The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

When researchers started really digging into empathy in the early 1900s, there were two commonly accepted types: instinctive and intellectual. Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself. These two terms eventually morphed into the two that are most commonly accepted today: cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings). Most experts believe these two types work together, but people often use them interchangeably or say “empathy” when what they really seem to mean is “compassion” or “kindness.” What’s the difference? The way I’ve come to think about it is this: compassion is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling with them.

people have a particularly hard time talking about issues on which there is no general consensus. Unknowns cause us anxiety, and when we perceive them to be connected to our identity in some way, even talking about them can feel like being threatened. This can be especially true between strangers, who don’t know from the start what the other person’s position—or disposition—might be.

come to an additional conclusion about why we have such trouble with conversations about politics and identity: a lot of us see these things as moral values, and those are starkly delineated in our minds. If we think something is either good or bad, moral or immoral, we’re less likely to want to talk to someone who we believe falls on the “bad” or “immoral” side; the issue at hand is not a matter of opinion to us in that case, and we assume the interaction will be unpleasant or unnecessary.

“We are about to get a whole bunch of books and think pieces that blame tech for a lot of stuff going wrong and how we could have been so wrong about social media, and I feel like some of my work is going to be used to make that argument,” she said. “I want to be clear first that tech is not the problem. It’s a tool like any other tool.” We have just become so overwhelmed by the number of people and feelings and conversations this tool opens us up to that we’ve squandered our emotional energy, argues Headlee. She encourages people to establish common ground and try to combat the “horizontal” nature of many online relationships by having more one-on-one conversations. “Some of the best hope we have is that you aren’t born with a specific amount of empathy,” she reminded me. “We used to think you were either empathetic or you weren’t, but the truth is you can increase your empathy, and one of the best and most effective ways is by hearing other people’s perspectives and experiences.”

multiple studies have shown that people who read more stories (especially literary fiction) score higher on empathy tests.

people we disagree with seem less human to us when we read their views than when we hear them spoken aloud.

subjects saw people they disagreed with as more sophisticated and warmer than those they agreed with, when they could only hear their voices.

unconscious bias, or the tendency for all of us to internalize and often perpetuate stereotypes about those who are different from us. We might not have conscious thoughts of bias, sexism, racism, or stereotyping, but the culture we live in sometimes makes those things inevitable on an unconscious level.

When I hear about a new app, gadget, or tech-based service, I try to ask myself the following questions: How might this improve my life or experience, or those of others? What is the potential for it to be manipulated, and are there safeguards? Is there incentive for the people in charge to monitor this—do they have skin in the game? And ultimately, do I think the rewards will outweigh the risks? Are terms, practices, and concerns transparent and open to critique by users? Does this technology, or do its founders and funders, have a reputation for intentionally or inadvertently harming and marginalizing others? Are they actively working to change/avoid that?

barring something cataclysmic, our future will likely be even more tech focused than the present. We can’t control all the tech products that come at us, but we should assert some agency in how they affect our lives.