Business Empathy: A Trendy Oxymoron

The English word “empathy” came into existence about a century ago when psychologists from Cornell and the University of Cambridge suggested it as the translation for the German term Einfühlung, literally meaning “feeling-in”(Lanzoni). “Empathy” caught on, but over its short history, the term has been defined and redefined many times. Despite the extensive literature on the concept and how often it is discussed in various realms today, there is still dispute about what empathy actually means.

In fact, empathy can now refer to at least eight different concepts, according to the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades (Lanzoni). To make the matter worse, empathy and sympathy are often falsely used interchangeably, and compassion frequently gets thrown into the mix as well.

The usage of the term empathy to refer to different concepts that are not actually empathy is especially common in business discourse, where it is praised as the “key to profit” by executives like Lady Geek CEO Belinda Parmar (Niranjan). However, because businesses are primarily interested in advancing their interests rather than those of others, it is inherently impossible for them to act based on genuine empathy. Furthermore, referring to empathy as a business tool may focus professional efforts in the wrong direction, and more importantly, it ultimately cheapens the value of the word empathy.

According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, the definition of empathy is, simply put, feeling the feelings of other people (Illing). Genuinely empathizing requires sensing the feelings of another person and experiencing them as if you were him or her. This is different from sympathy, understanding someone’s emotions, or compassion, valuing a person’s concerns and caring but not necessarily feeling the same way (Illing). However, over the past several years, the definition of empathy has been overextended to include other meanings, resulting in empathy becoming a trendy corporate buzzword.

The development of empathy as a buzzword in the business sector is likely due to the recent emphasis on the importance of organizations’ understanding consumer needs to improve products and services for its users. While some individuals may truly be using empathy in certain business-related interactions, it seems that many companies are restructuring the deeply personal skill to create “empathy,” the latest corporate tactic to connect with consumers. This “empathy” is used to generate revenue and maximize profit, but true empathy is not a process that can be expanded to an entire industry and systematically reaped for profit.

For example, a magazine telemarketer calls a potential customer and strikes up a conversation about the man’s interests to get a bearing on what type of magazine he might enjoy. She gathers enough information to predict that the older man would enjoy a specific senior sports magazine for its weekly listing of recreational activities in the local area in which he could participate. The man is thrilled by her suggestion because he had been looking for a fun way to stay active and turn his life around. However, he is honest with her and discloses that he is bankrupt and unsure if he can even afford to eat three meals a day in the coming weeks.

If the telemarketer were to act genuinely empathetic, she would insist that the man not buy the magazine and let him know that he could probably find out about local recreational events for free online.

It is unlikely that this is the “empathy” that is spoken about in business. True empathy in this scenario is not just the telemarketer imagining what she would be interested in reading if she were the man and using that to make a sale. It is feeling the stress he feels from his financial struggles and therefore advising him against buying the product, even though that goes against the telemarketer’s personal and company business goals.

Some may argue that empathy does not require such a sacrifice, but it is not possible to step outside of our default self-oriented perspective to feel the emotions of another person without letting go of personal thoughts and emotions. According to the 2015 report Neuroscience and Peacebuilding: Reframing How We Think About Conflict and Prejudice, humans have the capacity to empathize with the feelings of others, but we experience our own emotions as the most real and salient.

Holding on to ulterior business motives especially prevents the clarity of mind and heart that is required to make such an imaginative leap. A telemarketer is unable to feel from her target customer’s perspective when clouded by her own desires to sell a product. However, the empathetic telemarketer who does surrender her perspective to be able to feel the man’s stress would probably want to prevent aggravating that stress since she can feel it as well.

Professor of Philosophy at California State University–Fullerton Amy Coplan describes empathy that does not actually surrender focus on the self as ‘pseudo-empathy’:

“I use this term [pseudo-empathy] to refer to an attempt to adopt a target individual’s perspective by imagining how we ourselves would think, feel, and desire if we were in the target individual’s position. It is, essentially a type of self-oriented perspective taking” (Coplan 54).

