 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ALUXUM, GETTY IMAGES | |
| By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
The idea that travel makes you a more open-minded person is rooted more in well-meaning fiction than in fact. One of the most frequently quoted justifications for seeing the world is a snippet from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: “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 can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
But if travel truly were fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, wouldn’t more of the 1.4 billion annual international tourists (pre-pandemic) have made the world kinder and less biased by now? (Pictured above: Tourists buying fruit juice in Siem Reap, Cambodia.)
We asked reporter Ruth Terry to look into the science behind the empathy that travel is said to encourage. “The coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the global Black Lives Matter protests have forced an uncomfortable reckoning—that all the travel in the world might not be enough to engender the deep cross-cultural awareness people need now,” Terry writes. “While experts conclude that travel may not inspire enough empathy to turn tourists into social justice activists, the alternative—not traveling at all—may actually be worse.”
With pandemic restrictions still in place, missed opportunities to travel will have social, as well as economic, impacts. “Because travel produces encounters between strangers, it is likely to prompt empathetic-type imaginings, which simply wouldn’t be there without the proximity created by travel,” says Hazel Tucker in a 2016 study on empathy and travel.
Whether seeing the world actually opens travelers’ minds and makes them more empathetic is an unsettled question, but Anu Taranath, a racial equity professor at the University of Washington Seattle and a second-generation immigrant, says that travel is a step in the right direction. “It’s an invitation to think more carefully about our good intentions and where they really need to be challenged,” she explains. Her book Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World is a super starting point.
The good news, according to some researchers, is that empathy can be learned. “If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical,” writes Harvard’s Helen Riess in a 2017 study. I’m hoping we can get back to travel and to learning from the world—soon!
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