The Egoism of Empathy

George Orwell’s Down and Out In Paris and London is an astonishing work of empathetic research. The Eaton educated writer spent months slumming, donning dirty clothes and hanging around these great metropolises to learn about the the lives of other people.

Another early proponent of the participatory observation method was Tom Harrison. There is a classic David Attenborough 2007 documentary on the “Barefoot Anthropologist” whose methodological inclinations came intuitively. A perennial outsider who lived at the liminal edges between the epic and the emic, he did not even study anthropology at Oxford. Nevertheless, he founded the UK based massive ethnographic program called Mass Observation.

These are but a few of the great practitioners of empathetic research — people who have provoked transformations in how we think and behave as a result.

But let’s get real. In today’s business context, this kind of research is too slow and too costly.

We live in the world of agile design, lean startups and design sprints, where there is little room for immersive participatory observation or even participatory design. Discovery is often limited to days. I once complained to a project director that a discovery period was too short for the need. His response — “…we don’t think, we do. We are a maker culture.” As if fast failure was a more efficient means of gaining insight than starting with a basic understanding of the issues at hand. It is a form of supreme egotism — the assumption that the designer and the user are fundamentally the same. It is a failure of the imagination really.

Such instantiations are an extreme form of dogma to be sure. Most folks in the design space would not advocate such a position.

But designers do rely on forms of empathy cliff notes. MVPs are driven by MVE, “minimal viable empathy,” to drive a fruitful ideation phase.

Designers get in a room, with white boards and post-its, armed with empathy maps and customer journeys. They draw relationship maps and experience maps. And they are off to the races. Often this process works just fine because the designers are really designing for themselves. For people like themselves.

But there are times when the app is not built for a Bay Area tech worker. They may be designing for a child. A geriatric community. Someone who is low income.

Well intended, they try to engage in cognitive or mental modeling. Individuals in the group meditate on what it must be like to be another person, to live another life. They walk through the customer journey modeling the behaviors and preferences of another person.

Sounds perfectly reasonable. But what are the results?

Surprisingly bad. Worse than you could ever imagine, in fact.

All this well-intended effort and the designers would have been better off not trying to be empathetic at all. According to new research conducted by Johannes Hattula and team (Hattula, J.D, et al. forthcoming. Managerial Empathy Facilitates Egocentric Predictions of Consumer Preferences. Journal of Marketing Research), these mental models only cause designers to be more egocentric — injecting their own preferences for those of other users, while creating the illusion that they are being empathetic. “Empathy ironically is found to accelerate self-reflecting in managerial predictions of consumer preferences,” writes Hattula.

In essence, our attempt to displace our own experiences and preferences, and temporarily adopt those of another, are unsuccessful. Why?

Hattula and team argue that when a manager tries to activate a consumer’s mental processes, such as their decision-making map, they activate their own user/consumer identities. Because managers, and by extension designers, have distinct lives as employees and as users, it feels quite different from their role as managers and designers. But they have not really adopted the perspective of the other. Rather they have transplanted their own consumer models onto the other consumer/user, and perceive it as being distinct from themselves. They construe their own preferences and models and being those of the user they are trying to empathize with.

It reminds me of the blind spot bias. That is, the bias that you are not effected by cognitive bias. An overconfidence in one’s objectivity? In one’s own subjectivity really. The research also ironically found that those marketers who did not try to empathize and looked at the cold marketing data actually were making choices that were more reflective of their users and not their own preferences.

The overconfidence is quite debilitating — the confidence that you have truly empathized with the user also lead managers to ignore other data — such as market research on the user.

What a mess. But not really surprising.

It is hard to know the other. The optimistic assumption that we are all human and thus share fundamentally the same world view, beliefs, and values, is in an odd way very embracing of humanity, even as it dismisses and discount the very possibility that your reality is not everyone else’s reality. But people are not all the same. Cultures are not the same. And history is replete with the tragedies that follow from the assumption. This is why anthropologists spend significant time in the field. This is why context and the inter-relationship of elements in a culture are essential to the understanding of both the whole and the specific.

Human factors and ergonomics end at the pan-human experience whereas usability and design begin at the boundaries of culture and personality. At least that is they way I have always thought about these domains.

Again and again, the data points us to the means of gaining insight with external validity — to methods that look at documentation and artifacts of actual behaviors and allow these to trump proxies whenever possible. Unfortunately, these take some investment in time and resources. Even rapid ethnography can take several weeks. See for instance, the examples provided by Ellen Isaacs: (http://www.izix.com/pubs/Isaacs-RapidEthnography-2013.pdf)

Everyone wants optimal efficiency, but when you set aside the techniques that work for one’s that are based on chance, you have entered into the world of theatre. With so much at stake, the community continues to innovate to find techniques and technologies that enable us to find those counter-intuitive insights that drive competitive advantage and design direction — but the process is not a magical one.