Empathy

Figure 1: Degrees of Emotion

The Depth of Emotional Connection

For well over a decade, empathy has become an evergreen buzzword. This is surprising, not so much because casual observation would suggest that the world sorely needs _more_empathy, but because it’s so poorly defined and understood

Having, or displaying empathy, as well as being empathatic, are actually quite difficult, so we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves that we get it wrong but we can at least try.

See Bloom (2016) and also Steed and Safari (2019).

We can only ever really understand another person’s perspective from the lens of our own history which clouds our own perspectives. Its never possible to really understand that person because you can never really have their experience to really understand what it means to be that person even if you were to walk in their shoes you don’t have their history and you’re still not that person. (cf. to be a bat, plus badger study).

So if we cannot truly appreciate a person’s lived experience, because we can’t actually live it, what’s the best we can do?

Can we identify where our experience obscures our understanding and compensate by (controlling for and) subtracting it? This is akin to resolving systematic error after collecting data. It’s better to identify it and control for it, thus eliminating it, than to adjust for it. Here, any intervention runs the risk of introducing still more systematic error.

Okay so then the only valid thing to do is accept the other person’s description of their lived experience as truth. On the one hand, yes, their experience is, by definition, their truth. We can’t deny a person their own lived experience. But on the other hand, just as we see their experience through our own lenses, they suffer from the same limitation. Indeed, we all do. (cf. known and unknown variables.). This includes our cultural background our experiences everything to make this a person that informs us about how we receive a specific experience. It also includes influences which we may take for granted or fail to appreciate.

So what can we do? is it an impossible scenario to put ourselves in the shoes of another person and see the world to their perspective? It may seem that we have an insurmountable challenge but I argue on the contrary it allows us to simplify the process to its most generic and universally applicable solution. Which is not to say reductionist approach which isolates single components and have used them out of context. Here the simplification is a metal model to helps foster a personal connection, however false, that reminds us that we are dealing with an actual person with all the complexity that that entails.

Like all models we have inputs and variables in which we are connecting the person all the parameters that influence their experience or the primaris that influence our experience plus all those that we know but cannot quantify plus all those which we don’t even know just like all of the other models

Most sources describe two types of Empathy — emotional empathy and congnitive empathy

Pity
Feeling sorry for the unfortunate circumstances of others. No or little emotional connection beyond discomfort. A feeling of superiority and detachment.
Sympathy
Feeling that we are on the same wavelength as others. An emotional connection that we are unified in the same cause. An understanding of motivations.
Cognitive Empathy
Perceiving the needs of other people.
Emotional Empathy
Feeling outselves the emotions of others.
Compassion
Feeling a deep connection with ourselves and others. A sense of familiarity and a genuine desire for authentic, long-term well-being.