Decoding the Language of Empathy
Ask 100 people what empathy is, and you'll get 100 different answers. Yet, empathy is billed as an essential "soft skill" for today's world of work. So what is it? And what is it not?
A headline in the Harvard Business Review from 2012 declared that empathy is "The Most Valuable Thing They Teach at [Harvard Business School]." Another article from 2015 claims that empathy is the "key to a great meeting." A 2018 article gives tips for helping employees empathize with customers, while another gives tips for developing empathy for "someone who annoys you." And earlier this year, HBR offered a guide to sustaining empathy in difficult times.
Empathy, it seems, has made its way into the corporate lexicon.
Managers, marketers, executives, and even software engineers are expected to speak the language of empathy today. Of course, it wasn't always this way. Empathy used to be a foreign tongue in boardrooms and corner offices.
But the story of empathy doesn't start with a TED talk or bestselling book. The story starts in 1909, when the word "empathy" was first used in English by psychologist Edward Titchener.
As a distinct concept, empathy is new. Or rather, it's newer than its Greek etymology would imply. While "empathy" does derive from ancient Greek words meaning "feeling into," the word empathy was invented in English as a translation of a German word, Einfühlung. Einfühlung means "feeling into" in German and connotes a displacing or transportive quality of experience.
The German word wasn't invented by a psychologist but by a philosopher of aesthetics. Robert Vischer coined Einfühlung in 1873. Instead of merely observing a sculpture or painting, Vischer thought one could imagine what it would be like to be the sculpture or subject of the painting. This technique wasn't only for imagining the experience of human subjects—but also animals, mountains, buildings, or anything else.1
The aesthetic version of empathy has faded from the scene. Today's version of empathy—the kind that's equally suitable for the TED Talk stage or TikTok—seems like a completely different language from that original use. This version of empathy promises results—influence, wealth, success, and viral marketing campaigns.
But is that really empathy?
Or rather, what is empathy? And why have the powers that be in the 21st-century economy embraced empathy in such a big way?
This is the first in a 5-part series called Decoding Empathy.
Keep reading, or listen to the series on the What Works podcast!
Well, that is a very tricky question to answer, it turns out. But to begin, I'll start with my own empathy origin story.
Empathy: An Origin Story
I first got interested in empathy because it seemed that I lacked it. I couldn't easily identify my own emotional states, let alone the emotional states of others. I didn't feel the proper things at the right time. My brain would do one thing, and my face and body language would do another.
In the right circumstances, my unusual reactions made for comic relief. But most of the time, I came across as odd, cold, or even hostile.
At the same time I was realizing this—which I should probably mention was in my early 30s—I was also receiving some conflicting feedback. People who read my blog would tell me that I was a mind reader. I somehow knew exactly what they were thinking. I could put words to thoughts that they'd never spoken aloud before.
It was also at this time that I started to teach a design-thinking tool to help small business owners get inside the heads of the people they wanted to help. This tool is called an "Empathy Map." In my own work, I renamed it a "Perspective Map" because, well, it just seemed more appropriate at the time.
A Perspective Map is very simple.
You imagine a few people who are dealing with the kind of problem or have the sort of need that your product or service helps with. Then, you take a piece of paper and draw two perpendicular lines so that you have four equal boxes. In the upper-left box, you write down everything that the people you're imagining do related to the problem or need they have. In the upper-right box, you jot down what they say related to the problem or need. The lower boxes are for what they think and what they feel.
This ridiculously simple tool was my magic wand. With it, I could write engaging articles, create compelling sales copy, and plan effective workshops. And without fail, people would tell me that I "read their minds." The Perspective Map was like my decoder ring for the encrypted text of other people's needs.
Later, I would start to use the Perspective Map process while I was out and about. Any time I was in a situation that I didn't understand, or didn't know what was expected of me, or didn't know why someone was behaving the way they were, my brain would automatically consult my decoder ring. I'd systematically consider the doing, saying, thinking, and feeling of whatever was going on.
Honestly, it rarely helped in the moment. It's not like I was fluent in perspective-taking. And that's a lot of mental work to engage in while I'm supposed to be having a casual conversation or asking for help at a store! However, when I would debrief with Sean later, I found that I could reconstruct a variety of scenarios that might explain someone else's baffling behavior.
Sean called it my "empathy engine."
