Finance and business analytics Associate Professor Jorge Colazo, Ph.D. and colleagues have been taking Trinity University students to Japan every summer for the past eight years for an immersive cultural experience for college credit. But last year the team decided to harness the Japan Program for a particular piece of research.
“We’re always thinking about how our different experiences can make the program better,” Colazo says. “And also, how can we actually synergize the teaching and experiential learning that the students do in Japan with our own research.”
For the 2025 experience, Colazo and his co-leaders, Katsuo A. Nishikawa Chavez, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, and Makiko Fukuda, Ph.D., assistant dean for faculty success and modern languages and literatures professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, decided to study whether a humanities-based study abroad program developed empathy in the business students they took. Their novel findings were recently published in the Journal of International Education in Business.
It’s well established, Colazo says, that having empathy is a predictor of higher business performance, it produces better leaders, and inspires students to go on to graduate school. But his is the first research team to measure empathy outcomes in short-term study abroad trips.
They were able to prove that empathy is a construct that you can actually work on and it may not take as much time to develop as we once thought. A six-week study abroad program can actually move the needle.
In advance of the trip, the faculty started thinking about amping up the types of tours that could align with empathy development? “So for instance, the Hiroshima Museum of Peace–that’s obviously a really good experience because they get to talk to and listen to a survivor of the atomic bomb. The emotional response from that kind of experience is very strong.”
A visit to a Korean town in Osaka also served as an empathy growth opportunity. Students got to see the plight of immigrants in Japan. “They see we have immigration issues, not only in the U.S., but also in some other places.” Many Trinity students are second-generation immigrants themselves, he added, so that experience resonates with their own family histories.
The business students were surveyed both before and after the trip to see whether their empathy had changed. Questions included topics like whether others’ emotions motivated their mood, if they enjoyed debate because it helped them consider different perspectives, and how often friends trusted them with intimate details about themselves. The students in the study showed significant increases in the empathetic categories of cognitive ability, affective ability, affective drive, and affective reactivity. The next research question Colazo and his team are thinking of delving into is whether those empathy results stick and for how long after the program.
Colazo said doing this type of research and getting it published was possible mainly because of the type of university Trinity is–one that cares about digging below the surface of the subject matter. For example, Colazo teaches the hard sciences side of business; things like machine learning and forecasting. “But at Trinity, we also are big believers in complementing that learning with soft skills, and one of the soft skills that has been proven to offer success in business is actually empathy. We thought: what better place than Trinity to test that proposition?”