Tag: empathy

  • In considerate mode

    Delivery guys riding on the wrong side of the road, kids behind you kicking your seat on a flight, speaking on the phone loudly in a public space – these are a few of my favourite peeves. I am sure you have yours too. That’s why this post on LinkedIn caught my attention – “things pissing me off” in situations where people aren’t following rules is something I could relate to.

    Barring a few exceptions where I am absolutely not able to tolerate what I believe is ‘inconsiderate behaviour’, I don’t engage. But engage or not, these instances also reveal my snap judgements. e.g. what an inconsiderate idiot, speaking loudly during a movie. I judge myself the most, but also try to intellectually understand my motivations.

    That’s why I found this particular episode of The Knowledge Project – in which Shane Parrish speaks to Todd Herman – fascinating. Around the 49th min mark, Shane asks Todd if he has a hard time relating to average people, people who just didn’t want to be the best at what they do. I could relate to it in my professional context – another pet peeve. Todd admits how despite having matured, he still has to watch out as his ego still tries to stack them as ‘average’. Todd explains that he does this because he over-indexes what he personally finds important. e.g. a career-driven person might judge someone who prioritises being a parent.

    I battle my own bugbears – punctuality, work ethic, grammar and spelling errors etc. That image below is my team taking revenge on my birthday cake. Cheapos! 😂

    The point is that others are not average/ inconsiderate people, they are at best average/inconsiderate in the thing I am over-indexing for! There are many contexts and reasons why they don’t behave in a way I think they should . As I commented on LinkedIn, I have realised that being able to afford consideration (or applying oneself) is a privilege.

    But that was level 1. When I dug deeper, I saw my real problem. When that ‘idiot’ is not following my worldview (‘ideology’) – whether it is ‘considerate behaviour’ or being conscious of spelling mistakes – it raises (in my own mind) doubts on the objective correctness of my ‘ideology’. Will Storr has a  brilliant insight – “for humans, ideology is territory”. We fight for ideas like animals fight for land.

    At this point, we have evolved to an extent where we hold hundreds of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” in our heads. And we expect the world to comply – from nationalism to having pets/kids to the usage of the Oxford comma and so on. Any deviation from our ‘ideology’ is treated as a judgement against us. No wonder every interaction has the potential for conflict. We are defenders of our own little faiths that make up our identity. What we could practice, when we have the privilege, is to step back and think about the little judgements we make, in work and life scenarios, and then react with empathy, because it is not a personal attack.

    There have been many posts on this blog about morality, and recently, I found two quotes that connect it to judgement and empathy.

    “The drug of morality poisons empathy” ~ Will Storr (again)
    “Compassion is the basis of morality.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

    I found these to be an educative lesson on how I look at my subjective morality, and how I behave with others in real life.

  • Can brands be truly empathetic?

    Originally published in Business Insider

    This Diwali, brands that didn’t need festive-offer advertising to light up their sales figures used a sound strategy instead – empathy. From Facebook’s Pooja Didi to India’s first-ever hyper-personalised ad (this claim is disputed) by Cadbury, brands used the travails of a Covid-hit society to maximum effect. Health workers, local businesses, parents, domestic help, dabbawalas – everyone was at the receiving end of a psychological hug. However, it’s hard to distinguish between moment marketing and actual empathy these days. A mini primer on empathy helps elaborate my concern. 

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  • The intrigues of my empathy

    Simran was on TV, and though I didn’t watch the entire movie, I was intrigued enough to read up about Sandeep Kaur – the Bombshell Bandit, whose life it is vaguely based on. A tragic story of a 24 year old, who will most likely be unable to live what one might call a normal life. Did she make wrong choices? Of course, but in her shoes, things might not be as simple as that.

    D said recently that my sense of empathy confuses her. Apparently, from what she has noticed, it is high when the interactions are transactional in nature – Uber drivers, hotel/restaurant/security staff and such. However, it is completely missing in action in places where she expects it, say close relatives.

    I have to admit, it used to confuse me too! But when I thought about it, there is a pattern to it, though a rather strange one. It follows a U shape – high for people I don’t know, as well as those whom I am really comfortable with, and low for people in between. The bottom of the U is occupied by those who have broken my trust in some way. (more…)

  • Empathy with AI

    I have increasingly felt that our ability to find common ground is rapidly diminishing. This has a cyclical relationship with empathy and therefore our ability to empathise would reduce too. Since a big pillar of our species is cooperation, there is a good chance that the loss of empathy would lead to extinction. This is essentially what I wrote in Empathy & Extinction. “The death of nuance and the rise of binary.”

    That’s why I was intrigued by How AI will teach us how to more empathy. While it did make a compelling argument, I was skeptical because to me, the very idea of empathy is because we took the effort to think about the other person. Despite data and information about ourselves and others that will be fed into AI, would it really be able to sense and help us see the other person’s point of view? (more…)

  • Empathy & Extinction

    In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains how we’re the most dominant species on the planet because we’re the only ones able to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The ‘funny’ part is that the things we cooperate on usually exist only in our collective imagination – religion, nation, money. Intersubjective realities.

    But it gets funnier. When I look around now, I see these intersubjective realities actually causing more divisiveness between groups than unity. Offended because Spiegel allegedly called it a poor nation. Offended because Katy Perry used a Hindu goddess to describe her mood. New day, new reason to be offended.  (more…)