My empathy engine wasn't always helpful. Not that my analysis was off, but that sharing my analysis wasn't always appropriate. If Sean told me a story about a situation that upset him, my empathy engine would kick in, and I'd explain the other person's side of the story. Sean didn't need to know what the other person might have been thinking—he needed me to commiserate with him and recognize his feelings.
That lesson took me quite a while to learn—and frankly, it's one I'm still learning.
Anyhow, over the last decade or so, I realized that there were a lot of inconsistencies in the ways we talk about empathy. Is it about emotions? Is it about mind reading? Is it active? Intuitive? Somatic? Intellectual? Instinctual?
So, I did what I always do when I'm presented with conflicting information: research.
Ask a hundred people what empathy is, and you'll get a hundred different answers. Neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, psychotherapists, sociologists, management consultants, and TED Talk-givers all seem to have different definitions. And even within fields, there is little agreement on what empathy is.
For this series, my research focused on ideas of empathy as they relate to philosophy of mind, pop culture, and the workplace. Speaking of pop culture...
Bewildered By Empathy
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you, and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual, psychological, and moral understanding.
— Ursula K. LeGuin, Words Are My Matter
Fiction can provide a profound window into how others behave, communicate, think, and feel. It can also perpetuate stereotypes and objectify people.
In Richard Powers's critically acclaimed 2021 novel Bewilderment, a neuroscientist creates what the narrator, Theo, describes as an "empathy machine." Unlike my own empathy engine, this empathy machine is an fMRI machine. The scientist uses it to map how emotions affect someone's brain and then uses those maps to stimulate emotional responses in another person's brain.
Theo's son, Robin, has trouble at school—or maybe trouble at life. His dad tells the scientist that Robin's various doctors have given him two votes "for Asperger's, one probably OCD, and one possible ADHD."2 Theo hopes that the scientist will agree to treat Robin using the "empathy machine" to "calm him down and get his principal off [his] back."
So Robin goes into the empathy machine.
Eventually, they decide to use the brain scan that belonged to his mother, who passed away before the events of the novel, to train Robin's brain. Robin's affect and behavior improve. He seems happier and more focused. He has fewer outbursts and idiosyncrasies.
The treatment, however, can't last. The neuroscientist's lab gets shut down by the government. Robin and Theo try to maintain the changes as best they can. But it doesn't work.
As he loses access to his mother's feelings, Robin fearfully tells his dad, "I don't want to go back to being me."
Dad? He sounded petrified. I don’t want to go back to being me.
I've gone through mild manic periods when I didn't want to go back to being me, either—times I felt like I was finally speaking everyone else's language even though I was merely surfing ways of serotonin and dopamine. But those weren't healthy times. Those weren't times when I was fully myself.
The highs can be just as dissociating as the lows.
When I'm speaking my own language, when the mask is off, the autistic experience is thrilling. I'd never want to give it up. Not in a million years. Just because someone else can't imagine that experience or the delight that can come with it doesn't make it wrong.
Fiction helps us understand foreign perspectives when the author has done the work to imagine the inner worlds of their characters in all of their messy, contradictory, and sparkling beauty. However, when authors rely on tropes or assumptions about those inner lives, they cheat us of that empathic experience.
Heads up: spoilers.
I was shocked when the novel ended with Robin's death. Robin is portrayed not as a victim of other people's limited capacity for connecting with him but as a victim of his own disordered neurology. He's overcome by irrationality. And if it hadn't been clear all along, it was now painfully obvious that Robin was nothing more than a plot device designed to shine a light on the neurotypical protagonist.
So much for empathy.
Autistic people like me, and presumably Robin, are often thought to lack empathy. Our social differences are labeled as deficits. Our own norms are dismissed as symptoms of a bigger problem.
The Double Empathy Problem
In 2012, sociologist and autism researcher Damian Milton published a paper identifying the "double empathy problem." Milton, who is autistic himself, wanted to investigate the "ontological status" of autism—that is, what is it? Is autism a neurological disorder that requires treatment? Or is it a difference in processing and interacting with the world?
Milton, unsurprisingly, sees autism as a difference rather than a disorder. He argues that the emotional and interpersonal challenges that come with autism are socially constructed rather than inherent to the condition.
In other words, autistic people have difficulty in social situations not because we have an inability to function in those situations but because we speak a different language than the neurotypical people who perceive our social interaction as odd. In fact, this is exactly the metaphor that autism advocate Jim Sinclair used in their powerful essay, "Don't Mourn For Us."
Sinclair writes:
It takes more work to communicate with someone whose native language isn't the same as yours. And autism goes deeper than language and culture; autistic people are "foreigners" in any society.