‘Pseudo-empathy’ quite literally means fake, or false empathy. Interestingly, however, Coplan’s definition of this term seems to be fairly congruent to the common usage of empathy in business dialogue. According to cultural sociology scholar Carolyn Pedwell, the authors of the bestselling book Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy imagine the empathetic company as one that can “walk in someone else's shoes” (Pedwell 287). Walking in someone’s shoes is a metaphor frequently used to describe how professionals can use empathy, but the notion represents an attempt to imagine how we would feel in another’s position rather than imagine how the other actually feels from their own perspective.

The counterpart to this ‘pseudo-empathy’ is what Coplan describes as the following:

“In other-oriented perspective taking, a person represents the other’s situation from the other person’s point of view and attempts to simulate the target individual’s experiences as though she were the target individual. Thus, I imagine that I am you in your situation, which is to say, I attempt to simulate your experiences from your point of view” (Coplan 54).

Although a much more difficult imaginative effort, this action of focusing on the other person’s perspective is what is required to feel true empathy. Furthermore, because acting empathetically must involve sacrificing personal motives, i.e. letting go of the self to truly feel for the other, genuine empathy seems directly irreconcilable with the purpose of businesses.

While it is possible for an individual employee to have a truly empathetic experience with a consumer, it is doubtful that the same can be said about a corporation as a whole. For example, an employee could feel the consumer’s emotions and decide to forfeit a sale or opportunity because it is in the best interest of the other person. This might even cause the consumer to build a good relationship with the company and return to give them business when it is in their best interest to do so. However, to try to mass-produce this empathy company-wide would mean actually putting customers’ needs as a whole before company goals, and not in a gimmicky, “We put our customers first!”, manner. This would essentially require forfeiting any selfish enterprises to principally focus on others, something that businesses are not willing to do because it does not make sense for them to do.

Businesses exist to make profit. Of course, many have other goals along the way and may very well have corporate social responsibility initiatives and philanthropic efforts that are very important to them, but they are still ultimately profit-driven. Companies would go under if they made business decisions based primarily on the feelings of others, but the perpetuation of empathy as the ‘most important business tool today’ implies that this is precisely what efforts should be focused on. While many companies may use the word empathy to describe their practices because it sounds nice, they are likely to understand that their business empathy is more similar to Coplan’s “pseudo-empathy” than to genuine empathy. However, some companies who attempt to join the bandwagon and reap the benefits of the trending “empathy” may not understand this semantic distinction and could end up wasting resources focusing on feeling consumers’ emotions and making decisions based on those emotions.

This distinction between genuine empathy and other similar notions is more than semantics, however. There is evidence that these separate concepts activate different parts of the brain and therefore require different mental efforts (Illing). This could have consequences for professionals who listen to business leaders that rave about the power of “empathy” but are actually referring to a practice that is not truly empathy. In fact, focusing a company’s main efforts on truly acting empathetically would essentially be business suicide.

Large corporations may be able to afford to do some truly empathic acts—albeit infrequently—and have incentives to do so and publicize them to create positive public relations. However, smaller businesses are less able to afford losses and may try to take advice from industry leaders who encourage empathetic behavior in business. While NBC may be able to set aside time and money to act empathetically, it’s unlikely that an owner of a small hardware company can afford to do the same as a consistent business strategy. In general, empathy should not be considered a “key to profit” because true empathy requires consistently feeling the feelings of consumers, which would focus efforts away from generating profits.

Acting truly empathetic towards a person does not always necessarily mean being nice or giving a person what they want, moreover, which can obviously also be bad for business in its own right. In some cases, the empathetic thing to do might even make the other person unhappy in the moment. For example, if your daughter repeatedly has her heart broken by the same person, and you can feel her pain, the empathetic thing to do might be to protect her from future pain by making sure she doesn’t have contact with the person, even if all she wants is to see him in that moment. This type of situation could translate to business if a person gains an unhealthy addiction to a product. For example, the alcohol industry might need to restrict alcohol sales to anyone whose life has been seriously negatively affected by the overconsumption of alcohol to be empathetic to their consumers. In addition to being logistically difficult to implement, a decision like this would likely eliminate a decent portion of consumers and therefore significantly cut into the industry’s profits.

