Empathy Is a Technical Skill

Implementing empathy from colloquial, cliché advice can inadvertently lead us away from our desired outcomes. Instead of seeing empathy as simple or a superpower, it's time we embrace empathy as a technical skill.

Empathy may seem simple. Many people consider it to be just a feeling. If you look it up in the dictionary, you might find a definition like this: “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”[1] You may also recall common clichés and colloquialisms. Empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes” or “treating people the way you’d like to be treated.” These phrases remind us that our perspective isn’t the only one that matters and that we should take the time to look at things differently. What could be wrong with that?

As it turns out, applying this type of colloquial empathy can lead to some serious problems. Here are some examples:

1. There is mounting evidence that overemphasizing the emotional connection aspect of empathy can lead to serious ethical problems.[2]
2. Imagining yourself in another person’s experience often causes personal distress, which can drive disconnection,[3] discrimination,[4] and burnout.[5]
3. Empathy is hard work and cognitively expensive, so we can be motivated to avoid it.[6]
4. Empathy can drive division through parochialism and polarization.[7] Left unchecked, empathy can even grow into dehumanization and violence.[8]

This isn’t to say that empathy is doom and gloom or that we should abandon it altogether. There are many measurably positive outcomes of empathy and specific interventions that can help us tweak this good natured advice to increase the probability of more positive outcomes, such as: [9] [10] [11] [12]

• Higher levels of care, kindness, positive attitudes, and prosocial behavior for people who have been stigmatized or are in need.
• Reduced hostility, inter-group conflicts, and “us vs. them” thinking
• Higher awareness of discriminatory practices and improved collaboration and inclusiveness in groups of diverse people
• Improved relationships and more effective interpersonal communication
• Less burnout and generally higher levels of well-being
• More accurate recognition of emotions in yourself and others
• Better business outcomes, including increased morale, lower turnover, and higher profits
• Higher levels of empathic capacity (self-reported)

When people have been given the training to use empathy in more effective ways, these interventions are often quite effective. Empathy is a skill. A skill you can get better at with training, patience, dedication, and practice.

The good intentions of the sayings we’re familiar with shouldn’t go away. They can continue to inspire us to be better people. We just need to recognize that implementing their advice as written often isn’t effective.

Over the past two decades, a treasure trove of new research is giving us the data we need to take a technical approach with empathy. We now have lots of learnings to draw from which provide a more detailed understanding of what empathy is, what it isn’t, and how we can operationalize it effectively. However, successfully implementing technical empathy requires us to follow the advice of Master Yoda and "unlearn what we have learned."

Unlearning #1: Empathy Is a Skill, Not a Fixed Trait

Another common misconception of empathy is that it is a fixed trait, similar to adult height and that your empathic ability is predetermined at birth. Cultural stereotypes reinforce the idea that some people, typically women, are born empaths and are able to correctly infer other people’s emotions with a high degree of accuracy.

These myths may be misguided. Genetics do have an influence, but it’s likely much less than we might imagine. Some researchers estimate only 25-30% of individual variation in empathic ability is due to genetics.[13] Associative learning, environment, motivation, social identity, and resource management are likely much bigger contributors to our ability to empathize in a given situation.

Unlearning #2: Empathy Failures are Normal, Empathy Superstars are Hype

We are also much less accurate at inferring another person’s mental state than we would probably like to believe. While empathy is regularly claimed as a superpower, those who sense a heightened ability would do well to note that they are often wrong. Average emphatic accuracy rates are around 20% for total strangers and 30-35% for people who are in close relationships. According to William Ickes, the leading researcher on empathic accuracy, “The highest individual scores my colleagues and I see in our research usually fall in the range of 50 to 60%...After more than 20 years of research, we have yet to see any empathic superstars who score in the higher percentages—the upper 70s, the 80s, or the 90.”[14]

When people are more inclined to observe their empathic failure more readily than their empathic accuracy, this can influence their belief in their ability to empathize at all. “When people fail to empathize, they may conclude that they are unable to empathize or that they are not empathic people,” researchers Erika Weisz and Jamil Zaki note. “Instead, teaching people that empathy failures can be overcome with increased effort (i.e., inducing a growth mindset about empathy) could make them resilient to empathic failures and encourage them to exert more effort empathizing in these contexts.”[15]

If you don’t think you’re good at empathizing, it may help to recognize that no one is accurate all of the time and you can grow your skills and abilities with practice. If you have claimed empathy as your superpower, remember that your inference about someone else is often incorrect and should never be treated as fact.

Unlearning #3: Gendered Empathy is Likely a Stereotype

As for gender, women have been observed to display more stereotypically empathic behavior than men. However, recent research is calling these prior findings into question. In a paper that analyzed 60 years of research on empathy and gender, Robyn Bluhm concluded, “With the exception of studies that rely on participants’ self-reports, or on others’ reports of their behavior, no consistent gender differences in empathy have been observed. This pattern raises the possibility that gender differences in empathy are in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder is more influenced by gender stereotypes than by empathetic feelings or behaviors themselves.”[16]

Properties of a Technical Skill

Now that we understand why implementing colloquial empathy is risky, let's look at how a technical approach may be a better strategy. First, we need to get clear on what a "technical" skill is. While this term is often ascribed to working with technology or complex machines, it doesn’t have to be. An artist who knows the minutiae of her medium is technical. An athlete who understands the subtilties of their sport is technical, too. Being technical isn’t an aspect of what tools you work with. Regardless of the domain, technical expertise encompasses:

• Depth of knowledge
• Precision of language
• Specialization of skills
• Practical application
• Following the research

When we embrace a technical understanding of a domain, we lean into precision. We rely more on evidence and less on intuition. We recognize that there’s always more to learn and why it’s important to continue to update our understanding as new information becomes available. We question assumptions and embrace our curiosity as we continue to dive deeper into the details. When a domain is approached in a technical way you can spend decades diving deep into any single aspect and keep finding new things to learn. This is certainly true in the field of software development, and it's true in the domain of applied empathy, too.

