Empathy for Dummies
quarter--mile.com
quarter--mile.com
On many occasions, I have been told to “be more empathetic.”
When I ask why, I typically get this reaction:
This is a ridiculous question. I am not going to answer it because it is so ridiculous.
Empathy is the right thing to do! You should feel bad for that person. We’re humans, after all.
These explanations never really helped.
Even after reading this, I am not sure the author really gets what is behind the request.
My take on it is to remember that the people you are talking to are real people with reasons for doing things. Very few people do things that they think are wrong at the time of doing them.
I would guess that the single most common cause of bad faith arguments comes from people jumping to the conclusion that the person they are dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Reflecting on it some more perhaps you can boil it down to the implications of dealing with real people.
If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
If it turns out your motivation is, in fact, to hurt people then the issue isn't empathy but your own motivations. Reflecting on your motivations and what you feel like you should be doing as a person is the path to take here.
I think this might have to just be axiomatic. At the bottom of every system is an axiom, whether it's identity in mathematics or "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" in USican politics or "empathy is good and to be pursued" in interpersonal relationships.
>If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
I dare say that if your mission is actually to hurt people as much as you can empathy will help you a lot in that goal because it lets you define strategies tailored to hurt the target based on their feelings. Without empathy you're limited to thinking about what would hurt you and then applying it to other people.
Recognizing that when people say one lacks empathy and rejecting what one believes they might mean by that and instead reinterpreting empathy to mean something they want it to mean is fundamentally a demonstration of a lack of empathy in what was likely the original context. Even if new interpretation technically aligns with the dictionary definition.
I want to be clear that recommendations that the post make are helpful and seeing the world as best one can from some others point of view is worthwhile.
At a fundamental level though saying I see your definition of empathy and reject it for my definition which I'll be happy to try to live by, while noble, likely is directly contrary to both parity's use of the term.
Contrast this with the conversation we're having now where I requested clarification on your initial comment, and you thoughtfully provided it.
But to your point, there's an innate "getting it" where your level/expression of empathy is roughly in-line with people you interact with, and if you don't have that, you need to do work to "get it", which is what the author did.
We can compare empathy to other practices that can benefit from innate understanding. Some people "get" poetry, math, music, long-distance running, etc. and we can all work to "get" them, but in my experience, it's never quite the same.
Behaviour modification yes, but that is “stop talking so critically”. Or “don’t be so harsh” or “give this person special treatment”. WHEN to do that might be key here—perhaps the colleague’s husband has cancer, or their child missed school 3 days this week with the flu, or their project wasn’t productionalized/their new to the role/etc—and so a blanket “don’t talk so harshly” isn’t called for—instead what is really desired is social calibration.
But instead it seems everyone is getting caught up on the literal interpretation of this figure of speech instead.
> There is nothing more frustrating or disruptive to any negotiation than to get the feeling you are talking to someone who isn't listening. Playing dumb is a valid negotiating technique, and “I don't understand” is a legitimate response. But ignoring the other party's position only builds up frustration and makes them less likely to do what you want.
> The opposite of that is tactical empathy.
> In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart, and the vocalization of that recognition.” That's an academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to another human being, asking what they are feeling, and making a commitment to understanding their world. Notice I didn't say anything about agreeing with the other person's values and beliefs or giving out hugs. That's sympathy. What I'm talking about is trying to understand a situation from another person's perspective.
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The respondent to the author is ironically showing why empathy is so important. By being non-empathetic and shutting down the question as "stupid", the author is bound to feel the respondent doesn't care to understand their position. If the respondent really cared about having the author understand their position, they would have first shown that they will try to understand the author's, even if they don't agree with it.
Edit; on the other hand:
Over the last couple of years, that kind of empathy has stated coming more easily/naturally to me. On one hand it seems to have unlocked a richer range of relatability, but on the other it also seemed to open the door more to anxiety, self-doubt, and other not so easy emotions that I didn't really feel much of before.
It's a type of feelings which can inspire you to be nice to other people, but it can also actually make you not nice to them. When people make you feel things you don't want to feel.
An example of that is "cringe" - you see someone do something embarrassing, which would at least have embarrassed you if you were in their situation, even if it doesn't embarrass them. And so you feel vicarious embarrassment, embarrassment on their behalf - and you can easily get angry at them for this.
At an extreme, we may even dehumanize people, try to stop thinking of them as the same thing as us, because involuntary empathy with them would otherwise mess us up emotionally.
