What is Empathy?
Empathy comes up often in discussions of design theory. I first started thinking about empathy when I stumbled upon an essay by Carl Rogers, the well-known psychologist, when I was an undergraduate. Empathy is not an exact science, though we have a lot of scientific evidence to illuminate empathy. Because there are different kinds of empathy, the word empathy can mean different things. This is empathy as I am understanding it, drawn from a number of resources I've read.Empathy is the awareness of other people's thinking. Empathy is also the ability to sense other people’s emotions. Healthy empathy is objective. You don't think for another, but think in accord with them; you don't feel for another, but feel in accord with them. At the same time, you remain detached and retain your own thoughts and emotions, keeping them separate. You think or feel in accord with another person only as a tool to illuminate your own thinking and feeling, not to change yourself to match them. Empathy also means understanding and appreciating other people's experiences. It is the ability to imagine their point of view, or even their physicality, as they interact with situations or navigate systems. Empathy is the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling or experiencing—to imaginatively experience their experiences, imaginatively feel their feelings, and imaginatively think their thoughts.
Empathy can also involve meaning. If you practice empathy, you can see others' world views, their cultural points of reference, their personal philosophies. Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with other people's contexts, goals, and motivations. It can involve predicting others' actions and reactions, their assumptions, and their predilections. When you have the ability to see the world as others see it, you become aware of different people's frames of reference. Furthermore, you can become more aware of the simple fact that people are different, and also the same.
Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy means feeling sorry for someone's situation, but empathy doesn't necessarily imply sadness or distress or caring or concern. Sympathy is something you do in your own shoes, in your own reality, while considering another person's situation. Sympathy can mean reaching out to someone, and sympathy can include empathy. But empathy is specifically about paralleling your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with another person's thoughts, feelings, and experiences, as a way of understanding them. Empathy is something you do in an other person's shoes, in their reality, as far as is mentally possible. Empathy means imagining what they feel like in their situation. Sympathy is different. Sympathy is about having your own caring thoughts and feelings in regards to another person's experience. Sympathy means valuing another's feelings and experiences, from your own perspective.
Often, we are sympathetic where we cannot be empathic, because, in some situations, we can't understand another person's perspective; we sometimes can't imagine how they feel, or how we would feel. Sometimes the other person is, indeed, going through something we've gone through ourselves, but other times their situation is foreign to us and we cannot empathize. We can sympathize with them, nonetheless, because we appreciate their feelings, even if we can't know their feelings ourselves. We can feel for them, in our own ways of feeling. We can recognize the kinds of emotions they are feeling or recognize their needs.
Empathy happens when we are able, to a degree, to understand or visualize another's perspective. We are not adopting their thoughts or states of mind—not getting that far inside their heads—but simply recognizing where they are coming from. Empathy does not necessarily mean relating to another person's mind or emotions directly. Empathy means encountering their thoughts and feelings through the imagination. Some would say that empathy is most useful when it tends to be more cognitive, more logical. At any rate, where it is emotional, it works best when we don't let ourselves absorb too much of other people's emotions.
For the designer, empathy means objectivity. It means standing back and seeing what you are creating with fresh eyes, as if it is new to you. It is nonjudgmental. It means setting aside your own perceptions, especially as one so close to the product, in order to confront the interface and content and experience and interact with it the way others do, coming to the product as a customer, visitor, or other stakeholder instead of as the designer.
A very common neurological process, empathy occurs in all humans and many other animals. It may, in some ways, relate to the activity of mirror neurons. Empathy means distinguishing one's own mental and emotional states from those of other individuals, but in the process, also identifying with and conceptualizing what others are thinking, feeling, or meaning. Often we think of empathy as understanding another person's difficulties, but it also means understanding what works for them. Empathy comes in three forms: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and compassionate empathy.
Forms of empathy
Cognitive Empathy. This form of empathy is sometimes called perspective taking. This the mental process that allows us to see things from other points of view. It means conceptualizing other people's perspectives, but not necessarily vicariously and viscerally experiencing them. Cognitive empathy is separate from an emotional or compassionate empathy, though it can be paired with these other forms. Cognitive empathy is neutral; it requires no moral or ethical element. Cognitive empathy is more of a rational, analytical, or logical process. It means stepping into others' thoughts and emotions, but doing so without feeling or adopting their thoughts and emotions.Cognitive empathy does not necessarily mean connecting directly to someone's mental processes—the cognition belongs to the one being empathic. One can conceptualize another person's thoughts or conceptualize another person's emotions. From a cognitive empathy perspective, to say that you can see another person's point of view, or can imagine what they feel, does not necessarily mean you value it, regard it as good or bad, or respect it—though cognitive empathy could lead you to one of those evaluations.
Emotional Empathy. This form of empathy is sometimes called affective empathy. This is an emotional process that allows us to feel what others are feeling. Emotional empathy usually means connecting to others' emotions while being similarly emotional yourself. Emotional empathy can offset the coldness of cognitive empathy, preventing us from being aloof to other people's distress. At its best, emotional empathy means responding with healthy emotions to others' emotional states or situations. However, we will often select whom we feel empathy for (cognitively or emotionally) based upon our biases and prejudices, or simply whom we are closest to. Emotional empathy may magnify this tendency, as emotional empathy tends to focus our attention on individual personalities in specific situations instead of larger, more abstract populations. As designers, we might over-respond to a particular individual's stress and overthink a design solution that needs to serve multitudes.
