Cognitive empathy in intercultural post-conflict interactions: The pedagogical case of aikido

De Baets, Greet
(2025) ABC Regional Conference for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East - Building Bridges between Business Communication and Management — Location: Bergen, Norway (4.June.2025)

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Empathy, a critical element of intercultural competence, poses formidable challenges in professional post-conflict interactions, such as future scenarios involving Ukrainians and Russians or Israelis and Palestinians in a peaceful post-war society. In such contexts, affective empathy – sharing and feeling the emotions of the other – may not be immediately achievable. Instead, cognitive empathy, which includes perspective-taking, self-other differentiation, and objectivity, becomes crucial for constructive interactions. This cognitive empathy parallels the other-relative view of aikido interaction, which aims to see situations and oneself through the eyes of the other and acknowledge power imbalances. This presentation explores aikido as an effective method for developing empathy as a transferable skill for leaders and their businesses or organizations (Schumann et al., 2014). The study analyzes aikido as an embodied pedagogy in intercultural business communication training, drawing from a mixed-methods study with 73 participants (employees, employers, and entrepreneurs) from the Netherlands and Belgium. This study is grounded in an aikido-inspired interaction model (De Baets & Van Praet, 2024), where connection is central. In aikido, connection embodies the concept of viewing situations from the perspective of others. This is achieved through physical closeness and unified movement with one’s opponent. The connecting aikido movements transform opponents into partners. The importance of connection in aikido interaction, which is essentially a martial challenge, highlights its corresponding importance in challenging intercultural interactions. Building such connections in intercultural interaction fosters cognitive empathy at least and involves the cognitive skills that aikido practitioners use in performing other-relative view behavior. Cognitive empathy in intercultural post-conflict interactions lays the groundwork for deeper emotional connections over time. Through a biobehavioral process of co-regulation, cognitive empathy can gradually evolve into affective empathy. In post-conflict situations, the other-relative view learned with and from aikido offers a pathway towards stages of empathy and reconciliation, supporting mutual recognition and cooperation. References De Baets, G. A., & Van Praet, E. (2024). Aikido’s self-regulation and co-regulation: A promising embodied pedagogy for intercultural communication training. Sport in Society, 27(7), 1094–1117. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2023.2286018 <br> Schumann, K., Zaki, J., & Dweck, C. S. (2014). Addressing the empathy deficit: Beliefs about the malleability of empathy predict effortful responses when empathy is challenging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(3), 475–493. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036738
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  • Institution iconUCLouvainSSH/IRIS-L/ENGA - Engage - Research Center for Publicness in Contemporary Communication

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De Baets, G. (2025). Cognitive empathy in intercultural post-conflict interactions: The pedagogical case of aikido. ABC Regional Conference for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East - Building Bridges between Business Communication and Management, Bergen, Norway.