Boy did I hate this one being taught to me back in the day, by my country's first privately owned TV channel.
The last 10ish years of my life have been an emotional education journey, where previously I was a “logic above all else” kind of person. Like you, I feel like I can relate to other people now in a way I never thought possible. And also it’s brought about anxiety and self-doubt that was never here before.
Overall my ability to empathize still feels a little dulled sometimes. But it's hard to tell since you can't really compare it directly to another's experience, only observe how others seem to react... Maybe in its own way this is a bit of a "What is it like to be a bat?" situation.
That's cognitive empathy.
What most people ask you for is emotional empathy = experiencing (as opposed to modeling) the emotions of others.
It's not even that important to experience actual emotions of others. Even empathetic people are often mistaken about what emotions other people feel. Somebody might be sad for different reason than you think. Or they might actually be happy just pretending to be sad. An empathetic observer would still feel sad for that person, and it's still empathy even if the information it's based on is wrong.
What's important is the intent and the consequences of experiencing the possible emotions of other people. If you feel bad when somebody else is suffering, you're more likely to treat them well and less likely to abuse them.
That's what people are asking you for - to treat others better and not to abuse them.
BTW some people don't have emotional empathy, and it's not their fault. You can still be a decent human being. It's just harder.
And that, kids, is called structural violence.
Nothing in the invisible magical social contract you sign at birth gives anyone the right to require you to experience an inner state of their choice.
I've witnessed people extol the virtues of empathy to me, while on other occasions they talk about people they dislike with venom and disdain. A level of disdain that I have never held in my heart against anyone, but they throw it around casually. And they're gonna tell me about empathy?
Sometimes you just gotta agree with people out loud and figure out what you believe in offline.
It's like they've tricked themselves into thinking that they're very empathetic when what they really feel is particularly strong in-group/outgroup affinity/antipathy.
[1] https://embrace-autism.com/the-different-types-of-empathy/
I've certainly benefited from useful ideas in my core area of expertise from people who were nowhere close to being experts in that same topic.
Conversely, as someone who has never experienced a terminal disease, I'll admit that I cannot really empathize with someone who is experiencing such a thing. I've read books and watched movies and heard testimonials, and yet still I don't really know what it's like. I can imagine what it might be like, but I'm just imagining things. Nonetheless, I can still sympathize.
Is this being an empath? Idk. But if we can dial the knob of fun (for us and others) up and the dial of sadness for others (who don't deserve the sadness) a bit down, you're not lying nor faking, just trying to redirect a bit of your happiness for others too feel less bad. Which doesn't mean you can't be a playful ass and say "yah, they had been playing very well, it's kinda a pity. But my team still won. Come on, the winner pays you a beer and the loser pays me another! Wink, wink!"
My take at least. USA is either regressing or too far along in the future. I'm not sure which.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/sympathy-empathy-dif...
hm, i think Fricken has it right: He is actively sharing in the other persons emotional experience, it just is that he is feeling glee about it.
Actually the higher the empathy (knowing that the other person is a superfan and knowing how much the other teams losing sucks for them) the higher the delight.
It is similar in war: If you are in the trenches you know exactly how your enemy in their trench is feeling (and know how they are feeling about you). But that doesnt mean they get your solidarity or mercy.
By framing an argument against semantics or social obedience, you're ignoring self-implicating behavior; you're intentionally ignoring people's needs.
Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" instead of "Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper, this is no time to consider how I treat other people."
Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored.
If you're doing something wrong, and I decide to do something about it, minimum decency dictates I make sure you understand what it is. Bringing into it some vague abstract notion that everyone with half a critical mind turns out to have a whole personal exegesis about, but I only know about it from everyone else? Now there's a clear signal that nobody in the room actually cares how people are treated.
When someone's being asked to have more empathy, they're probably in the middle of ignoring someone else's needs right then.
Yes, correct. That's exactly how abusers expect us to think things work.
The difference is whether the person asking you to be more X cares if you have agreed-upon criteria of what that even looks like.
Given how many people ostensibly driven by positive motivations seem to be rubbed the wrong way by "empathy", well...
The funny part is that if you care about a semantic argument I know you will care about how you treat other people, too.
It's the person who strongly insists to not discuss what words mean, who 9 times out of 10 turns out to be dangerous.
> "Usually, 'be more empathetic' was a veiled request for me to modify my behavior or thinking towards someone (e.g. they thought I was rude to someone and wanted me to apologize and change my behavior)."
And you actually illustrate the entire point of the post.
