I think we can all agree that business is driven by relationships between people. And we can agree that people are emotional beings.
This means that business and life has a lot more emotions to it than we like to believe.
If we are honest with ourselves, we probably would say that many of us in Western culture tend to avoid emotions in general. Emotions are squishy and we tend to think that they guide us to make impulsive and misguided decisions - almost like the Mariah Carey song above. We are told time and time again that the brain and rational thinking keeps us on-track. So we believe that.
Sure, we use spreadsheets and presentations and diagrams to make analyses, but is that what really drives decisions?
The dirty secret about emotions is that what you are feeling at any time reflects how you perceive what’s happening in your life.
- You are happy when you believe life is going your way.
- You feel in love when you meet a romantic partner who sweeps you off your feet.
- You are sad when you lose something of great importance to you.
- You are angry because something didn’t go as you wanted or someone did something to cross you.
With that in mind, basing a decision on how you feel isn’t always a bad thing. Again, we are emotional beings so making a decision based on what feels good to you - makes you happy, gives you joy - should be a reasonable reaction.
In the West we like to attribute emotions to women, but that’s not true in all cultures. Emotions are for everyone (ask Margaret Mead).
In my opinion, we in the West, particularly of US and certain European cultures, are afraid of those pesky emotions, so we avoid them and embrace rational thought. But again, we are emotional beings and life isn’t entirely rational so this decision doesn’t always work. We fall into a tailspin when we can’t rationalize away why people make a certain decisions, especially if they are driven by emotional factors. Emotions become mysterious drivers of how we live.
If we are afraid of emotions then it logically follows that we are afraid of empathy too.
Given that people are emotional one would think that understanding empathy would be a key requirement to understand other people. However, I have noticed that a number of researchers and writers aren’t comfortable with the word empathy to the point that they are critical of it. Sure, they support compassion because it is about solutions, but empathy is about those pesky emotions and feelings. The question I have: Is empathy all that "evil" to begin with?
So we’re all aligned, let’s define what empathy is:
Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Many researchers will define empathy as sharing feelings more than understanding feelings. At least, that is what Paul Bloom is proposing. I need to read more of his book, Against Empathy: the Case for Rational Compassion, to better understand his arguments, but after the first few pages I'm already challenged by his case.
My challenge centers around how he defines empathy as the sharing of feelings more than the understanding of feelings.
What are the challenges?
To start, you can't really share feelings and emotions. Those are unique experiences. You can never 100% know what someone else is thinking or feeling - it just isn't possible. Even an "empath" can only experience what they feel from someone else, and even then, it is a second hand experience with an understanding of those feelings based on that person's own past experiences. There is no way to get a unique understanding of what someone else is going through at any time.
You can imagine what someone is feeling or experiencing emotionally, but it's all hypothetical without a shared experience. When you imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling, you are basing it off of your personal experiences, which may or may not have any similiarities of what’s happening to the other person. You need a common ground to work from - a shared experience to discuss.
This is why we need to revisit the definition of empathy and focus on the part that is about understanding someone else’s emotions so you can relate to them.
If you have had an experience that shares some similarities to someone else’s, then there is a strong possibility that you could better understand what that person is experiencing. What are some examples?
- We flinch when we see pain because we have all had a cut or other injury of varying degrees. We know what a cut feels like. Looking at the severity of a cut, we can magnify or downplay our own experience with it.
- We cry when we watch a movie where someone loses a child or spouse because we imagine what we would feel like if we lost someone very close to us. Most of us have in some way, which makes the emotional expression more powerful. However, if a child doesn't have a spouse he or she cannot relate and probably won't cry.
- Women don’t really have any idea how a man feels when someone whacks him in the testicles. There can be no frame of reference. It looks painful, but is it? This is why women don’t really flinch when they see that onscreen or in real life.
You need a frame of reference - a shared experience - to be able to communicate how you are feeling and thinking.
In one of the empathy criticizer articles, Mr. Bloom shares an example of a spouse trying to comfort the other after losing a job. He said that you don't want two very emotional people - just one and the other providing comfort, and the other didn't have to really "get" the experience to provide that comfort. That story didn't do it for me. I have been laid off and a close friend who had no experience with losing a job tried his best to comfort me and have compassion. Needless to say, he tried hard, but had no understanding of what I was feeling or experiencing. Further, he could barely imagine what it was like because he had no experiential frame of reference.
What's an experiential frame of reference?
It's either experiencing the same event or having a parallel experience that has shared qualities. In the case of a layoff, this would be events where someone is exiled from a group for no apparent logical reason. That person did nothing wrong - and most likely, there is no known reason for the exile. So in this case, experiential frames of references could be:
- Being asked to leave a group for some reason beyond your control but not hearing that reason
- Family not talking to you because of something heard through the grapevine that isn't true and not sharing that information with you
- Not being invited to a party that all of your friends were invited to - and you don't know why
When I got laid off, friends who had experienced a layoff were empathetic and helpful. The friends who never experienced a layoff were difficult. They tried their best and shared some nice sentiments, but their efforts simply didn't support me and made me more aware of the job loss. I had to part ways with some friends because there was no shared experience of no job lead in sight - they didn't understand my stress. They just didn't have a similar frame of reference to understand. To show empathy or compassion you need to have a connection with the other person. And the only way to truly understand emotions is to have a shared experience.
I think what gets lost with empathy is people believing its all about having those pesky emotions and feelings. However, empathy really is more about understanding the emotion. And you can’t understand the experience someone is having if you haven’t had some level of the experience yourself. It's not really the emotion - it is the experience that is prompting the emotional response.
Maybe if we tweaked the definition of empathy to fit an understanding of the emotions experience and base this connection with someone else on having a shared experience it wold work better for those who value rational thinking. Then, maybe, we'd all be less critical of empathy and understand it's value.
For more information, take a look at Empathy Exercises or read about why people like Monopoly and other simulation games.
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