The Time for Technical Empathy Has Come

Technical empathy helps us find targeted interventions. General advice, such as “have more empathy,” “be a better listener,” “improve your communication,” “be aware of your bias” is helpful for spotting a problem but fails to provide a meaningful solution to solve it. With technical empathy, we go deeper. Instead of describing what needs to be done, we find specific, concrete, and actionable ways to deploy behavioral strategies with more confidence because we’re aware of the risks and benefits of our choices.

By shedding our simple colloquial understanding of empathy and embracing empathy as a technical skill, we see empathy in a new way. Like with software development, when we better understand underlying mechanisms, we can increase the likelihood that our empathy intentions will be executed as planned.

Technical empathy allows us to better identify and fix the bugs in our communication, personal well-being, interpersonal relationships, and the ways in which our decisions as technologists impact society more broadly. Following the evidence from recent research, we can look at empathy's intricacies in a much more nuanced way than we ever have before. Personally, I find this incredibly empowering. How about you?

Feedback Appreciated

This article is adapted from a draft section of a book I'm working on titled Empathy-Driven Software Development: A Practical Guide to Coding with Compassion , which is being published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley.

I'd really appreciate your feedback, so please consider posting a comment to help make the material stronger. What are you skeptical about? Is there anything that resonated with you? Do you have any research or stories that you'd like to share? I'm looking forward to hearing your points of view. :)

* Criticism is encouraged. Cruelty is not. Keep your comments respectful.

[1] “Empathy,” in Cambridge Dictionary, accessed October 24, 2022, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/empathy.

[2] Jean Decety and Jason M. Cowell, “The Complex Relation between Morality and Empathy,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18, no. 7 (July 1, 2014): 337–39, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.04.008.

[3] Jacob Israelashvili, Disa Sauter, and Agneta Fischer, “Two Facets of Affective Empathy: Concern and Distress Have Opposite Relationships to Emotion Recognition,” Cognition and Emotion 34, no. 6 (August 17, 2020): 1112–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2020.1724893.

[4] C. Chad Woodruff and Larry Stevens, “Where Caring for Self and Others Lives in the Brain, and How It Can Be Enhanced and Diminished: Observations on the Neuroscience of Empathy, Compassion, and Self-Compassion,” in The Neuroscience of Empathy, Compassion, and Self-Compassion, ed. Larry Stevens and C. Chad Woodruff (San Diego: Academic Press, 2018), 285–320, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809837-0.00011-8.

[5] Siedine K. Coetzee and Heather K.S. Laschinger, “Toward a Comprehensive, Theoretical Model of Compassion Fatigue: An Integrative Literature Review,” Nursing & Health Sciences 20, no. 1 (2018): 4–15, https://doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12387.

[6] C. Daryl Cameron et al., “Empathy Is Hard Work: People Choose to Avoid Empathy Because of Its Cognitive Costs.,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148, no. 6 (June 2019): 962–76, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000595.

[7] Emile G. Bruneau, Mina Cikara, and Rebecca Saxe, “Parochial Empathy Predicts Reduced Altruism and the Endorsement of Passive Harm,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 8, no. 8 (November 1, 2017): 934–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693064.

[8] Melike M. Fourie, Sivenesi Subramoney, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Less Attractive Feature of Empathy: Intergroup Empathy Bias, Empathy - An Evidence-Based Interdisciplinary Perspective (IntechOpen, 2017), https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69287.

[9] Francis Stevens and Katherine Taber, “The Neuroscience of Empathy and Compassion in Pro-Social Behavior,” Neuropsychologia 159 (August 20, 2021): 107925, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107925.

[10] Erika Weisz and Jamil Zaki, “Empathy-Building Interventions: A Review of Existing Work and Suggestions for Future Directions,” Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, 2017, 14.

[11] Kenneth Nowack and Paul Zak, “Empathy Enhancing Antidotes for Interpersonally Toxic Leaders.,” Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 119–33, https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000164.

[12] Doron Atias and Hillel Aviezer, “Empathic Accuracy: Lessons from the Perception of Contextualized Real-Life Emotional Expressions,” in The Neural Basis of Mentalizing, ed. Michael Gilead and Kevin N. Ochsner (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021): 171–88, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_9.

[13] Jean Decety and Claire Holvoet, “The Emergence of Empathy: A Developmental Neuroscience Perspective,” Developmental Review 62 (December 2021): 100999, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2021.100999.

[14] William Ickes, “Everyday Mind Reading Is Driven by Motives and Goals,” Psychological Inquiry 22 (2011): 200–206, https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2011.561133.

[15] Weisz and Zaki, “Empathy-Building Interventions: A Review of Existing Work and Suggestions for Future Directions.” Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, 2017, 14.

[16] Robyn Bluhm, “Gender and Empathy,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge, 2017): 377-387