Imagine that someone's upset with you and tells you to be more "gropulent". Many people have said this to you, but gropulence doesn't come naturally to you, and the term is bandied about in a wide variety of situations, making it hard to pick up context clues. There are people who call themselves "gropules" who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds.
How would you start learning to be gropulent?
I hope you'd be as curious and thorough as the author of TFA.
Like the author, you're constructing a similar straw man argument: selecting a specific use of the word and making that the main point to argue against.
'be more empathetic' is an argument to behave differently with the people around you. Not think differently; behave differently.
I think I'm arguing that telling someone to behave a way that they don't understand is unhelpful. That could be "empathetic", "thankful", or "gropulent". ** Taking the author at their word, they don't understand the request.
When they ask for clarification, they don't receive it.
In that way, it is veiled, similarly to my "gropulent" analogy.
In other words, the author is being asked to behave differently, but not given guidance on how to behave differently. Which is why they wrote this piece about what empathy is.
I think the author would have gotten a lot further by asking how rather than why, but the author admits that they thought that requests to be empathetic were requests "to be fake and lie". (i.e. They misunderstood what "empathy" meant.)
> who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds
You invoked usage that connotes vapid meaning.
I see your argument: How can someone do something if they don't know what to do?
Explicit instruction is useful to a novice; say a toddler or someone new to a domain. But most adults don't spend the day explicitly telling each other how to behave socially.
A case can be made for individuals who display some difficulty learning this vicariously, but considering that should affect <1% of the world population, I think it's reasonable to be suspect of misbehavior.
i.e "you didn't tell me how to be nice, so how could I be nice?" is not a reasonable excuse for most adults.
My sentence about "gropules" was a dig at "empaths". You may not have run into them, but they're tarot and crystal adjacent. It's a teeny tiny minority of people who talk about "empathy", but they do use it vapidly, and could lead to people with an underdeveloped sense of empathy to dismiss the whole concept as something akin to new-age nonsense. I've met enough to last me a while though.
However, you're right about my argument, and our disagreement lies in the affected population.
"17% of children aged 3–17 years were diagnosed with a developmental disability, as reported by parents, during a study period of 2009–2017. These included ASD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), blindness, and cerebral palsy, among others."[1]
Now, that's children, and with the correct support, people with those disabilities can be taught empathy along with other social skills.
But what about those without support, those who should have been diagnosed and supported but weren't, and those who didn't meet the criteria to be diagnosed with an official disability/disorder but still struggle?
I may be an outlier, but I would estimate that about 1 in 5 people that I meet have some trouble with empathy (i.e. semi-frequently misunderstanding the feelings and/or motivations of others).
Ultimately, I agree, ignorance is no excuse for bad behavior, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't act empathetically to those who have trouble doing so. If anything, the author's piece is a fantastic path to developing a sense of empathy for the <1-20% of adults affected by a lack of it.
Or call it empathy, whatever.
Growth does and that's what "being more empathetic" requires.
I can't say if this affects the author, but I am aware that some people have a neurotype that is very opposed to "being told what to do", especially when they can't reason to it themselves. and sometimes being able to anticipate needs in advance is an important first step to meeting those needs more often <3
I share this as someone who is [un]fortunate to have easy access to empathy, but also has some tendencies of "pathological demand avoidance". For me, empathy is an innate skill, and I am who I am because my identity is shaped by how I use it to anticipate needs in advance, so that I can react more generously (and won't be caught by surprise when someone "demands" something of me that I didn't expect)
Bingo. Having the right to decide what's warranted in a situation a.k.a. essential human autonomy: a thing which isn't meant to somehow cancel out with being considerate of others or having a role in society. That's the question which IMO the post and most comments here are either vaguely getting at, or studiously avoiding.
It's essential to empathize. Few things are more worthwhile than understanding others. It's by empathy that I've learned how when someone actually says something about "eMpAtHy" at you, they're usually trying to scam you out of genuine emotional labor. Beware this - chances are your own sorry ass would be your only recompense.
Tbh I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say this particular one to me (or anywhere around me, maybe I'm too unapproachable hehe) but do I tend to hear "you should be more empathetic" as "someone other than you has already decided what's warranted, which you're supposed to telepathically infer, except there's no such person and we don't actually understand in what ways we need you to modify your behavior or why; so you're gonna have to come up with that by yourself, too - on your own time ofc"
This happens because they don't have sufficient empathy to have a mature conversation with you about what's what, but have heard the word on the influence grapevine and are quick as ever to brand themselves with it.
