Fear of Empathy
newsletter #27 | 15-Aug-2017
When I wrote my book Practical Empathy, I chose my vocabulary carefully. I was thinking of the many clients who got distracted by the words “feelings” and “emotion,” who got great laughs by turning a listening session into a Hollywood psychoanalysis session. “How does that make you feel?” (They were pretending to ask this of their customers, who were engineers trying to solve systems problems.) I wanted to be careful not to distract my readers with their own reactions. I emphasized cognitive empathy so readers could calmly explore what I was proposing. I tried to help readers become aware that the “science” and “data-driven” proof organization reference as proof for a design decisions isn’t the same as scientific rigor in biology or physics — and that the hypotheses organizations craft spring from a narrow understanding of the problem space. But my careful vocabulary has failed in a couple of respects.
First, not enough people have read, adopted, and spread the vocabulary. Yet. People still work off of the dictionary definition of empathy. They still believe that empathy is narrowly defined as emotional contagion, “bathing in the emotions of someone else,” toward the goal of sparking sympathy or compassion. Paul Bloom and Donald Norman are two of these to write about it, and recently so many other writers have adopted that narrow “emotional contagion” definition. These authors use “compassion” to talk about what is good about empathy, but they are mis-defining it. Compassion is actually a form of empathy.
(See also links to Empathy Critics and Supporters in newsletters #20 and #21 and my interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge in newsletter #22.)
Second, there is a lot of reluctance in our culture, especially in the technology and business world, to admit that meritocracy is only a theory, not a reality. The reality is that people pre-judge each other based on outward signals, without being aware of it. Gender, ethnicity, age … how a person dresses. Hundreds of people write about the struggle for and science of diversity, but we are up against fear of “the other.” It takes consciousness and effort to embrace other humans as assets and collaborators. Hundreds of people have this awareness and make this effort; progress takes time.
Third, I might not have emphasized the different uses of different types of empathy clearly enough. Emotional contagion is useful in telling stories, like the beginning of the Pixar movie Up or the end of The Little Prince. (Emotional contagion is also for manipulation, but that is not an area I am interested in.) Empathic listening is useful for building rapport with someone, making them feel understood. Empathic listening is for supporting people through an emotional experience. Usually this happens in real time, when you are interacting with a person. Developing rapport and building trust is a requirement if you want a person to tell you their inner reasoning and guiding principles. Cognitive empathy is building an understanding of a person’s inner reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles. It’s going deeper than the bubble of opinion, preference, and statements that a person puts out about themselves. There are other kinds of empathy, also, like personal distress, mirrored empathy, empathic concern, and self empathy that have their uses, too. Empathic listening and cognitive empathy together are the two that I use the most in my work.
In the coming decade, I anticipate seeing more writing and speaking about the variety of different kinds of empathy and their different uses. I anticipate people becoming more informed about empathy, and, I expect, there will be fewer rants “against empathy.” The human mind, no matter the background or experience, is an incredible thing. We can use its power to help recognize and unlearn the “fear of the other.”
