What Empathy Really Means
We All Drink Kool Aid, Just different flavors
Being a practicing Christian, I often hear “did you know?” statements from people who don’t believe in the same values I do.
“Did you know that Jesus might’ve not been white?”
“Did you know that the LDS Church just owns a bunch of businesses? It’s a scam!”
Yes, I know all those things. I just don’t really care. But this post isn’t to refute anybody. or defend my beliefs. I just want to share my thoughts on agendas.
An agenda is the underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group. Essentially the “why?” behind action.
In a recent Vox article titled, “Silicon Valley has a problem with conservatives. But not the political kind.” by Caroline McCarthy, McCarthy talks about the toxic culture toward conservative employees at some of the worlds top tech firms, and how highly intelligent people are mocked and harassed if they are religious.
For top performers who happen to be conservative Christians, they keep their beliefs to themselves because they are afraid that if their coworkers found out, they would have to explain themselves to be seen as “rational”.
“At Google, few co-workers would blink an eye if you told them that you spent the previous weekend attending an electronic music festival in an otter costume, but you might get some funny looks if you admitted you went to church every weekend. “
I admit that I sometimes feel like I’m not treated as a rational person for my religious convictions, but I consider myself luckily when I worked at the my college school newspaper, which doesn’t have many practicing Christians. I was pleased to feel that even though my coworkers didn’t agree with my views, they still respected me professionally and avoided getting into debates on the subject. I love working with those guys, and they represent a vast section of the workforce who display empathy to others.
Unfortunately, for many other people that isn’t always the case.
Let’s not just stick on religion. The Cold War and the communist witch hunts that ensued led to shadow operations where CIA operatives incited revolutions in unstable nations in the name of democracy.
Atrocities where performed on both sides, and people where defined by if they believed in capitalism or if they believed in a communal society. Wars where fabricated to retain “freedom”, which led to the purposeless Vietnam War.
Humans just suck sometimes… actually most the time. Religious pundits will point fingers a Mao’s China, Hitlers Germany, and the Russian Gulags as example of secularism to the extreme. With the ball in their court, the atheists and agnostics will point to the crusades, the inquisition, and current day anti-muslim sentiment, as failures of “religion”.
I say it is a failure of not having enough empathy.
On Chinese Culture
I learned a big lesson on agendas while working for FamilySearch to design an experience where Chinese visitors to the site can learn about their surname and it’s origins.
At FamilySearch, they have a dedicated team for the Chinese side of their products because what Chinese users value *spoiler alert* isn’t what Americans users value. In essence their agenda for doing genealogy is different from a westerner.
You look at the current website, you will see a couple value propositions, like “See our big worldwide Family Tree” and “Discover yourself”.
When I collaborated with the UX Designer in the Chinese team (who is from Taiwan) to create an experience that is culturally relevant to Chinese users, she expressed that to the Chinese user, discovering (one)self isn’t as valued as discovering the whole of their clan. The Chinese people care more about the collective many than the individual, so catering to individual value propositions doesn’t come off as valuable to them.
They also don’t hold the mental model of genealogy as a tree, they model their ancestry with records called Jaipu. Which is structured more by surname and clan than by direct family lineage. So the whole Chinese product changes to represent genealogical information in a Jaipu style view instead of a Family Tree style view.
Low Context and High Context Cultures
If you want to deploy empathy, you need to understand the nuances of someones beliefs. Starting with why isn’t just for building a good business culture, empathy is suspending judgment of the individual to find the root cause of their behavior.
High context cultures are predicated on implicit communication and nonverbal cues. Bowing to royalty and letting the head of the household take a bath first can only be understood by someone who has a good understanding of the context behind the cultural norms.
High context cultures include Asian, African, Arab, central European and Latin American cultures. Formalities are strictly adhered to and relationships depend highly on close ties and trust that is built over long periods of time.
Low-Context Cultures are predicated on direct communication and rational debate. In western European countries, Americans and Australians usually have this dynamic when communicating. Westerners tend to have larger circles of acquaintances and go beyond their trusted circle to accomplish tasks.
Coming from a low context culture, where it encourages us to critically engage with pretty much every facet of life, it is easy to misunderstand the pomp and ceremony of a high context culture like China.
What is seen as a human rights violation to Americans is seen a necessary act for a high context culture. The needs of the many far outweigh the needs of the individual in China. So the metaphysical notion of basic human rights is not universally adopted around the world. It doesn’t “just make sense” to everybody.
Human Rights in the USA might refer to the bill of rights like freedom of speech and the right to fair trial while another country defines human rights as free college education and healthcare. You can’t just label your views as “common sense” because they make sense to you based on your socio-economic upbringing. As you cross borders, (even between states in the USA) cultures change, and it is extremely ineffective to impose a mental model on conflicting mental models just in the name of “social justice”. That’s no better than the CIA trying to nation build during the Reagan revolution.
Words do not mean the same thing to everybody as well. Money to a rich family might mean a tool to amass wealth and influence while to a poor family is seen as a taboo subject and necessary evil to get by. Because of that, rich and poor people spend money differently.