It's always fun to pretend to take these dog whistles in good faith, the Pavlovians don't know what hit 'em. Your own dam treadmill, that's wha
Lifelong direct and intimate familiarity with a person of the “neurotype” you describe is actually what drew forth my comment.
To be more clear, a real person with the “being told what to do” interpretation of the world you mention was forced to my thought by what the author said.
You probably even saw some of them around, they have a very distinctive yellow cover.
Don't teach HR any more new words, please.
But I'm not splitting hairs; it's a fundamental error to conflate the behavior w/ the characteristic. Someone who is neurodivergent -- just like someone who's neurotypical -- can behave in any number of ways. If they are "being a dick", the fact that they're neurodivergent _might_ help explain why (eg because they might struggle to understand others' points of view). But IMHO it's unhelpful and maybe harmful to lump them together.
Case in point: the current US administration (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sin-empath...)
You can unpack it: "You have made this person unhappy, and you didn't notice. Here are things that you may not have noticed about this person: X, Y, and Z. They see this encounter like thus-and-such. Now that you know that, you can interact with them in a way that makes both of you happier."
Some people observe that more easily than others. It seems to be the case that some are neurologically lacking the ability to do it at an intuitive level, though you can do just as well with conscious observation and rational conclusions. That is more effort, but "whoops, it's just too hard" has never been a good excuse for anything. It gets easier with practice, and when you're too tired to make the effort, you can learn tactics to cope. (Such as, "Hey, I don't think I can have this conversation right now. I'm sorry about that. Can we please resume this later?")
Too many people, including some very prominent ones, have decided that any effort is too much, and that they are better off being dicks. I can't necessarily refute that. But I can say that if you're a dick, people are going to treat you like a dick, and that is likely to end badly for you.
Unfortunately the indirection ("be more empathetic") is the safe/polite/un-hurtful bet for a huge percentage of the population. The majority of people hear that and pick up on the implied request to be more sensitive.
well you will be taken for a ride in modern workplaces if you go the opposite direction. you need to weed out snakes.
> well you will be taken for a ride in modern workplaces if you go the opposite direction. you need to weed out snakes.
You do, but usually it's better to be more on the charitable side by default and only be uncharitable when someone has behaved in a way that proves that to be necessary.
>> its usually too late by then. you always need to be one step ahead.
> No. That's just paranoia. That makes you the snake.
Yeah.
Also "and only be uncharitable when someone has behaved in a way that proves that to be necessary," does not mean that behavior has to have been directed towards you. If you're charitable by default to people, you can make friends and hear about things that happened to others. Also your friends can help you avoid working at places that are just dens of snakes. To put it in gamer software engineer terms: having friends can be like having a wallhack (among many other better and more important things).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452724
i am usually too naive but i am going to protect myself.
"I'm sorry kid, I know you probably have aspirations and all that shit, but due to a host of technical reasons we don't care about any of that. Here's this fentanyl instead, either shoot it or go sell it to the next loser. And say hi to your mom from me - she's an absolutely remarkable woman."
Edit: After your edit you seem to have found a rationale for rounding up and executing drug dealers "because reasons" so I think we're all done here.
That's all rather revealing as to what this so called "empathy" actually is, and why of all possible ethical values this is the one which epitomes of uncaring choose to pay lip service to.
Circling back to your original strawmonster - no, I don't believe any particular disaffected youth has had any voice in whether society should go through an opioid epidemic. As to the actual people responsible, I'm sure you'd perceive them as having vivid, rich inner lives, not unlike your own.
But in your example you described an attitude of depraved indifference, which is exactly how I described the motivations of many drug dealers, including ones I know and that you do not.
>But in your example you described an attitude of depraved indifference, which is exactly how I described the motivations of many drug dealers, including ones I know and that you do not.
You're pointing at a contradiction in "unlikely" or in "ingroup"?
>attitude of depraved indifference
We stock two flavors of indifference in the indifference truck, we got callous and then we got depraved. Callous is sans empathy, weighs one `compartmentalize()` call. Depraved is the one with the extra sprinkle of empathy, more precisely a dash of empathy with the victim in the very moment the indifferent person is screwing them over with their sheer indifference. So, not very indifferent anymore, but what some people go for anyway. Empathy is very poignant after all. Plus, observers are none the wiser. Now, how much flavor you prefer, that's kind of career-deciding innit
Which is how only a new language and level of explanation solves that paradox.
Glad we needed an essay on that.