The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess and Liz Neporent is a non-fiction book about building empathy. The advice is based on neurobiological and physiological research. The subtitle is “7 neuroscience-based keys for transforming the way we live, love, work, and connect across differences”.
Notes
- The book talks about three types of empathy: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy and emotional concern.
- Emotional empathy is the sense of feeling what other people are feeling.
- Cognitive empathy is being able to understand what someone else is thinking and feeling and why, and then to see things from their perspective.
- Empathic concern is the motivation to care about other people.
- The “7 neuroscience-based keys” are include several physical aspects such posture and tone of voice. The last two are “hearing the whole person” and “your response”. “Hearing the whole person” includes listening without judgement.
- A chapter on the relationship between empathy and digital communication suggests that empathic skills can be both learned and unlearned. Internet trolls are an extreme case: research shows that they tend not to view their targets as real people, but their behaviour also harms themselves in the long-term, with their reduced empathy giving them a higher chance of becoming depressed and feeling isolated. But the book suggests that more well-intentioned people can also be affected – communicating by text alone makes it harder to listen empathically, and it’s more common for misunderstandings to occur and then go unresolved.
Reflections
Perhaps, with more conscious attention, we can become better at conveying empathy through text-based communication. A few quick, untested ideas: checking in with how other people are feeling and avoiding leaving long, unexplained gaps in communication whenever possible. But another potential problem with text-based online communication is the questions about where the words will be saved and who will have access. Empathic communication on sensitive topics needs confidentiality – I suspect people will be subconsciously influenced by the possibility that corporations may be listening in, and they’ll be less open even if they don’t realise it.
In my recent reading, the idea of paying attention without judgement has appeared repeatedly in several different contexts. This is a concept I’d like to explore further.