25 Oct 2020
Every person is unique, each experience idiosyncratic. How I perceive any given situation will depend on my age, gender, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic background, upbringing, parents, genes, what I did 3 years ago and so on. Given the idiosyncrasies in our experiences, it is mysterious why we are at all able to relate to each other. We’ve all likely had the experience of meeting someone and immediately ‘clicking’ with them – whatever that means. We immediately resonate with another human being, even though their experiences are so enormously different compared to ours.
An interesting question arises from these observations: what does it mean to empathize with another person? Can we truly walk in another person’s shoes? I would argue that the answer is yes – it’s all a matter of scaling.
I have never been good at the arts. When it comes to drawing something, it is borderline magical how someone can have an image in their head and intuitively put that onto a blank sheet of paper. For them, the paper is potential, for me it is blank. People with such artistic skills are just so completely different to me so how can I ever understand what it is like to draw something exquisite; how can I ever empathize with someone who can draw so impeccably?
I think the way to empathize with people with such different experience is two-fold: 1) listen, explore, and understand their experience, and 2) relate that experience to similar experiences you have had. If I wanted to empathize with someone who has the experience of being able to draw well, I could ask a bunch of artists about their experience and see if common themes and patterns emerge – this is the cognitive element of empathizing. For example, they can tell me that they see images clearly in their head, that they feel present while they are drawing, that they try to turn off their brain and just let their hand express something deeper inside of them. Once I find those common patterns, I can easily move to step two. I can now see if I have instances in my own experience of seeing an image in my head and trying to allow it to manifest itself (that could be reading or programming), or an experience of feeling present while doing something I enjoy (meditation, dancing, writing), or trying to express or do something naturally and intuitively, to express a deeper part of myself (talking, dancing, writing). Now I can recall those experiences I have had that constitute, albeit abstractly, the craft of drawing and can clearly empathize with the act of drawing, despite not being able to do it myself.
But hold on – the trenchant reader might object – the experiences that drawing is made up of are unique; you can’t pick and choose experiences you’ve had in completely different scenarios and mash them together under the assumption that you are reliably empathizing with an artist. I agree with that. That is what I call the scaling problem of empathy.
The scaling problem of empathy is the idea that it is possible to relate to another person as you’ve most likely had similar experiences as them – albeit abstractly conceptualized – but to empathize effectively, you need to be able to scale your experiences to theirs. Take one dimension of drawing mentioned above – the experience of feeling present while drawing that some artists have. I would argue that I have had that experience to a very similar degree – I have lost track of a great many hours while writing, reading, dancing or programming. Hence, the scaling I would have to do on that dimension is not that large. But if I want to empathize with one of the greatest yogis or meditation teachers, their ability to be present is likely so much greater1 than mine that the scaling I’d have to do is very large – and with larger scaling, comes larger variance which makes my empathizing less effective.
This would explain, for example, why psychotherapists are so effective at empathizing with other people. Not only have most therapists have had a lot of experiences first-hand, but they have also come across people from many avenues of life. They have had the time to understand their clients’ stories, i.e. carefully and clearly delineate the abstract dimensions of different experiences. Then, viscerally empathizing with their clients is a snowball effect: the more clients they learn about and empathize with, the more their scaling ability becomes refined and it becomes ever increasingly easier to relate to others. Indeed, people who take the time to listen and understand others’ experiences have a better calibrated scaling ability for empathy, which makes them more effective.
One problem might still be obvious: unlike psychotherapists, who usually work with clients for months and years, we rarely have that time to get to know someone with a specific experience. Then how on earth can we figure out what are all of the relevant dimensions of someone’s experience? Although a difficult problem, I reckon we can do this by any of the means in which we acquire information. Take the example of depression. There are a gazillion books and journal articles on the topic approaching it from almost all possible angles. You likely know someone who has suffered depression – you can ask them. You can listen to podcasts, read Wikipedia entries, watch movies and documentaries about it and so on. If you consume enough information, you will be able to complete step one – delineate the common dimensions of the experience of depression and try to find how they manifest in your own experiences.
The idea that empathizing is possible, and it is only a matter of scaling one’s own experiences, does have significant implications. For one, it might very well change how we think in the political domain. For instance, abortion and motherhood no longer remain a women-only issue much like suicide and homelessness are no longer a men-only issue. Instead, this view suggests that we need to listen to people who are experiencing these issues first-hand, try to find patterns that match our own experience and do our best job at scaling our experiences appropriately. Another implication is that this view provides a further argument why it is beneficial to live in diverse-in-experience societies. Encountering people who see the world quite differently expands our minds and “a mind stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”2.
In summary, starting from the observations that experientially we are quickly and enigmatically able to ‘click’ with and relate to specific people, I argue that it’s possible to have that experience with any one and any experience. In the case of people with whom we resonate deeply, the experiences are already well-matched, while in other circumstances we have to scale our own experiences to match theirs. This scaling inevitably introduces noise in our capacity to effectively empathize but with patience and perseverance, we can better calibrate our scaling ability and thus become better at empathizing with one another.
1 I appreciate that this sentence assumes that the presence of a yogi teacher and mine are on the same scale – which they need not be, they could be categorically different – but this is irrelevant. If you have not found out the correct dimension you need to scale, you have not yet passed the first step of correctly determining the dimensions that need to be scaled.
2 Quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