Capitalism might drum up feelings of self reliance and industry to some and to others is seen as the model of exploitation of workers and the corrupt bosses and corporate fat cats.
Christianity could be perceived as a message of hope and redemption while others see it as a tired institution that has no place in the modern world.
The result of this polarization isn’t because one is right or wrong, it is because the mental models are different when perceiving these words. Those perceptions come from life experiences that are different from person to person. One might be jaded by religion because of a bad experience with an “practicing” member of that religion. My mother after the 2008 crisis had a hard time seeing money as something that wasn’t scarce and that influenced my perception of money as a scarce resource for a years.
In a way, we are all sheep.
We all drink the kool aid. Just different flavors.
We all adhere to different ways of life and differing views of the world. Like it or not I’d argue that we all at some point trust in a fearless leader that advocates a certain belief. We are not as independent as we seem.
For the Granolas, they have Noam Chomsky.
The Christians have Christ, Peter, James, The Pope.
Jews have the old testament prophets and rabbis.
Spirituals/agnostic folks have Tony Robbins.
Atheists have Bill Meher.
Communists have Marx.
Islam has Mohammad.
Silicon Valley has Steve Jobs.
Actually one can argue that his death magnified himself to the status of a prophet in the techno-saviorest religion. When you are dead, it is hard to perform quality control on your ideas.
McCarthy put it this way:
At Google, I spent every day in a work environment with a specific cultural uniformity — one with its own rituals and deities that have come to feel decidedly contradictory for a population that so fervently rejects “faith.”
One quick scan through the email from the ayahuasca invitation and a pattern of vocabulary emerges: “Sacred,” “purpose,” “transformation” — with this kind of language, you may as well be in church. Companies profess to be driven not by mere secular profit but by a belief in changing the world; until his death, a speech by Steve Jobs was treated like a sermon.
Yet tech’s avowed rationalism and skepticism has some very obvious contradictions. There are prominent factions in Silicon Valley who would scoff at anyone’s belief that Jesus Christ could really perform miracles but who would have no problem believing a tweet that read, “Just turned water into wine!” if it came from Elon Musk.
Wisdom isn’t a zero sum game.
It is the practical application of knowledge. Of proven principles that are tried and true again and again.
Recently, Grant Cardone talked about why he doesn’t live to party of smoke weed when mentoring a young entrepreneur who was rationalizing why he was smoking weed.
“It (weed) doesn’t help…Me and you go into a deal and you are smoking weed and I am not dude, let me tell you something dude, I’ll kill you, cause I have so much certainty man. You know, you’re driving a car at 70 mph and you smoke some weed, tell me you are not going slower in the next 10 minutes–because you are not certain! I’m still going 80mph! I’ll go 100mph!”
I live a Christian life because I see an ROI with the certainty it gives me. As much as the yogi feels good about life performing yoga and meditating.
It depends on what you value or the results you want in life. Even happiness as a term is relative in philosophic circles. Do you maximize for pleasure or fulfillment? If you maximize for pleasure, religion holds no value to you, because the religious guidelines prescribe not drinking too much and waiting to have sex until after marriage.
If you maximize for fulfillment, hedonistic values hold no value to you. Because partying in your twenties and putting off marriage doesn’t put life in perspective fast enough.
So I guess what I’m saying is depending on what you want in life you have to pick your Kool aid. But don’t tell me that strawberry is better than the green apple flavor, because more than likely, you don’t understand how I view a successful Kool aid session. Maybe green apple makes me confident in my skin, and motivates me to be better. Maybe I think drinking strawberry is thinking too short term. You don’t deploy empathy to change me, you empathize to see how you fit in in my life. That might mean we are not a good fit on a personal level but on professional level we are peers.
How this applies to product design
I’d be weary of working for any organization that is “out to change the world” and believes in putting the “user first” when their leadership has strong opinions about using their products to mold the world in their ideological image.
FamilySearch is a non-profit owned by the LDS Church, it’s purpose is to eventually document the whole human family in one place. Policy and doctrine wise, the LDS Church believes that marriage is only between a man and woman. So you’d think that that belief would influence how the Family Search designs it’s products right?
Not really. with the legalization of Gay marriage and the resulting privileges afforded to gay couples, like adoption, will inevitably lead to a product shift in FamilySearch’s genealogical records. Currently the engineers at FS are working on providing support for gay marriages on the platform. This should be ready by 2019.
Now that is empathy. FamilySearch’s purpose isn’t to impose LDS mental models on the masses, it is to document things as they really are. And they have homosexual users that will eventually be able to record their family history for future generations.
Gerber also did this when they expanded into different markets. They had the assumption that every country would like their product. Turns out not only did countries like Australia, Japan and the Philippines didn’t adopt the Gerber baby food, they also had completely different feeding patterns than American consumers. This led to the development of Gerber’s “lamb stock stew” for Australia, “rice with young sardines” in Japan, and “strained mango for the Philippines. Gerber deployed empathy in this situation.
If you ever have the pleasure to work with a big multi-national company that caterers to differing creeds and ideologies, think about it this way, the purpose of empathy is not to figure out ways to conform people to your product, it is to find out how your product fits in their lives. And it might not fit unless you change the nature of the product for different markets.
