Empathy, Bias’ Cousin
Meet Empathy, Bias’ Cousin
Focusing on other’s feelings, emotions and needs can help bring a sense of joy and fulfillment into our lives. Understanding empathy can help us tackle our own biases. Empathy can be broken into three categories:
Cognitive empathy
The ability to understand someone else’s point of view and perspective.
Emotional empathy
Feeling what someone else feels as your own.
Empathic concern
Unconsciously or consciously figuring out what someone might need from you.
Biases and empathy are intertwined, so it’s important to figure out how strong our empathy muscle is. This allows us to, by default, become better at assessing our biases.
It’s important to build self-awareness around our own empathy beliefs. When we grow our self-awareness, we can begin to see what thoughts/biases about our own empathy might exist. Using the space below, do your best to write down three of your own empathy beliefs.
Examples
- Empathy Proof 1: I can relate to other people’s emotions easily
- Empathy Proof 2: I can be less empathetic to people who are aggressive or rude
- Empathy Proof 3: After a long day, I can run out of empathy for my loved ones at home
The Empathy Quotient (EQ) test1, developed by Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, can be used to better understand your own empathy.
