Getting out to see the world doesn’t just let us see and experience new and diverse places but also has a positive effect on our social empathy.
Mark Twain, novelist: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts”
One of the greatest American authors, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, traveled extensively. His journeys gave him insight into the power that venturing out into world can have on changing us for the better.
After his “Great Pleasure Excursion” in 1867, he wrote the novel ‘The Innocents Abroad’, in which he said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Mark Twain had it right on the benefits of traveling
His view has been backed by scientific studies which show that the more you travel, but not necessarily the amount of time that you spend in any one place, “increases generalized trust,” Jiyin Cao of Northwestern University told PsyPost.
“In other words, the more countries one travels, the more trusting one is,” she added. “Breadth is important here, because breadth provides a great level of diversity in people’s foreign travel experiences, allowing them to reach such a generalized assumption.”
Furthermore, in one of the experiments that Cao and her colleagues performed, they found that those who visited places that were less similar than their homeland developed a stronger feeling of trust than those that only visited places more similar to their homeland.
Elizabeth Segal explained in Psychology Today that “being open to learning from others, especially strangers who have different lived experiences from our own, is one of the key components of social empathy.”
“Building our empathic abilities is best done through experiences that help us to see the world through the eyes of others,” she added. “We benefit when we can take the perspective of others who are different from us, whether that be in ethnicity, race, class, culture, or other ways that people claim their identities.”
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