I love this metaphor because it highlights a key facet of the double empathy problem: No one is surprised to discover that they communicate more easily with someone who speaks the same language as they do than someone who doesn't.
Of course, social interaction among autistic people has its own difficulties. But, generally speaking, there is a broader awareness and accommodation of different behaviors and affects than in an interaction with a neurotypical person. That's the "double" part of the double empathy problem. Autistic people may struggle with the social norms of nonautistic people, but nonautistic people struggle with the social expression of autistic people, too. It goes both ways.
In Bewilderment, Robin displays tons of empathy long before he ever enters the empathy machine. But Robin's empathy language is different from his father's, his principal's, or the scientist's. Instead of recognizing that Robin speaks a different language, they want to fix him and force him to speak the same language as everyone else. They have little to no interest in speaking Robin's language.
This is the irony of Powers including a stand-in Greta Thunberg character who claims autism is her "special asset." She's overflowing with empathy, the kind of empathy that roils with righteous anger when others are subject to injustice. Unsurprisingly, Robin sees himself in her. "She's like me," he tells his dad.
Two people speaking the same language—empathy recognizing empathy.
Damian Milton points out that "normal" is always determined by the dominant group. So, autistic people get labeled as having an empathy deficit that needs to be corrected rather than a difference that deserves to be recognized. Nonautistic people want autistic people to learn to speak a nonautistic language because that's the "normal" language. But that's like an American going to France and expecting all French people to speak English because English is "normal."
Autistic people do not lack empathy, as is the stereotype. Autistic people experience and express empathy differently. So again, that begs the question: what is empathy? And what does it mean for empathy to be an in-demand soft skill at work?
No, really: What is empathy?
For a word used so frequently across so many domains, contemporary philosophers and psychologists don't have a set definition of what empathy is. Philosopher Amy Coplan describes the various definitions of empathy as "one or more of several loosely related processes or mental states," such as "feeling what someone else feels, caring about someone else, being emotionally affected by someone else's emotions and experience, though not necessarily experiencing the same emotions, imagining oneself in another's situation, imagining being another in that other's situation, making inferences about another's mental states" or some combination of those processes.
But Coplan's own definition is worth examining, especially in the context of empathy at work. She writes, "Empathy is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation."
“Empathy is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation.”
Got it? No?
Let me attempt to put that into something resembling casual speech.
Empathy is both an intellectual and emotional process that imagines what another person might be experiencing in a given situation without projecting one's own mental state or taking on the mental state of the other.
Now, let's break this down.
Empathy can be cognitive and/or affective.
Affective empathy is an emotional process. It's the "feeling into" that we find in a lot of management or self-help literature dealing with empathy. Affective empathy is experienced in a few different ways based on whether the feeling in question has more to do with the empathizer or the subject of empathy.
Cognitive empathy is an intellectual process. It's the ability to reason what another person might believe, intend, or feel. Cognitive empathy is what I described when I told you about my "empathy engine." It's a conscious process based on inference and deduction that imagines the mental state of another person.
Empathy is a product of imagination.
Imagining someone's mental state requires curiosity about their experience, emotions, and inner narrative. Assuming that another would respond to a situation the same way I would isn't very imaginative! In this way, practicing empathy demands that we set aside our own cognitive and emotional patterns so we can recognize and appreciate the differences other people experience.
Empathy is situational.
Obviously, someone's mental state is going to vary depending on the situation they're in. But it doesn't vary only on the visible and contemporaneous details of the situation. Someone's mental state varies depending on something that happened to them an hour ago, a year ago, or a decade ago. It varies based on their self-confidence that day or the conversation they had with their therapist last week.
Practicing empathy, therefore, requires open-mindedness. We'll never have all the information we need to understand someone else's mental state fully. And if we forget that, we're likely to jump to conclusions or ignore information that could offer insight.
Open-mindedness is especially needed when practicing empathy with people who don't belong to the same group you do. While the research and theory on this effect are mixed, it seems likely that what's perceived as empathic behavior can actually (1) activate stereotypes or prejudices about people in the out-group or (2) lead to justification of existing social systems or interpersonal relations.
Milton's double empathy problem can be applied here, too. It's easier to empathize with people who speak the same language you do—and that can extend to all sorts of identities beyond neurodiversity, including race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc.
When we have more similarities and fewer differences relative to others, our empathy doesn't need to be as imaginative.
