I’ve been taking notes on how I empathize, considering I seem to be more successful at it than others. I broke down my thought-patterns, implied beliefs, and techniques, hoping to unveil the mechanism behind the magic. I shared my findings with a few friends and noticed something interesting: They were becoming noticeably better empathizers.
I realized the route to improving one’s ability to understand what people feel and think is not a foreign one. Empathy is a skill; with some guidance and lots of practice, anyone can make drastic improvements.
I want to impart the more fruitful methods/mind-sets and exercises I’ve collected over time.
Working definitions:
Projection: The belief that others feel and think the same as you would under the same circumstances
Model: Belief or “map” that predicts and explains people’s behavior
Stop identifying as a non-empathizer
This is the first step towards empathizing better—or developing any skill for that matter. Negative self-fulfilling prophecies are very real and very avoidable. Brains are plastic; there’s no reason to believe an optimal path-to-improvement doesn’t exist for you.
Not understanding people's behavior is your confusion, not theirs
When we learn our housemate spent 9 hours cleaning the house, we should blame our flawed map for being confused by his or her behavior. Maybe they’re deathly afraid of cockroaches and found a few that morning, maybe they’re passive aggressively telling you to clean more, or maybe they just procrastinate by cleaning. Our model of the housemate has yet to account for these tendencies.
People tend to explain such confusing behavior with stupidity, creepiness, neurosis or any other traits we associate with the mentally ill. With Occam’s Razor in perspective, these careless judgers are statistically the mentally ill ones. Their model being flawed is much more probable than their housemate going insane.
Similar to the fundamental attribution error, this type of mistake is committed more often with people we dislike. A good challenge is to try understanding confusing behavior from individuals or sub-cultures you dislike. You’ll find yourself disliking them a bit less if you’re doing it right.
Another challenge is to try and find the appeal in popular attractions/entertainment you dislike. For instance, if you dislike music videos, try watching a few until you get the “Aha” moment. Yes, that’s what it should feel like when you get it right.
As you’re able to explain more behaviors, your model of people becomes more robust, making you an overall better empathizer.
Projection works, but not for resolving confusion
People’s intuition for how someone’s feeling is normally accurate—with more ambiguous cases—intuition needs conscious support. Unfortunately, most rely too heavily on the “put yourself in their shoes” mantra. You are not always like most people and can react very differently in the same circumstances. There’s already an inclination to project and putting yourself in their shoes rarely overturns initial judgments. If you’re confused about someone’s behavior, it most likely means projection hasn’t worked so far.
Instead, build accurate models of people and figure out whether your model would’ve predicted such behavior. If not, gather reliable evidence proving what the person actually felt and tweak your model accordingly. Hopefully this is starting to sound a lot like the scientific method.
Understand yourself better
As mentioned above, projection normally works well (which is probably why humans are so inclined to do it). Projection, however, isn’t useful if you can’t predict your own reactions in another’s situation.
Catch yourself next time you experience an emotional reaction and try figuring out what network of beliefs caused it. As a personal anecdote, I tried to uncover the beliefs causing me to procrastinate on my work. I narrowed down the portions of work I had an emotional reaction to and discovered I believed I either didn’t have the skill or knowledge to complete the task. Now, when I try to explain other’s procrastination, I ask what part of the work they are having willpower issues with and determine their self-efficacy for those tasks. I was surprised to learn that others had the same beliefs causing their procrastination. Understanding yourself well can lend more non-trivial competing hypotheses.
Caveat: If you’re very different from most people, then understanding yourself better won’t be as helpful. In this case, I’d suggest finding someone more typical to be your proxy. Get to know them well enough to the point where your proxy model can explain/predict behaviors in other typical people.
Put others in YOUR shoes, that’s how they’re empathizing with you
We often find our empathy skills lacking when trying to explain others’ reactions to our own behaviors. We normally consider how we’d perceive our own behaviors coming from another person before acting—making questions like “Why did he think I didn’t want to see him last night?” or “Why was she so offended by my jokes?” hard to figure out off projection alone.
Use the fact that most people project to your advantage. If someone’s trying to empathize with you, they’ll most likely project i.e. put themselves in your shoes.
Imagine a man and woman on a date at a fancy restaurant and just about finished eating their meals. The waiter drops off the bill and the woman glances at the bill. She says enthusiastically, “Wow great food and for a great price too!” The man pays for the bill and moments later his mood shifts, becoming noticeably sadder and quieter. The woman knew he’s more passive than her, but still confused by his behavior.
As it turns out, the man imagined himself describing food as having a “great price” and realized he’d say that about cheap food. The man brought her to the fancy restaurant hoping to impress her, but felt his attempt failed. The woman didn’t think the food was cheap, she thought it was reasonably priced given how good it tasted and the restaurant’s upscale reputation. If she thought the food was cheap, she’d explicitly say so. Since she knows he’s more passive, she could’ve inferred the man believes others are more or less as passive as he is. Thinking back to the incident, she should’ve considered how people would interpret her statement as if she had a reputation for being passive.
One lesson I’ve learned from this technique is that considerate people are more sensitive to inconsiderate behavior. Because they closely monitor their own behaviors, they tend to assume others are about as equally conscientious. When they determine someone’s behavior to be inconsiderate, they are more likely to interpret the behavior as a sign of dislike or apathy rather than obliviousness.
Knowing others are projecting can help you learn more about yourself too. For instance, if you’re confused as to why your friends always ask “Is everything’s ok?” when you feel fine, consider that your friends may be observing certain behaviors they themselves would exhibit when uncomfortable. And maybe you are, in fact, uncomfortable, but aren’t consciously aware of it.
