EMPATHY
What is it?
“Empathy is the ability to imagine
yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is
feeling. It is the ability to
stand in others’ shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts.”
Pink
gives contagious yawning as an example of spontaneous empathy. I have never thought about it in that
way. Steven Platek calls it this a
“primitive empathic mechanism.”
Apparently, according to research contagious yawners score high on
various tests that measure levels of Empathy. How fascinating.
What does it do?
“Empathy builds self-awareness,
bonds parent to child, allows us to work together, and provides the scaffolding
for our morality.” Empathy gives
us different perspectives, allows us to put ourselves in another person’s
position, helps us comfort someone, etc.
As the chapter describes, empathy is an important aspect of human life. “Empathy makes us human. Empathy brings job… Empathy is an
essential part of living a life of meaning.”
Evolution
During the Information Age, empathy
was often considered a weakness, especially in men. “The era of sharp-minded knowledge workers and briskly
efficient high-tech companies prized emotional distance and cool reason—the
ability to step back, assess the situation, and make a decision unimpeded by
emotion. But as with so many other
attributes of L-Directed Thinking, we are beginning to see the limits of such a
single-minded approach.”
As the Conceptual Age continues,
the aptitudes that are more difficult to replicate using computer and
technology are becoming more valuable.
“And the one aptitude that’s proven impossible for computers to
reproduce, and very difficult for faraway workers connected by electrons to
match, is Empathy.”
R-Directed Thinking
“We
both express our own emotions and read the emotions of others primarily through
the right hemisphere.”
I
was interested in the research that showed “The vast majority of
women—regardless of whether they are right-handed or left-handed—cradle babies
on their left side. Since babies
can’t talk, the only way we can understand their needs is by reading their
expressions and intuiting their emotions.
So we depend on our right hemisphere, which we enlist by turning to the
left.” I found this extremely
interesting. As I think of when I
cradle a baby it is most naturally on the left side, even though I am right
handed.
How Empathy relates
to other Senses
Design
-“Good designers put themselves in
the mind of whoever is going to experience the product or service they’re
designing.”
Symphony
-“Empathic people understand the
importance of context.”
-They see the “whole person.”
Story
-“Stories can be pathways to
Empathy—especially for physicians.”
Male vs. Female
“The
female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding
and building systems.” While this
isn’t the case for every female and male, “More males than females have brains
that systematize… More females than males have brains that empathize.”
Conclusion
“Empathy
is neither a deviation from intelligence nor the single route to it. Sometimes we need detachment; many
other times we need attunement.
And the people who will thrive will be those who can toggle between the
two.”
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