Is a systematic, analytical focus the best approach to enhance empathy?
Wednesday, December 13, 2023. Another road trip to Virginia to visit my son, Dan. See you at 7 monkeyboy!
Revised Monday, September 2, 2024.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about “how to mind read, if you absolutely must.”In that post, I discussed the bind we have between Occupational Psychology seeking to systematize soft skills, and the erratic and imprecise fashion in which most humans attempt to empathize with others.
Surprisingly, according to these researchers from Harvard, systematic reasoning beats gut instinct for working out what other people are thinking and feeling.
The result is a bit unexpected, as the same research found that humans thought that gut instinct would triumph.
Dr. Jennifer Lerner, one of the study’s authors, said:
“Cultivating successful personal and professional relationships requires the ability to accurately infer the feelings of others – that is, to be empathically accurate.
Some are better at this than others, a difference that may be explained in part by mode of thought.
Until now, however, little was known about which mode of thought, intuitive versus systematic, offers better accuracy in perceiving another’s feelings.”
What is empathetic accuracy?
In the first of a series of studies, the psychologists discovered that most humans rely on their gut instinct, which was also believed to be the best way to read and understand other humans.
Actually, according to these researchers, when they checked this out scientifically, it emerged that carefully analysing information worked better.
Dr. Christine Ma-Kellams, thought leader, 2-time Harvard Post-Doc Fellow, and fiction writer, is the study’s first author. She said:
“Importantly, three out of the four studies presented here relied on actual professionals and managers.
This sample represents a highly relevant group for which to test empathic accuracy, given the importance of empathic accuracy for a host of workplace outcomes, including negotiations, worker satisfaction and workplace performance.”
One of the studies found that people who habitually thought systematically rather than intuitively were better at reading other people.
Another study, though, encouraged half the participants to think in a systematic way with the following instruction:
“…write about a situation in which carefully reasoning through a situation led them in the right direction and resulted in a positive outcome.”
The other group were encouraged to think intuitively.
Once again, analytical thought seems to have, once again, prevailed.
Dr. Lerner said:
“The many settings in which the value of intuition is extolled — for example a job interview — may need to be reassessed with a more nuanced perspective.”
Final thoughts
This is another one of those studies longing for a capitalist gangsta paradise in which we credibly and accurately infer the feelings of other humans, to our increasing profit and delight.
It’s important to remember that this is a workplace study.
Workplace empathy relates to life-partner empathy, the way a military band marching down Main Street relates to a small jazz combo grooving in a corner bar.
These researchers are probably confusing empathy with retail discernment, because they both feel good, when they land well.
But that’s where the resemblance ends. Organizations often require professional intervention in order to provoke a semblance of empathy…
A professional manager bestows a goal-seeking, professional empathy.
It’s a pale, unsatisfying substitute. And everyone knows it.
But it serves the field of Occupational Psychology to assume otherwise, and explore for evidence to blur that distinction.
What I suspect is that these researchers may have caught was the perhaps the conscientious effort of neurodivergent managers to better understand their neurotypical underlings. At the end of the day, the researchers are describing a careful, goal-oriented noticing, recruited to elicit a preferred emotional outcome.
The idea that systematic managers were somehow better at this than managers using their gut instincts is the click-bait headline.
I’m learning that musings about the “best ways” to display soft skills can be as oppressive as they are confusing for the neurodivergent.
And, most importantly, I think it’s the wrong question.
Why can’t we luxuriate into multiple pathways of empathetic noticing without trying to bestify?
Since I just made that word ‘bestify' up… let me explain:
To “bestify”..is to insist on identifying a best way to do something, even if you make other humans profoundly uncomfortable in the process.
I have my doubts that a systemic approach to empathy is necessarily worse, or better, although it might be occasionally, and randomly experienced as more accurate.
But I will acknowledge that, because humans enjoy all sorts of different brains, it is often necessary.
Be well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Ma-Kellams, C., & Lerner, J. (2016). Trust your gut or think carefully? Examining whether an intuitive, versus a systematic, mode of thought produces greater empathic accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5), 674–685. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000063