Moreover, aside from an inherent inability to constantly give up resources to empathize with others and the impracticality of running an emotion-based business, it is also unlikely for it to be possible for companies to empathize with hundreds, thousands, and especially millions of consumers. In fact, it’s near impossible for any person—let alone corporation—to genuinely empathize with more than a few people at the same time. Truly feeling what others are feeling is exhausting and requires focus that Bloom compares in an interview to a spotlight that can only zoom into where you point it:

“How many people can you [empathize] with? Well, maybe I could do that with you and some other guy at the same time. You’re feeling different things, and I kind of got them both in my head. Can I do it for 10 or 12 or a 100 people? No. Maybe an almighty god could empathize with every living being. But typically, we zoom in on one” (Illing).

Perhaps this constraint on empathy is why some companies segment their audiences into groups of similar people as a way to manage mass amounts of people as one type of person. Some companies even create and name fictional characters to represent an entire audience in order to make it easier to empathize with many people at once. While this technique may help professionals understand their consumers enough to market to them, it’s doubtful that it brings them any closer to feeling their emotions.

In fact, in most cases where professionals refer to using empathy in business, they are often actually speaking of sincerely understanding consumers’ needs and desires. Understanding often includes having knowledge of how a person is thinking and feeling, but does not necessarily involve actually feeling what a person is feeling. Some may argue that understanding and feeling are entangled, but it is easy to find disassociations. Bloom uses psychopaths, who by nature do not feel normal emotions and can’t empathize, to illustrate an example of such a disassociation. He points out that competent psychopaths are impressively good at influencing people because they have such a good understanding of others, despite the fact they can’t even attempt to empathize with them (Illing). This example shows that there is a difference between understanding and feeling, illustrating that professionals do not need to feel consumers’ emotions to understand them.

It is entirely possible and often necessary for businesspeople to use a deep understanding of consumers based on market research, big data, and interpersonal skill to their advantage in business. In fact, it is genuine understanding, not genuine empathy that is essential to profit in an age where consumer sensitivity seems more important than ever. Professionals could easily replace the word “empathy” with “authentic understanding” when they speak of the wonders it can do for business such as in Wired to Care. Through producing “widespread empathy” amongst employees, the authors suggest, companies like IMB and Nike have not only become more in tune with the “specific interests and needs of their customers”, but also been able to “discover and seize on new markets and opportunities for growth” (Patnaik xi). However, corporate leaders are inclined to incorrectly speak of empathy in their discourse because of the popularity of using the word, regardless of what they mean by it.

Besides the potentially detrimental consequences to businesses of attempting to genuinely empathize with consumers, discussing empathy as a business technique degrades its true meaning. As Pedwell puts it, “It is clear that what is valued above all here is not care, ethics, or morality per se but, rather, how empathy, as an affective technology for `knowing the other', can be mobilized to extract increased profits” (Pedwell 287). It is not immoral to seek knowledge about others and learn how to better understand consumers for business efforts, but empathy should be saved for greater purposes.

Likening the word to a profit tool makes it too easy to forget its potential. Feeling the emotions of another is an experience than can be a wonderful source of pleasure, from allowing us to enjoy fiction as if we were one of the characters living in a story to giving us the ability to feel deep intimacy with another human being. Moreover, the phenomenon of genuine empathy is one so powerful that it can motivate people to look at the world from others’ perspectives, something necessary to solve crises of national and global importance and listen to loved ones with an open heart and mind. A process so beautiful and potentially life-saving deserves to retain the integrity of its name.

Works Cited

Coplan, Amy. "Will The Real Empathy Please Stand Up? A Case

For A Narrow Conceptualization." The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011): 40-65. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Illing, Sean. "The case against empathy." Vox. Vox, 19 Jan. 2017.

Web. 2 Mar. 2017.

Lanzoni, Susan. "A Short History of Empathy." The Atlantic.

Atlantic Media Company, 15 Oct. 2015. Web. 1 Mar. 2017

"Neuroscience and Peacebuilding: Reframing How We Think

About Conflict and Prejudice.” Jan. 2015. Web. 21 Mar. 2017.

Niranjan, Ajit. "We don't really understand empathy, but we

know business could do with a little more." New Statesman. New Statesman Media Group, 28 July 2014. Web. 2 Mar.

2017.

Patnaik, Dev, and Peter Mortensen. Wired to Care: How

Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2011.

Pedwell, Carolyn. "Economies of empathy: Obama, neoliberalism,

and social justice." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30.2 (2012): 280-97. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.