Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
The issue is not the empathy per se but how the word “empathy” is used and connected to actions in our daily life.
To cite Indi Young, “Empathy is a noun — a thing. Empathy is an understanding you develop about another person. Empathizing is the use of that understanding — an action. Empathy is built through the willingness to take time to discover the deep-down thoughts and reactions that make another person tick. It is purposely setting out to comprehend another person’s cognitive and emotional states. Empathy then gives you the ability to try on that person’s perspective — to think and react as she might in a given scenario. This use of empathy is what most people confuse with empathy itself. People try to act empathetic — to take someone’s perspective, to walk in his shoes — without first taking time to develop empathy. This leap is problematic when it comes to your work. You end up with business decisions based on expectations about how others are reasoning, not based on knowledge.”
According to her, there are four different levels of empathy:
- mirrored empathy: if you see movements, neurons start to fire and make the same movement happen
- personal distress: something bad happens to somebody, and you are feeling with them e.g., a cut with a knife, and you are feeling the pain
- affective (=emotional) empathy: feeling the same emotion as the other person is feeling
- cognitive empathy: understand what went through a person’s mind (and reactions) as they worked toward an intent or purpose
No. 3 is, what most articles relate, but this empathy is neither steerable, nor reproducible. And as the name already says it: it is affective.
The empathy that is meant by people like Daniel Goleman as part of emotional intelligence is no. 4. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the different kinds of empathy.
If you understand all the differences, then it is neither a danger nor a delusion anymore.
