Empathy: holy grail or poisoned chalice?

The research and insights sector has an empathy problem. But it’s not, as you might think, that we all need to develop more empathy. Instead, I believe that the focus on empathy is becoming a hindrance to the industry.

As a qualitative researcher who has worked for many years with marginalised audiences such as prisoners, drug dealers, football hooligans, the far right and gamblers as well as mainstream audiences, and specialising in researching working class people, I hear a lot about empathy, and it makes me uncomfortable. I hear that empathy is our superpower, that empathetic research will help our clients walk in their customers’ shoes and even that empathy is ‘everything’ in research and insights.

I don’t buy it.

There are three key issues with the way that people in the industry talk about empathy.

1.     Insight is not empathy

There is a tendency to conflate or confuse insight with empathy. There’s a lot to unpick here, but essentially, they are not the same thing. Insight comes from looking at the world in a different way or finding something new and compelling in your data – but it is not empathy. Frankly, some of the biggest bastards I’ve worked with in the industry were great at finding insights, but they had no empathy – and I would argue that they didn’t need empathy to be good researchers.

Empathy is a big word which, like trust and authenticity, is overused, ill-defined and open to interpretation. I presented on the empathy problem at a recent AQR event and it sparked a huge debate about what we actually mean when we say empathy.

There are two different types of empathy: cognitive empathy, which is about understanding, which we need to do more of, and emotional empathy, which is this notion of walking in someone else’s shoes, which is where the problem lies.  I believe we fail to make this distinction and falsely bundle these types of empathy together. What we should be striving for is more understanding, as this is actually achievable.

2.     Empathy is mythologised

When we talk about empathy as a superpower to deeply connect with audiences, we are fooling ourselves. Sometimes researchers talk about empathy in an almost religious way, referencing Charles Taylor’s work on the ‘Social Imaginary’, helping us to make sense of a world we don’t understand. We con ourselves that our empathy will stand instead of actually immersing ourselves in the world of the audiences and having the conversations that lead to understanding.

I would argue that this approach is more for our benefit as researchers, so we can feel good about ourselves and for the benefit of our clients, who can feel like they are hiring people who really know the worlds they are researching, than it is actually effective in gaining insights into our audiences, especially when they come from backgrounds that are very different to ours. It creates an artificial closeness and enables us to feel like we understand more than we do.

3.     A focus on empathy has damaged our work

I come from an advertising background and much of the work I do today is around creative development. I contend that too much empathy has changed the shape of comms. So many ads now are warm and fluffy and have lost any bite. Take the financial services sector: comms from banks these days portray them as wanting to be our friends rather than really offering us helpful services during the cost-of-living crisis.

Beyond comms, I feel that the focus on empathy has consolidated around a certain type of individualistic thought process that misses the bigger picture and fails to understand group dynamics. For example, Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy references a study where people asked to think empathetically about a terminally ill child were more likely bump them up the waiting list for treatment, to the detriment of other children on the list, whereas those asked to think rationally and dispassionately made better decisions that took the bigger picture into account. This type of thinking holds back research and innovation.

Why has the empathy problem arisen?

I think that one of the key issues that researcher have is time. If we go to a tough council estate in Manchester on cold rainy day and speak to three respondents, we go back to our comfortable hotel feeling that we have got a perspective on their whole situation. But we don’t think about what we miss had we have been there for more time, and at different times.

For example, we might not see the way that the community comes together for summer parties or bonfire night guy, the way that people help each other out if there are problems, or the way that people of all ages gather at the social club. We don’t have time to ensure we talk to different types of people within our target group, and we don’t have time to do research at different times of year to capture how behaviours and feelings change with the seasons.

The realities of research budgets, and the constraints of research objectives mean that we can often only spend one hour with, for example, a teenage mum, but telling ourselves we empathise means we come away thinking that we really understand their life. Or we can go on an accompanied rave with a drug user but not have the time to see them again when they are going through the Monday morning comedown. We don’t have a full 360o perspective, but we feel good that we empathised. Consider the images below. Spend an hour with Lacy from Boston and get one perspective – that in image one. But take more time to dig deeper and understand more, and you might get a bigger picture – image two.

The impact of misplaced empathy

What tends to happen when we believe we have empathy and put ourselves in the shoes of our participants is that we jump from straight from the research into imagined worlds that we haven’t really explored. This can sometimes mean that we go dystopian, especially with tougher audiences, focusing on what divides us, rather than what unites us, creating a false narrative and leading to us proposing artificial solutions.

For example, we decide that people need to be educated about health, literacy, digital literacy or whatever social issues we feel they are suffering from. We then start talking about them as ‘they’, a homogenous group that doesn’t really exist. I have a disability but there is no reason that I should have anything in common with, for example, someone who is blind or deaf – there is no ‘they’.

Similarly, when we over-empathise without true understanding, we tend to draw on prototypes, and then jump straight to a solution. For example, empathise with working-class people being seen as stupid or threatening – jump to portraying them as smiling ‘cheeky chappies’. Empathise with Muslim people being seen as extremists – jump to portraying them as ‘smiling shopkeepers’.

For those who still feel that empathy is the way to go, I would ask, can you really have empathy with extreme positions or those that go against your beliefs? With the far right? Islamic extremists? We have empathy with those most like us and we project our hopes of what we want to see on other groups. Many in the industry believe that 18-24s are progressive and embrace diversity – as a primarily white, middle-class, left/liberal-leaning sector this is what we want to believe is true. But a working-class 18-year-old living on an estate may have more in common with his grandad than with a middle-class peer. 

By thinking this way, we risk missing out on what is really happening. For example, although some 18–24-year-olds are progressive, others in the age group are embracing far right ideology, and moving away from diversity because it feels too mainstream and establishment – hence the influence of people such as Jordan Petersen and Andrew Tate and the growth of toxic masculinity. Others are not interested in issues such as sustainability, they just want to watch TV, get their nails done and have a nice time.

How do we solve the empathy problem?

I hear a lot of talk about matching to increase empathy. Black researchers interviewing Black research participants. Working-class people interviewing working-class participants. Disabled people interviewing disabled participants. Is this the solution? I think that in some cases it can be helpful but in general, I refer to back to my comments about homogeneity – these groups are not homogenous, so we are unlikely to ever truly ‘match’.

Because I know that I need to build understanding, not empathy, I regularly interview research participants with whom I have very little in common. Two recent award-winning projects – some of the best work I have done – involved interviewing young black men for Mental Health Innovations and menopausal women for TENA.

So what is the solution to the empathy problem if it isn’t matching? My approach is to treat research into audiences that are very different from me as if they were international research. When we conduct international research, we recognise that we are coming from a different place, and we set out to immerse ourselves in the culture. We are humble, and we don’t talk about building empathy – we seek to learn and understand.

In a practical sense, this means reading as much as possible about the audience I am interviewing, conducting expert interviews with people from the local area or who have particular experience in working or living with the audience of interest. I work hard to understand and challenge my own biases to remain objective and interested. I take cues from anthropology; anthropologists never talk about empathy, they are conscious that within the research process, their own biases and preconceptions are the problem. We need a similar level of humility if we are to get past our belief that we have empathy and start to truly understand our audiences.

And finally, next time an agency tells you how important it is to have empathy, ask them to tell you what they really mean.