The principles of proximity: How to think about empathy as a method.
Method (noun)
- A particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one;
- The quality of being well organised and systematic in thought or action.
Empathy is the ability to see the world through a perspective other than your own. It means not only to understand why people act the way they do, but to question our way of thinking, feeling, and doing things.
We can achieve a state of empathy by comprehending the context in which other people live without prejudice or previous judgment. In order to do that we have to forget about ourselves for a moment and try to live like somebody else.
However, once you get there doesn’t mean you’re some kind of saint or deity. There will be always something or someone we can’t really understand and we’ll have to begin all over again and try to grasp that foreign reality.
In the research business, that’s a given. The one thing we really know is that each and every single new project is going to make us have to learn all over again how to do research. That’s why method is so important.
Method is what ensures validity to insight. Is what distinguishes opinion from fact. Informational noise from data. Information from knowledge. It is different from methodology. Methodology is method in action: the toolkit we have at hand when we need to gather specific kinds of information.
Method is all about reflecting about the ways we can achieve an understanding of the world around us. That implies that we have theories about what the world is and what would be the best way to get closer to that reality. That relates to two fundamental philosophical concepts: Ontology and Epistemology.
When somebody says that they have a method of doing things, what they are really saying that they have developed a particular procedure of doing things based on the specific concrete reality being studied. [I know, I know, this can be tricky. Let’s not begin with those fundamental questions about what reality really is, okay?]
There are many ways of knowing the world. When we are talking about understanding how cultures and societies come to be, we are talking about a relational perspective on human phenomena.
That’s because culture and society don’t exist in a vacuum. Concepts, manners, and morals are the product of social relations.
Many people in research nowadays consider empathy a deliverable.
Something the client take with them by the end of a research project. Something that can be put into words in some report or presentation. Something that can be translated into business insights.
Saying that a qualitative research approach delivers empathy couldn’t be farther from the reality of doing research. It’s naive to think you can make every single one member of a team think just like their consumers or their target audience by presenting them with compelling field images, videos or transcripts.
It’s impossible to deliver empathy. You can make it part of your method, though. In that way, empathy serves as a means to produce knowledge.
As Ethnographers, empathy is just one aspect of doing research. Still, we can consider Empathy a fundamental element of the Relational Episteme upon which Ethnography is based.
Let’s take a few steps back.
I spoke earlier about ways of knowing the world, a reflection that lies at the heart of Modern Philosophy. The history of Western thought attributes to René Descartes the creation of the cornerstone of the scientific method: Positivism.
Positivism poses that the best way to solve intellectual problems should be to divide it into smaller pieces, ‘as many parts as possible’, and that we should only accept as truth — that is, concrete reality — elements that we can perceive ‘very clearly and distinctively’ when separated from other things. Each solved problem becomes the blueprint to solve those yet to come.
That is the principle of division that gave body to what we call Reason.
Underlining positivism there is an attempt to produce universal theories about the world that can be applied regardless of context. Unfortunately, adopting a positivist perspective is not an effective way to study human phenomena.
The reason why is that what makes us human is our ability to symbolise experience and knowledge across time and space and to interact with others using increasingly complex and abstract forms of symbolisation. Symbols are socially constructed, therefore always subject to context and to a continuous process of creative invention.
To understand humanity in its most abstract form we need to expose ourselves to human complexity, not cut it into distinguishable little pieces because it all makes sense as a whole.
We can only grasp meaning if we connect the dots.
The only way to do that is by getting closer to what we want to know better.
Empathy enables us to see connections and subtle nuances of social interaction. That’s why it is so valuable for social researchers. It opens up a completely different world of possibilities.
To apply empathy as a method is not that hard. We can follow some basic principles to get it started.
Let’s call that the principles of proximity. You can apply these principles not only when doing research but in the most different areas of your life.
First principle: When faced with something you don’t know anything about, get closer to it.
Second principle: Put yourself to the test. Do something you have never done before.
Third principle: While doing something you have never done before, try not to judge.
Fourth principle: Create a diary of that experience. Maybe a Word document or a spreadsheet on Google Drive. Doesn’t matter. Write it down. Write about your experience until reflecting on the immediate reality in front of you and living in the present becomes a habit.
Fifth principle: Think about how you can make connections between what you have experienced and other things in your life.
Sixth principle: Reflect on how that different reality changed you and apply that knowledge in your daily life.
