Compassion Is a Type of Empathy
newsletter #42 | 08-June-2019
Don’t let go of empathy. There is a trend in our field to walk away from empathy and instead use less painful concepts like compassion or mindfulness. Don Norman, author and pioneer in the usability field, wrote an article, Why I Don’t Believe in Empathic Design. Paul Bloom, professor at Yale university, wrote a book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.
Empathy is difficult. It’s a tool for situations where your natural inclination is to take a shortcut. Empathy is that act of connecting with other humans by setting aside your own thoughts & judgments and just listening. It’s about being open to learning, being curious to understand. Teams and orgs don’t do this often enough, instead relying on what they read or relying on one person’s point of view. Or, worse, they are relying on assumptions. This opens the doors wide to cognitive bias, leading to strategic decisions that lead the org down the same path they have already noticed is not as fantastic as they had hoped.
I have been seeing compassion held up as a better, more noble object than empathy. “It’s the act that matters.” The primary argument is that empathy is emotional contagion; empathy is only “feeling the emotions the other person is feeling.” It’s unsustainable. This is a narrow definition of empathy. (See the paper linked at the top.) They’re not wrong that it’s unsustainable. It gives rise to mental exhaustion and negative health affects. But emotional contagion is only one form of empathy.
I recently had a series of discussions with psychology and empathy experts, asking their help to understand how compassion relates to empathy. I know that empathy is an act of connecting and listening, so I wanted to hear what these experts from other fields thought. They said compassion is a type of empathy that offers connection and support for the heavier, more negative emotions. Empathy offers connection for all emotions and all thinking. They said that empathy always includes understanding a person’s emotion, but also their thoughts.
An example of empathic listening when the emotion is positive: I encountered a neighbor on the street and we stopped to chat. He is a recently retired accountant, and we had one of those “nice weather, have a good day” kind of surface conversations. Just as I was about to move along, he told me, “I did a painting yesterday.” A painting! He went on to tell me how it was the first painting he’d painted since retirement, and how relaxing it felt. His words were filled with happiness. He was sharing this emotion, wanting to connect to celebrate it. What kind of painting was it? A village on the sea shore, with hills in the background. He told me where he got the idea and how he drew the lines of it, and then went on to tell me how he loves tall ships, those lines, and how he loves figuring out how to paint the sky. His whole family has affinity for painting. He was very happy to be back at it again. When we parted, on the street, he was feeling the joy of reconnecting with the act of painting, and I was feeling the pleasure of being the canvas upon which he swirled his description of this joy.
Empathy offers connection for all emotions and all thinking. Compassion played no part in that particular exchange with my neighbor on the street simply because it was about hearing and supporting a positive emotion, not pain and suffering. But if I encounter someone experiencing a negative emotion, like loss or distrust, I can be the canvas upon which they can paint their words. Compassion is a type of empathy. Humans need canvases like this to feel heard, to unburden, to feel part of, to get justice, to be respected, etc. If we tell people in the tech and business worlds that the only kind of canvas that’s powerful is one that collects and acts upon the negative scenarios, then we are limiting ourselves.
I am confused why this dislike of empathy and misunderstanding keeps cropping up. I ran across an essay by a meditation teacher where compassion is introduced as a good practice to follow, and it’s defined exactly the same way Dr. Brené Brown defines empathy. Both definitions focus on supporting a person who is experiencing pain and suffering by listening. Empathy is supporting a person by listening, no matter what the emotion or context is. Compassion is, too. Compassion might also include the idea of acting beyond just listening, but it starts with listening.
Definitions of empathy are legion, and that’s fine. It’s a powerful tool with many applications. If you click on the title of this essay, you can see one chapter in a book of collected papers in 2011. This chapter, by Dan Batson, attempts to curate all the ways neuroscience and psychology have referred to concepts of empathy. There are more that have developed since. Here are two that I use in my work as I help teams find gaps & weaknesses in your enterprise process, build awareness of cognitive-bias, and discover approaches & thinking styles they missed.
Empathic Listening: (for use when you are with someone)
1. recognize a person is having an emotion
2. recognize their perspective is their truth
3. communicate your recognition (offer your ears)
4. stay out of judgement as you listen
In your work: listening sessions, unstructured interviews, stakeholder interviews, team meetings, collaborative workshops, helping direct reports grow their careers, working one-on-one with peers, etc.
Cognitive Empathy: (develops over time, as you get to know people)
Use empathic listening to gather an understanding of a person’s inner landscape:
thinking, inner voice, reasoning, pondering, wondering, decision-making
reactions, motivating emotion, resulting feelings, shifts in mood
guiding principles
In your work: develop cognitive empathy with a range of people trying to achieve the same purpose, cultivate the patterns that develop across different people. You’ll discover some approaches and ways of thinking that aren’t familiar to you. Create a mental model diagram and thinking styles to guide your work, broaden your strategy, and reduce cognitive bias. Develop services and solutions that can adjust for different thinking styles and approaches.
These trends away from empathy represent the industry-wide fear of being late to market. Hurry! Make something small and get it out there. It doesn’t matter that the thing that gets out there represents the team’s shallow understanding of what people are really thinking as they attempt to achieve various purposes. It’s something–we’ll test it and iterate. (That’s if the org wants to support people as opposed to advertisers. And if the org makes good on that promise to iterate.)
Gathering understanding at depth takes too long to fit into fast-spinning cycles of design-test-develop. But deep understanding has a long shelf-live, so you can do it once a year. Or less.
Empathy is the foundation of better support for people, and aids the reduction of cognitive bias. Don’t let go of empathy, or we will lose that power.
Trends toward empathy:
Minter Dial Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business & AI
Edwin Rutsch What is the Relationship Between Empathy and Compassion
Seung Chan Lim Realizing Empathy: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Making
Indi Young Practical Empathy: For Collaboration & Creativity in Your Work
