Thoughts after reading: Empahty — why it matters, and how to get it
Empathy — Why it matters, and how to get it — by Roman Krznaric
Empathy becomes a buzz word these days as it comes up more and more often in our lives, especially for designers.
What is empathy?
I am not going to list a lot of history anecdotes about the origin of empathy and the history of how it evolves. Here, I am going to give my definition after finishing reading the book:
“Empathy is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and feel what they feel and think what they think; meanwhile those experience will guide your behavior to help those people.”
It has to include all of these elements, or it won’t be empathy. Only feel what they feel will make you have sympathy, which might lead to no behavior change; Only think how they think but not helping them might lead you to be a sociopath (since you know exactly how they think, you can easily manipulate people).
Why does empathy matter?
Empathy comes with our gene. We can more or less empathize with other people. It is a like a muscle that can be trained and exercised. When we empathize with other people, we build connection and mutual respect. We can better understand other people’s viewpoint and avoid a lot of conflicts due to miscommunication or no communication. And we can think more of other people’s problems rather than only our problems. And we can realize that we are only part of the society and there are many people out there suffering from different kinds of troubles. We can become less anxious and less aggressive in pursuing our personal goals, which some of them are not that important compared to other people’s goals.
Can I get more empathy, please?
As I mentioned before, empathy comes with our gene. And some people are born with more and some are born with less. However, we can train ourselves to be more empathetic.
There are examples in the book talk about how some people never had some kind of empathy towards certain people. But they can be triggered to grow their empathy, such as the main character in Schindler’s list. He never thought of Jew should be treated fairly until he got to know his Jew accountant on a personal level. Once he understood that his Jew account also had a family and had to deal with the same types of problems and issues as he did, he changed his mindset and started protecting the Jew factory workers from the Nazi.
Some ways to gain more empathy is by really understanding people through living with them, talking to them, etc. The richer the ways to interact with them, the deeper you can emphasize with their lives. So when you travel, instead of taking many pictures of the beautifully built plazas, talk to the locals to understand what they think and how is their daily lives. Books and movies are possible convenient ways to gain more empathy toward certain people. But how much you will gain is largely depending on how much an author wants you to empathize with the characters And you are emphasizing on the characters written, not the real people.
What to be aware of?
After reading the book, I have one question stuck in mind and couldn’t get an easy answer.
“What will happen if we empathize with all people? And should we?”
When we empathize with a person, we feel what they feel and we know how they think. And we want to do something to help them to be better with their live problem. But one person’s solution might be the other person’s problem. Sometimes there will be a conflict of interest. So it seems that it doesn’t make sense to empathize with all people knowing it is not going to work.
Secondly, empathizing with people is tiring. It consumes lots of your energy, especially when you want to do some good to people. In the end, it will be good to have someone empathize with you as well. So you can have a mutual support. So, should we form empathy groups where we can make sure that no one is going to just provide empathy to other people while s/he is starved from other people’s empathy?
What does this all mean to a designer?
Design is different than art. Design is to serve while art is about self-expression. But who do we serve? I used to think that we serve the business owners since they are the ones paying the money. Now I think I was wrong.
I think we are serving the users now. But of course, it is the business owner knows that even though they offer the compensation, the goal for hiring user experience designers (and people for all user experience roles) is to let us serve the users. So we will be producing products/service that user will like to use and pay for. So we need to empathize with our users — to understand how they think and what they feel. Then we can better design product/service for them and rationalize design decisions when there is an argument.
As a designer, it is very important that we know our users on a personal level. It is very important that we know their working environment. It is very important we know their working dynamic with other members of the team, in the company. By knowing these and others, we can start to empathize with our users.
To end with
Let’s focus what we want to achieve and use that to guide us on who should we empathize with. If you are a teacher, empathize with your students; if you are a mom, empathize with your children, if you are a pet-owner, empathize with your animal friends. And I think you have noticed that we can take more than one role in our lives. So we can have many goals to achieve. Just remember to focus on the ones that matter to you.
