Having empathy for your users is easy, just fake it

Understanding your users, really understanding them, will always be the most important part of product development and management.

But Noemi! Everything is changing! AI-this, AI-that.

Listen. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You have to really understand your users. When we talk about this process, empathy always comes up.

We talk about how important empathy is, but it's kind of an open secret that not everyone is naturally able to experience it the same way. Neuroscientists and psychologists largely describe empathy as a passive process, which makes it tricky to "get better at it." Not only that, it's just one of many forms of emotional transference:

"When confronted with someone else's emotions, people often spontaneously share that affective state–your grief can become my grief, your joy, my joy....Of course, empathic affect sharing is only one possible response to another person's emotion. Complementary affective states such as schadenfreude, envy or compassion occur as well, but the peculiarity of empathy is that it enables access to another's internal state by re-creating a representation of that state in the observer." [emphasis mine]

Source: Stietz, J., Jauk, E., Krach, S., & Kanske, P. (2019). Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research. Frontiers in psychiatry, 10, 126. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00126

So empathy is one of many types of responses to others emotions, and it's not entirely clear why sometimes empathy happens, and sometimes compassion or envy or disaffection happen. Research shows that some people have a tendency towards one of these. So lets say, you're not the most empathetic person. What do you do?

Enter, perspective taking.

Perspective taking is different. (That's kind of the whole point of the paper above.) But it leads to similar results. It looks like: taking a moment, in a social situation, especially if its heated or getting emotional, to actively consider and try to imagine what the other person is feeling.

When it comes to your users, it looks like: thinking of them as real people, in a real person context (They are tired from work, or their kid was sick last week, or they had a disappointing 30th birthday.) And then piecing toghether why they do what they do, what they are likely to do, think, feel, or say in various contexts. In my experience, this is shockingly accurate. It's like we have a little human simulator in our brains.

It doesn't matter if its 'fake' - just humanize them. What really helps is actually visualizing them in your minds eye. Start adding the pieces of the things you do know about them from observing them, talking to them, reading about them - all your user research.

You are unlikely to imagine exactly what they are feeling, or feel what they are feeling, so this is not empathy. But research shows is that just making the effort to actively imagine someone else's emotions helps us behave empathetically. Meaning, we don't actually have to feel what other people feel passively - we just have to try to. (And I want to note, this is a high effort activity.)

While natural empathy is passive, using imagination for perspective taking is seriously active.

I first read about this in this study, where high-narcissism participants reported levels of empathy equal to those with low narcissism when explicitly told to take the victim's perspective. I ended up sharing this as kind of a factoid with a handful of people who struggled with passive empathy, and many came back to me later and told me it's a life-changing technique.

Perspective taking is available to all of us. And even those of us who have good passive empathy can benefit from using active imagination to try to deeply understand our users as human beings - whole human beings - who honestly, have a lot more going on in their lives than using our product.