behalf.

Put those pieces together and a plausible thread emerges. Self-compassion and warmth toward others seem to belong to the same neighborhood of the mind, and empathy — especially the caring, affective kind — is the connective tissue between them. The people who extend themselves some grace also tend to be the people who feel for others, and feeling for others is what sits opposite the wish to see some groups rise above the rest. It gives the old intuition a shape: not "self-kindness causes fairness," but self-kindness, empathy, and egalitarian attitudes forming one cluster that hangs together.

Now to that timing detail, because it is a quiet strength of the study. The two survey waves straddled the arrival of a global disruption that upended daily life between them. That gave the researchers an accidental stress test. If the network linking these traits were fragile, you might expect an event of that scale to scramble it. It did not. The structure connecting self-compassion, empathy, and social attitudes stayed essentially stable across the pre-disruption and later samples [1]. Whatever binds these traits together appears to be reasonably deep-rooted rather than a mood that shifts with the headlines.

The limitations, as always, set the boundaries of what we can claim. This is correlational work, and network analysis, for all its sophistication, does not turn correlation into causation. It can show that these traits cluster and which links are strongest, but it cannot tell us that cultivating self-compassion would soften someone's views about other groups, or vice versa. The direction of influence — or whether the traits simply grow from some shared root — remains open. The sample was also made up of university students, a group that is younger, more educated, and often more socially liberal than the population at large, so the specific pattern may look different in a broader or older cross-section. And all of it rests on self-report, with the usual caveat that people describe their inner lives with a mix of insight and flattery.

What survives those caveats is a suggestive map. The compassion we can muster for ourselves does not seem to sit in a sealed compartment; it appears to run along the same wiring as our warmth for strangers. That wiring, and the emotions that travel it, shapes how we act in the wider world — a theme that also surfaces in research on how a flash of anger changes what we amplify to others. For more on emotions and social behavior, browse more psychology coverage.

Sources

1. Juberg, M., & Beloborodova, P. (2025). Empathy as the Critical Link Between Self-Compassion and Social Dominance Orientation. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-025-02651-3
2. Mindfulness, Springer. https://link.springer.com/journal/12671

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.