Ever heard of “empathy marketing”?
It’s the latest business buzzword. The idea is that if companies can look
through their clients’ eyes and understand their desires, they will be better
able to tailor their offerings and gain a competitive advantage.
To me, this is stepping into someone
else’s shoes just to sell them another pair.
I believe that the best use of
empathy is not in the commercial world but in the social one, where it allows
us to challenge prejudices and create political change.
And if you look through history,
there are some extraordinary figures who have harnessed this power by engaging
in what I think of as “experiential empathy.” This is where you don’t just
imagine someone else’s life (a practice technically known as “cognitive
empathy”) but try to live it yourself, doing the things they do, living in the
places where they live, and knowing the people they know.
You might also call an experience of
this nature an “empathy immersion.” It’s like empathy as an extreme sport—one
far more exciting and adventurous than ice climbing or sky diving.
So here is my top-five list of
people who took empathy to the extreme, showing how it can transform the social
and political landscape. If you like these characters, you’ll find more on each
of them in my new book Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It.
1. St. Francis of Assisi: Learning
from beggars
In the year 1206, Giovanni
Bernadone, the 23-year-old son of a wealthy merchant, went on a pilgrimage to
St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He could not help noticing the contrast between
the opulence and lavishness within—the brilliant mosaics, the spiral
columns—and the poverty of the beggars sitting outside. He persuaded one of
them to exchange clothes with him and spent the rest of the day in rags begging
for alms. It was one of the first great empathy experiments in human history.
This episode was a turning point in
the young man’s life. He soon founded a religious order whose brothers worked
for the poor and the lepers, and who gave up their worldly goods to live in
poverty like those they served.
Giovanni Bernadone, known to us now
as St. Francis of Assisi, is remembered for declaring, “Grant me the treasure
of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does
not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name,
and that it have no other patrimony than begging.”
2. Beatrice Webb: From comfort to
the sweatshop
In the early 20th century it became
popular for writers and would-be social reformers—among them Jack London and
George Orwell—to spend time living down and out on the streets of East London
to experience the realities of poverty among the homeless, beggars, and
unemployed. The forgotten figure who started this tradition was the socialist
thinker Beatrice Webb.
Webb was born in 1858 into a family
of well-off businessmen and politicians. But in 1887, as part of her research
into urban poverty, she stepped out of her comfortable bourgeois life and
dressed up in a bedraggled skirt and buttonless boots to work in an East London
textile factory. The account of her adventure, Pages From a Work-Girl’s Diary,
caused a sensation. It was unheard of for a member of respectable society,
especially a woman, to have firsthand experience of life among the destitute.
“My own investigations into the chronic
poverty of our great cities opened my eyes to the workers’ side of the story,”
she wrote in her autobiography. Her empathy immersion inspired her to campaign
for improved factory conditions and to support the cooperative and trade union
movements. She later became a leading figure in the socialist Fabian Society
and co-founded the London School of Economics.
3. John Howard Griffin: Crossing the
racial divide
In 1959, the white, Texas-born
Griffin decided to get a taste of what reality was like for an African American
man living in the segregated Deep South. He dyed his skin black with a
combination of sun lamps and pigment-darkening medication, and then spent six
weeks traveling and working in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South
Carolina. Nobody ever suspected his deception.
It was an eye-opening experience.
Working as a shoeshine boy in New Orleans, he was struck by how white people
stared through him without acknowledging his presence. He experienced the
everyday indignities of segregation, such as walking miles to find a place to
use the toilet, and was subject not just to racist verbal abuse but to the
threat of physical violence.
He wrote about his experiences in
the monthly magazine Sepia, which had sponsored his experiment, and later in
his best-selling book Black Like Me.
Today it might seem condescending or
unethical for a white man to speak on behalf of other racial groups, but at the
time most African American civil rights activists saw his work as necessary
because it was so hard to get their own voices heard. Griffin gained widespread
attention for the cause of racial equality, and worked with Martin Luther King
Jr.
At the heart of his book is a
resounding message about the value of empathy: “If only we could put ourselves
in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of
the injustices of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of
prejudice.”
4. Günther Walraff: Two years as an
immigrant worker
In 1983 the German investigative
journalist Günther Wallraff embarked on what may be the most extreme empathy
immersion of the 20th century when he spent two years undercover as a Turkish
immigrant worker.
Wearing dark contact lenses, a black
hairpiece, and having perfected a broken German accent, he threw himself into a
succession of backbreaking jobs, such as unblocking toilets on building sites
that were ankle-deep in urine and shoveling coke dust at a steel factory
without a protective mask, which left him with lifelong chronic bronchitis.
What struck him most, he later wrote, was not the 19th-century working
conditions but the humiliation of being treated as a second-class citizen by
“native” Germans.
His book about the Apartheid-like
conditions experienced by foreign workers in Germany, Lowest of the Low, sold
more than 2 million copies in 30 languages. It led to criminal investigations
of firms using illegal labor, and resulted in improved protection for contract
workers in several German states. Walraff’s work demonstrates the unique power
of experiential empathy for uncovering social inequality—an approach followed
by later investigative reporters such as Barbara Ehrenreich.
5. Patricia Moore: A product
designer from all ages
Today, one of the leading exponents
of experiential empathy is the U.S. product designer Patricia Moore, whose
specialty is using empathy to cross the generational gulf. Her best-known
experiment was in the late 1970s when, aged 26, she dressed up as an
85-year-old woman to discover what life was like as an elder. She put on makeup
that made her look aged, wore fogged-up glasses so she couldn’t see properly,
wrapped her limbs and hands with splints and bandages to simulate arthritis,
and wore uneven shoes so she hobbled.
For three years she visited North
American cities in this guise, trying to walk up and down subway stairs, open
department store doors, and use can openers with her bound hands.
The result? Moore took product
design in a completely new direction. Based on her experiences, she invented
new products for use by elders, such as those thick rubber-handled potato
peelers and other utensils now found in almost every kitchen, which can easily
be used by people with arthritic hands. She went on to become an influential
campaigner for the rights of senior citizens, helping to get the Americans with
Disabilities Act enacted as law.
Her latest project is designing
rehabilitation centers for U.S. war veterans with missing limbs or brain
injuries so they can relearn to live independently, doing everything from
buying groceries to using a cash machine. Her whole approach, she says, is
“driven by empathy, an understanding that one size doesn’t fit all.”
How to be practice experiential
empathy
What lessons should we draw from
such inspiring lives?
Few of us are going to dress up as
an 85-year old or spend years masquerading as an immigrant worker. But we can
all practice experiential empathy in other ways. You could take part in Live
Below the Line, an anti-poverty campaign where tens of thousands of people each
year live for five days on $1.50 a day, which is the amount that more than 1
billion people on the planet have to live on. Next time you go on a two-week
vacation, sure, spend some time lying on the beach in Mexico the first week,
but why not volunteer as a teacher at a local school in the second one?
And if a “wealth swap” isn’t your
thing, try a “God swap”: If you believe in a particular religion, spend a month
going to the services of different religions, including a meeting of humanists.
These are all ways of getting a little
experiential empathy into your life. Doing so will not only expand your own
worldview and imagination, but enable you to use empathy to create social
justice. And that’s a whole lot better than allowing this powerful form of
human understanding to become just another tool of the marketing industry.
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