One issue with anything in life is your inevitable empathy gap between who you are now and who you used to be. You can also see this between yourself and other people who are in a situation that you used to be in.
What do we mean by empathy gap? This concept shows that when humans go through some struggle, they quickly and almost automatically “forget” they went through it, because a person’s mental state when not under duress is wildly different from their mental state when they are under duress. The original study was by George Loewenstein, who stated the following:
affect has the capacity to transform us, profoundly, as human beings; in different affective states, it is almost as if we are different people
George Loewenstein
Perhaps, then, we can start to apply this to everything in life.
If you expand this concept to expertise, you can see how if you’re very experienced, and you feel very secure in your knowledge and skills, that it would be hard for you to empathize properly with people who are in a position you used to be in earlier in your development. EVEN IF YOU DON’T MEAN TO DO IT, IT HAPPENS ANYWAY!
But I guess that’s the definition of a bias.
What does this mean for managers, experts, high level professionals, or anyone else really? Well, people must proactively put themselves in the shoes of people they spend time around, who are earlier in their development, or in a mindset they used to be in.
I spoke of problems with management and morale, which is very well-described by George’s Empathy Gap concept. Essentially, it’s natural for us to “forget where we came from” and treat others like they’re incorrect for not thinking and behaving the way we feel and behave.
On one hand, being too empathetic can be self-destructive. But my assertion is that most people, at least in the US, have a cultural training to be less empathetic overall with people they don’t have a pre-existing personal relationship with. Therefore, when we encounter someone who is going through something we’ve been through, we should actively remember the anxiety, then doubt, the fear, and then pain that they went through. Only in this way can we properly help them–that is, if they want us to.
So, do I truly hate empathy gaps? I guess so, but really they’re just a part of us all, a bias that we can’t ever truly shake.
Our biases push us in the opposite direction, to forget our past, and forget how our journeys shaped us. The key is to consciously work against it. Let’s revisit this as often as we can, to be better for the people around us.
What do you think? Leave me a comment if you’d like to discuss!