In today’s digital-first workplace, empathy has become a key driver of successful leadership. Historically, leadership often focused on efficiency and emotionless processes. However, the shift towards authentic leadership highlights the need for human-centric strategies. As technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, the ability to lead with empathy has emerged as a competitive advantage. Leading HealthTech specialist Air Doctor examines this shift in strategy.

Visit https://userdefenders.com/seth for detailed show notes including mentioned links, transcript, and Eli Jorgensen’s astonishing superhero artwork.

Rise to the FREE mentioned #EmpathyChallenge at https://userdefenders.com/empathy.

Seth Godin shows us what radical empathy looks like. He reminds us to do work that matters, for people who care by focusing on serving a minimum viable audience. He teaches us that the way to stay indispensable in our work is to do work where you can't write down the steps. He also reveals how faked empathy is just as good as real empathy for the true professional acting 'as if'.

• Creating UX for Early Computer Games (4:23)
• What Book Would the Seth Godin of the Industrial Revolution Write? (6:43)
• How Do You Define Empathy? (9:30)
• Why is Empathy Important in Doing Great Work? (12:01)
• What’s Your Greatest Story of Empathy in Action? (14:50)
• One of the Greatest Marketing Lessons Seth Ever Learned (18:44)
• Status Over Empathy (25:07)
• Empathy Learned the Hard Way (28:19)
• What’s Your Best Advice in Building our Empathy Levels? (30:33)
• Advice for Becoming Better Storytellers (32:51)
• Are Our Smartphone Addictions Negatively Affecting our Empathy Levels? (34:27)
• Seth’s Apple Rant (37:44)
• Apple Could Solve the Texting & Driving Dilemma in 4 Minutes (If They Wanted To) (39:31)
• How Do We Stay Indispensable In Our Work in an AI World? (41:16)
• Faked Empathy is Just as Good as Real Empathy (43:59)
• What Makes You Angry? (45:34)
• Jason’s Blurb for Seth’s New Book “This is Marketing” (48:10)

The 2024 election has passed, but the work being done by members of the University of Pennsylvania’s newly formed Political Empathy Lab who visited Johnstown this summer continues.

Students, along with Lia Howard, a professor and part of Penn’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program, covered almost 2,500 miles, talking to numerous people in Pennsylvania including voters, elected officials, media professionals and business owners. They stopped in numerous locations, from big cities to small towns.

The goal was simply to converse with people and gain an understanding about what issues mattered to them.

One recommendation is to try empathetic honesty. Empathy is the ability to understand and share another’s feelings. As Sara Konrath, PhD, an associate professor of philanthropic studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy shared in an interview with the American Psychology Association, “It's the building block of empathy, to feel what others are feeling.” Honesty, meanwhile, is speaking and acting truthfully and transparently. Combining these two skills into empathetic honesty subsequently allows someone, like a manager at a company, to give candid, critical feedback while understanding, acknowledging, and reacting to - rather than ignoring - the human factors that may also affect an individual’s work performance, such as the death of a loved one.

This series of Empathy Circles explores turning the heart and mind from our familiar, unsatisfying self-centered attitude, to “others before self,” and collective action for the common good. Gratitude, empathy, compassion, altruism, and an appreciation of our common humanity are all essential for cultivating genuine happiness and are beneficial for social action and harmony.
 
Janna will provide short excerpts, quotes or video, and suggested topic questions, or you can share whatever is on your mind. When it’s your turn to speak, whatever is in your heart and mind is always welcome in an Empathy Circle. Suggested topics we can explore together will include: our common humanity; altruistic motivation; creating community; collective action for the common good. Join any session—or all four!

The Empathy Circle practice is the most effective gateway practice for learning, practicing deep listening and empathy skills, as well as nurturing an empathic way of being.

For best-selling author and happiness expert Arthur Brooks, empathy is overrated. Rather than simply putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and assuming their burdens, he says, we should actively work to alleviate those struggles — turning empathy into compassion.

“Instead of striving to be more empathetic, we should all try to build on empathy to cultivate its superior cousin: compassion,” Brooks writes. It starts with attempting to understand what someone is going through, tolerating any uncomfortable feelings that may elicit, and finally working to resolve the source of the problem.

By Alexa B. Kimball  
Kimball is CEO of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

As a physician, I was taught to appreciate the clinical importance of human touch for our physical and mental health. As a human being, I worry about its loss. And as a dermatologist, I know what that loss may mean for the loneliest and most vulnerable among us. 

Scientific studies prove that human touch — whether it be a quick hug, holding a baby, or a professional massage — is important to our mental and physical well-being.  Babies who are deprived of touch can die, and even as adults, touch causes our brains to release oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin while reducing stress hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine. Touch builds our immune systems, helps our bodies fight infection, and can help regulate digestion and sleep. Even petting a dog or cat can slow heart rate and lower blood pressure

Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams showed he understands what is at stake when he said on Late Night With Seth Meyers that Biden's "biggest unforced error" was the border.

"To tell people it's not a problem, it's insulting," Williams added.

And: "For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards and motel rooms is probably insulting as well."

Williams had a term for this phenomenon: "suicidal empathy."

by Joel Abrams

Artificial empathy
The chatbot’s use of the first person simulates awareness and seeks to create an illusion of empathy. By adopting a helper position and using the second person, it engages the user and reinforces the perception of closeness. This combination generates a conversation that feels human, practical, and appropriate for giving advice, even though its empathy comes from an algorithm, not from real understanding.

