Empathy

Recently, listening to a podcast between two prominent Silicon Valley business leaders, one of them told an anecdote.

A candidate had been recruited for a role, and when he entered the interview, the candidate said something to the effect of “I can’t wait for the weekend to come.” The interviewer, who was the founder of the company, immediately knew that this was not a candidate they wanted to work with, and immediately terminated the interview. The founder then posted this on twitter that they had done such

The candidate was very angry. The twitter public was very angry.

What I found fascinating was not what happened - it was the discussion between the two on the podcast. Neither the founder, nor the person interviewing them could really understand why the candidate would get angry, or why the twitter audience thought it was a “dick move”.

The podcast conversation is the two of them puzzling over what was wrong, and how what they did was clearly right, since they did not waste their own time, and they did not waste the candidates time, as it was clearly not going to be a fit.

It was like hearing two lions trying to understand why the human has a problem with cutting the deer’s throat. Trying to rationalise it logically, looking at it from multiple angles, because the lion has no feeling of “wrongness” in killing a deer. It’s just normal.

Empathy is normal to most human beings - and what it means is that a human mirrors the feelings of another human in particular situation. If I see someone being mocked, I get the exact same feeling as if I were being mocked myself. I then often have the urge to step in to solve it, protecting that person as if I were protecting myself.

Here comes the part that people do not really realize: empathy exists on a spectrum. The people with very high empathy assume everyone feels about the same, and the people without empathy assume that people who do this do it because it’s “the right thing to do”. They do not actually feel the way that person felt.

It is not a flaw, and it’s not a negative trait at all. It’s just a different way of seeing the world, and people are born somewhere along this spectrum. And they often do not think of it at all, they just assume everyone else is the same.

Empathy is not universally positive, empathy can be a negative thing, for example in business. In business, you may need to get rid of a poorly performing person - but what if the person has two kids and is unlikely to get another job? People with excessive empathy will keep this person on at the expense of the business. People with less empathy will not struggle to remove the person.

Anytime a decision needs to be made that would negatively affect people, then those with empathy will take disadvantages to themselves in order to not affect those people - because they feel the pain of others like their own pain.

On the other hand, having low empathy means that you can also make a lot of decisions where you are logically correct, but people realise more and more that you only “care about yourself”, and they will never matter that much. You lose loyalty, people become wary around you, and you do not get blind loyalty. Rather, people attach themselves to you as long as you are rising and they can rise with you, but will jump ship as soon as they can.

People without empathy are not heartless - they intellectually want to do the right thing, and they often do. They are also intelligent, and can observe and execute on the rules of empathy. They can “do empathy”, but they cannot “feel empathy”.

There is no judgment on which is the better way to be. Some people are born one way, some another way, it’s just important to know that there are people who are fundamentally different, as one navigates through life.