While some emotional empathy can prompt us to action, too much emotional empathy can cause us to be stressed ourselves. We can suffer from emotional contagion, whereby we internalize others' emotions, or we can even spark our own, different emotions, becoming angry at an other's pain, for example. One can also become emotional about another person's confusion or inability to understand a difficult design, in which case our emotions precede and anticipate another person's emotions.
Avoiding emotional contagion can help us be calm and logical when others need our help, but too much coolness will come across as uncaring or clinical. Emotional empathy can be effective in personal relationships, particularly when involving positive and even complementary emotions, but it is often ineffective for understanding people in general. Emotional empathy can cause us to simplify another person's experience in our own mind, thereby doing them an injustice. We can certainly articulate a similar criticism with cognitive empathy.
Compassionate Empathy. Compassionate empathy is sometimes called empathic concern. This identification of empathy is relatively novel compared to the other two and seems to have a bit less agreement at present. In some ways, compassionate empathy is a melding of cognitive and emotional empathy. It eliminates the extremes of being too cerebral and also of being too feeling. Like morals, ethics, etiquette, and law, compassionate empathy seeks to consider the experience of others more abstractly and more universally. Compassionate empathy means I care about your experience, I value your perspective, I give weight to your needs and your emotions, I am mindful of where you are coming from, but I don't get wrapped up in feeling your distress, because that's not useful to you and it is harmful to me. Compassionate empathy is a form that is sometimes attributed to the practice of Buddhism.
Empathy is about others
Related to empathy is the natural tendency that humans, as well as other animals, have toward helping and protecting others. Sometimes this sense of altruism can be unemotional, like cognitive empathy—based on an idea that the world we construct should be helpful to others and safe for their use as a matter of course. Other times, a sense of duty or responsibility to help and protect is connected to an awareness of the suffering of others or of potential danger to others. For the designer, a preference for incorporating ease of use and safety in a design may have to do with a preference for productivity and effectiveness, which can be conceptual and logical as well as altruistic. Even still, the awareness that a design is useful for another relates to the usefulness we would want for ourselves.When discussing empathy, we have to consider also the actions we take as a result of that empathy. Certainly, that is the entire purpose of empathy in design—to take appropriate actions in creating our designs. Cognitive empathy does not, by definition, imply taking action to improve another person's experience. One often does, but one can also use cognitive empathy to manipulate, exploit, and even torture others. Similarly, emotional empathy can mean getting bogged down in others' emotional states, which can become paralyzing. Emotional empathy can be, in some ways, self-indulgent. Or, in contrast, it can lead to shutting down and safeguarding one's own emotional health in the face of seemingly hopeless distress. In addition, taking on someone's pain can feed into the suffering of the other person, and that gets us nowhere.
Compassionate empathy means showing concern but it is a form of empathy that also facilitates reaching out. Compassionate empathy can foster action where emotional empathy can prompt reaction. Cognitive empathy may or may not motivate action, but compassionate empathy, by some definitions, implies action. Compassionate empathy, by merging the cerebral and the affective, can give us a deeper understanding of other people. When we consider how others might think and feel, we might, with some effort, imagine the complexities and contradictions of their needs, their desires, their expectations, and other ways that they think and feel. We want to open our minds to as many perspectives as possible, so that we aren't simply patronizing our customers or pandering to superficialities of their cultures.
When you step into someone else's shoes, or try to imagine yourself in someone's situation, or try to imagine what another person is thinking or feeling, or try to sort through how you feel about another person's feelings, whether you are being sympathetic, empathic, or compassionate, you are comparing and contrasting your points of view with an abstract other psychology. This is challenging, and can seem sort of unnatural. But the fact is, it is natural for everyone to empathize. Empathy happens when we connect with something innately human.
Some people are more inclined toward empathy than others, and different people are inclined toward different kinds of empathy. In addition, some people have trained their minds toward empathy better than others. So empathy can be both a learned skill and a personal trait. Empathy is situational as well. It is a stance one can adopt in circumstances where it can be used as a tool. It can be a mental state or a point of view one adopts when it is useful to do so.
Empathy involves listening to words and paying attention to nonverbal cues. Over time, when you have listened to feedback from many people, observed their interactions with systems and products, and conceptualized their points of view, you can empathize with an abstract individual rather than a real one. You can become, yourself, a customer instead of a designer when stepping back and considering the product you are designing.
Empathy is about ourselves
Empathy asks us to focus on others. But in many ways, empathy is about addressing our own thinking. The point of empathy is that we are imagining and experiencing what it feels like to be another person. It is important to understand that this is an expansion of our own cognition and emotional intelligence. When we are creating a design or a product for other people, we have already presumed to know the customer and their needs. That's why you make a new product, to satisfy a perceived need. By going into production, we have taken a step toward enhancing others' experiences and this is potentially—perhaps inherently—manipulative.In some business sensibilities, manipulation is meritorious. In the 21st century, the providing of products and services is increasingly seen as cooperative. Be that as it may, we have a big responsibility when we take control of the design process. We cannot presume to have authority over the experience of others. At the same time, we may be introducing our customers to something we know more about than they do. And certainly we are the ones taking responsibility for a design that no one else has yet created. We have to accommodate other people's values while also recognizing our responsibility to guide and our ability to teach. We have to recognize that our customers know themselves and their needs better than we can predict but, then again, just as we are too close to our designs, the user can be too close to their previous experiences to understand our intentions and adapt to an innovative product. Finally, in too many organizations, how we communicate has less to do with what we give our customers and more to do with what we want for ourselves. Empathy is one way we can remedy arrogance, egoism, and rampant self-interest while determining the best ways to enhance our customers' experiences and grow our customer's consciousness, along with our own.