Empathy Mapping UX offers a profound insight into understanding user experiences by visualizing how users feel, think, and act throughout their journey. Imagine a potential customer navigating your website, full of hopes and concerns. By incorporating empathy mapping into your UX strategy, you can identify these emotional touchpoints, leading to a more user-centered design. This approach enables businesses to tailor their messaging and offerings, ensuring they resonate with users' expectations and emotional states.

To effectively utilize an empathy journey map, it's imperative to capture and analyze customer emotions at every phase of their journey. Accurate mapping allows for the alignment of customer needs with appropriate responses, whether communicating value during the awareness phase or addressing concerns during consideration.

Democratic listening is becoming an ever more important part of the study of deliberative democracy. Where past deliberative democratic theorists spent time on the speech act, more attention is now being given to the listening act. 

What exactly happens when we listen to each other and how does that increase our potential to understand each perspective as citizens in a democracy? 

Political Empathy Lab is observing this summer what political science studies substantiate, the idea that people feel more favorably disposed to you (even in cross party discussions) if you let them express themselves and you demonstrate that you are listening by your posture.[1] 

Again, your responses as you speak are less important than your presence of just showing up and your humility in just listening.

Researchers at Penn and beyond are studying affective polarization.  PEL continues this work and applies it by equipping Penn students to connect with others by attuning themselves to their own thoughts and feelings as they listen to different points of view. 

It strives to develop and cultivate practices for both the outer conversation and the inner conversation.  These practices and the regular exercise of them, especially the practice of listening, builds social trust and is a necessary precondition for deliberative democracy.

Some of the practices are explored, refined, and exercised in the spring course PSCI 4201 Political Empathy and Deliberative Democracy.

Key Facts:

• Study participants tended to include AI bots excluded from play, showing empathy.
• Older participants showed a stronger response to unfair AI treatment.
• Designers are encouraged to avoid overly human traits in AI to maintain distinctions.

People don’t like ostracism – even toward AI

Feeling empathy and taking corrective action against unfairness is something most humans appear hardwired to do. Prior studies not involving AI found that people tended to compensate ostracised targets by tossing the ball to them more frequently, and that people also tended to dislike the perpetrator of exclusionary behaviour while feeling preference and sympathy towards the target.

Artificial empathy
The chatbot’s use of the first person simulates awareness and seeks to create an illusion of empathy. By adopting a helper position and using the second person, it engages the user and reinforces the perception of closeness. This combination generates a conversation that feels human, practical, and appropriate for giving advice, even though its empathy comes from an algorithm, not from real understanding.

Getting used to interacting with non-conscious entities that simulate identity and personality may have long term repercussions, as these interactions can influence our personal, social and cultural lives. As these technologies improve, it will get harder and harder to distinguish a conversation with a real person from one with an AI system.

This increasingly blurred boundary between the human and the artificial affects how we understand authenticity, empathy and conscious presence in communication. We may even come to address AI chatbots as if they were conscious beings, generating confusion about their real capabilities.

Note, Emy is a non-commercial AI designed to support research into empathy. Emy is not optimized for managing goals, and her scores show that. In this article, she is used as a proxy for potential discipline-specific commercial AIs. If Emy is capable of close to or above average professional performance for most roles in a discipline, then well-funded teams should certainly do well. After all, Emy has received no third-party funding, and hands-on development was all done by one person.

Empathy is widely regarded as a valuable trait for teachers, but its impact on student achievement has been a topic of debate among education researchers. In his article, Vomund explores the historical roots of teacher empathy and its effects on students in diverse educational settings.

Vomund’s findings highlight that not all forms of empathy are equally beneficial. Certain types are more prone to being influenced by existing teacher biases, which can inadvertently harm students who have been historically minoritized in school environments. To address this, Vomund introduces the concept of “adaptive teacher empathy” — a method that emphasizes understanding the classroom experience from the student’s perspective as a foundation for fostering equity.

Launched on National Empathy Day, the Mpathy Index by MullenLowe Romania is a unique proprietary tool that analyses Romanian consumer perceptions of brands, attributing various levels of empathy to them. Among the six categories analysed, the top empathetic brands according to Romanians are Gerovital (94/100), Nivea (85/100), Napolact (83/100), Kinder (81/100), and Heineken (80/100).

Empathetic marketing is the practice of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes to tailor your marketing to their specific wants and needs. Using empathy in your marketing is customer-centric and involves a deep understanding of who your customer is, their biggest challenges, and what motivates them to take action. It starts and ends with your customer, it is about understanding something from another’s perspective by seeing something through their eyes. To empathise with customers, imagine their experience with your brand.

By — Casey Kuhn

Holiday gatherings can come with the invisible stress of potential arguments and conflict.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Tapping into empathy can help prepare you to face conflict head-on and diffuse a disagreement before it escalates.

The fact is, empathy, like basketball or drawing, is a skill you can practice.

“That is a fairly new take on empathy that we’ve been exploring over the last decade or so,” Karina Schumann, associate psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said.

Ed Kirwan is high school teacher-turned-filmmaker and founder of Empathy Week. In this episode, he talks about his vision to empower a generation of young people to become empathic leaders through the power of films. This is a must-watch for educators everywhere.