The simplest explanation is usually correct
As you develop your mental model of people, you’ll notice models share a lot in common. For instance, primitive motives like attraction, attention and status can explain the same behaviors exhibited in many people. These “universal” components to your models often yield more likely hypotheses. People are obviously more typical than they are not.
Try to pick out which behaviors are consistently explained by the same mechanism in your models. For instance, it’s helpful to know that most submissive/dominant behavior is done out of status disparities, not some idiosyncratic personality trait. Your knowledge of how people interact with status disparities will offer a powerful starting hypothesis.
As you continue to merge your models together, you’ll be that much closer to a unifying theory of people!
Build models of people, like a scientist
Start developing models of individuals and groups, which predict their behaviors under certain circumstances. Like a scientist, when the model proves to have low predictive value, tweak them until they do. Combining your models is a good approach.
Say you’re having trouble understanding why your brother does everything his new “friend” tells him to do. He’s never acted like that towards anyone before; your model of your brother is missing something. Fortunately, you’ve seen such behavior before, explained by a different model, the one of your co-worker. That model made you realize that, like your co-worker, your brother finds his new friend much higher status and feels lucky receiving his attention. Not only did you strengthen your brother model, you’ve also collected more evidence that such behavior is more likely status-related and less likely person-specific, making all your models more robust.
Experience more
If I tried imagining what a professional soccer player feels like scoring a winning goal, I’d use my memory of the time I scored the winning goal at a pick-up soccer game and multiply my euphoria by some factor. Imagining what emotions someone would feel under circumstances you’ve never experienced isn’t easy. Your best approximation may depend on a similar circumstance you have experienced. Therefore, experiencing more means being a better empathizer.
Empathy checklist
Here’s a short checklist of the different techniques to use whenever you’re confronted with confusing behavior. Run through the list until you feel confident about your conclusion.
- Put yourself in their shoes
- Think of times you’ve been in a similar situation and explain your reaction
- Can the behavior be explained by a more “universal” model than a person-specific one?
- How are they empathizing with you, given they are projecting?
- How are they empathizing with you, given what you know about how they perceive others?
- What successful model have you used to explain similar behavior for similar people?
- Is your conclusion affected by your attitude towards the subject?
Great points in this article. I noticed in high school that I had difficulties in this area, but rather than approach it with this conceptual pwno has, I sought out training regimens more like what you describe.
I can't say that they've been super effective. I still come across as a bit "off" a lot of the time, but they've certainly helped. YMMV, of course.
If you're single (or, at least, not locked down), join a dating website (or a few). Don't try to find the love of your life. Just try to go on as many first dates as you can. Try to learn as much as you can about the other person, and practice empathy techniques. This is good because people tend to have very little tolerance for odd behavior, and will be experiencing a lot of odd uncertainty, curiosity, excitement, etc., themselves. Make it your goal to learn about them, and build a model of this new person.
Take a foreign language. This is good because it's regular, safe, and you'll have to interact and converse with a bunch of people. Since you're all struggling, people tend to let their guard down, and the conversation topics are usually pretty basic (what's your name, where do you live, how many pets do you have, blah blah blah) so it's not distracting. I'm studying ASL now. Sign language is particularly good because facial/body language is such a huge part of the language, so it can build a lot of control and awareness.
Take a dance or martial arts class. Empathy is a very physical activity, and it can be incredibly instructive to learn how to trust your instincts and respond to another person's body in real time. While, of course, it happens in the brain, it's not the sort of problem that (in my experience) I can "think my way out of".
Tell the people closest to you that you've come to realize that this is something you need to work on, and that they seem pretty good at it, and ask them to a) call you out on it when you seem to act oddly, and b) to be patient and helpful if you ever ask them how they're feeling at random times. Most people will be flattered and happy to help. Then actually use their help! Resist the urge to be defensive if they correct you on something, and repeatedly check your model of how you think they're feeling if you're unsure. (Make sure to tell them that it's ok to tell you to stop, if it bugs them. You don't want to push people away in your quest to be more empathic!)
When you're speaking with people, try to figure out how they're feeling, and state it as a tentative sentence. Throw in "And you're happy about this" or "that makes you sad" or "you're mad at me about something" in conversation, if it seems like that's true. In therapy, this is called making "process comments" -- comments that just state what's happening, and don't try to add explanation or judgement. They'll correct you if you're wrong, and give you more information if you're right. It's an incredibly powerful technique, and much more difficult than it sounds.
Keep a log. At the end of each day, write down how someone you know was feeling, and how it made you feel, and what physical sensations made you aware of these feelings. Especially: make a note of any time when someone's behavior surprised you, or someone you know who is consistently surprising. This means that you're not reading them properly.
Remind yourself frequently that no one is the villain of their own story. So, while they may in fact be a villain any number of reasons, thinking of them as such will not help you understand them.
A lot of overcoming a lack of empathy is simply a matter of overcoming a fear of interaction as such. If you wear a watch or carry a book with you everywhere you go, stop. Every time you're at a bus stop (train station, etc.), ask someone what time it is, and make put-up comment. If you make them smile, you get a point. If you don't, make a note of it in your journal and try to think of why that might have been. Did they seem annoyed? Startled? Tired? What messages were you sending that might have made them felt that way? How could you have misinterpreted their reaction?
I learned a lot from doing door-to-door sales once upon a time, but I would not recommend that. As helpful as it was for getting over my lack of empathy and social skills, it was a horrible experience overall.
I'd second that in particular.