How we feel or what we think is likely to be how another feels or what another thinks. But when those differences start to outweigh the similarities, our empathy engines need to work harder. It takes more creativity to imagine how someone whose identities are very different from mine would think or feel.
When it comes to empathy, my otherness is a superpower. I never assume I'm more like someone than I really am because I am acutely aware of my otherness in any social situation. I have to imagine what it's like to be someone else because I know I can't rely on my own inner world as a template for theirs.
Empathy is always constructed. We remain separate from the object of our empathy, never knowing whether what we perceive as a shared feeling reflects the emotional landscape of the Other. Empathy is our best guess. An approximation based on context clues.
Even that—a context clue—is no objective reality. The clue itself might be context for constructing the empathetic affect, but the context of the clue is also up for interpretation. A gray cloud on a hot summer afternoon means something different than a gray cloud on a crisp winter morning. The clue is the same—but the context changes how I perceive it.
Social context is a moving target. I know that a hot summer afternoon brings with it the chance of stray thunderstorms, moving from west to east. Although, sometimes not. I know that the context of a conversation or shared activity shifts and changes. And just as I can be caught off guard by a sudden summer storm, I can be caught off by an unexpected change in the social weather. Truthfully, I often get wet.
But that isn't a lack of empathy. We all get wet.
Certainly, any effort at perspective-taking and compassion is a step in the right direction. But we ignore the deeper and more profound language of empathy at our peril. If what passes for empathy is assuming that what you feel must be what I feel, we're in trouble.
What are you going through?
Empathy isn't based on assumptions but on curiosity. It's not based on similarity but on difference.
Empathy requires that we recognize that difference. If we don't, it's just projection. I project my feelings or thinking on you—you project yours on me. That doesn't get us any closer to understanding each other. It doesn't help me anticipate what you might need or how we might better work together.
Philosopher Simone Weil called this dimension of empathy attention. Attention requires forgetting oneself and focusing exclusively on the other. "The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth," she wrote in a letter to a friend.
To offer attention, she explained, "simply means being able to say to [another] : 'What are you going through?'" That kind of attention is the recognition that the other exists, not as a member of a group or a person dealing with a certain brand of situation but as an individual worthy of attention, just as we are.
Weil believed that the capacity for attention was rare. "It is almost a miracle; it is a miracle," she wrote. "Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough."
Weil lived this philosophy. It was never enough for her to contemplate the other. She had to experience what the other was going through. She wanted to be among people who were suffering so that she could better understand their needs and desires. While she never stopped embodying the scholar and philosopher, it's why she left the profession to experience work in a factory. It's why she went to the front lines of the Spanish civil war. Her desire for self-denial and the experience of others' suffering might have even led to her untimely death in 1943 at the age of 34.
Today, many autistic people claim Weil as one of our own.
I certainly do. She speaks my language. I recognize my own fire in her fire, my own awkwardness in her awkwardness, my own curiosity in her curiosity. What I wouldn't give to offer her my full attention, my full empathy, and ask her, "What are you going through?"
Weil's version of attention and empathy isn't the kind heralded by thought leaders as the solution to every business problem that ails you. It can't be. To forget yourself, you'd need to forget profit or KPIs first. To ask another, "What are you going through?" with the kind of curiosity Weil embodied, you'd need to forget that you were using empathy as a product development, marketing, or management tool.
Attention isn't attached to outcomes.
Empathy doesn't concern itself with 'what's in this for me.' Neither are tools for forcing us into emotional and experiential sameness—all the better to create ads for.
No, what we've come to call empathy in the world of work and business is far from an effort to really understand what someone else is going through as best as I can tell. Lessons in corporate empathy might give the ambitious manager enough to get by with a tourist-level grasp of the language—their empathy expressed in the equivalent of "Please," "Thank you," and "Where is the bathroom?"
What we really need to transform the world of work and business for the better is a full-immersion empathy experience.
Series like this one take months of work—research, interviews, drafting, and revising. If you appreciate this kind of exploration of work, business, and leadership, please consider becoming a premium subscriber. Your $7 per month helps make this work sustainable and ensures that I can continue to bring you in-depth analysis and ideas.
Ganczarek, J., Hünefeldt, T., & Olivetti Belardinelli, M. (2018). From "Einfühlung" to empathy: exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience. Cognitive processing, 19(2), 141–145.
I probably should have stopped reading when a book that was published in 2021 and takes place in the near future used an outdated term for Autism Spectrum Condition.