Empathy is having a cultural moment. As a hallmark of design-thinking, empathy exhorts us to listen and not impose, to solicit rather than dictate, to be a bit humble, to learn by walking in the footsteps of others. Empathy gets you to innovation faster and better (as Leonard and Rayport told us in 1997, and design, UX, and marketing fields have told us since). Empathy is the difference between human and artificial intelligence. It is thought to play in the domain of the emotional, unsaid, and unarticulated – consonant with industry’s notion that innovation comes from meeting unmet needs.
With empathy we don’t just get to the right idea…but get to successful implementation too. Empathy is seen as a lubricant that primes implementation within teams and the organization. Several years ago, in a project that explored being a mom in today’s world, we played excerpts of mothers’ audio diaries during the final presentation which, in this case, was to MILK PEP, the marketing and education board representing milk producers. The diaries of ‘mom moments’, experienced and reflected on over the course of a week, were intimate life accountings – sometimes heart-altering, sometimes poignant, funny or sympathetic, sometimes raw anguish. We played excerpts as a way to hear voices and illustrate life-as-a-mom; we played them to jolt, silence and coalesce. But we also played them to illuminate our cultural analysis of motherhood. Confusing one for the other, that is, confusing empathy-creating deliverables for powerful analysis, imperils knowledge.
In the Handbook of Anthropology in Business, Martha Cotton describes installations designed to create client empathy for users’ needs; here empathy-generation is a project deliverable. Simon Roberts has talked about the power of embodied experience. Use of photos, videos, or other immersive experiences is meant explicitly to foster empathic understanding of research participants by the project team or corporate executives – to convince and persuade, to introduce a form of nonverbal truth. As Tiffany Romain and Tracy Johnson point out, empathy in the last two decades has been conceived as a method, an attribute, and commodity in ethnographic research practice. As they also note, while there is practical value in imagining end users, a limited or misinformed imagining does damage. It is a problem, I would add, if compassion stands in for understanding.
What is empathy?
Since the mid-20th C, empathy has been conceived as an intersubjective experience. It is an extension of oneself across a boundary to imagine what another is feeling or experiencing. 
It is not merely sympathy – feeling something for another. Empathy purports to know. But can we ever really leave ourselves to understand another’s psychological state? As an anthropologist, I have always thought of empathy with suspicion. It smacked of hubris – who was I to pretend to know what someone else is thinking and feeling? I could know what I felt but to weigh in on interpersonal others was an act of presumption. The less we understand about worldviews, or social and cultural ideas about important things like personhood, being a parent, child or citizen, the more difficult that act of imagination is. Wearing a prosthetic device literally or figuratively as a way to mimic the experience of disability limits the terms and scope of understanding (Romain and Johnson, 2014).
And yet we idealize this form of exchange (Mageo, 2009:79). In UX, design, and marketing, empathic experience is seen as the key to insight and innovation. But this presumes a universality about personhood that is unwarranted.
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures (Geertz 1983:59).
And why do we assume that achieving psychological closeness is the prerequisite of understanding? Why, instead, shouldn’t we assume the opposite? That empathic knowledge is too often projection? Hubris that limits alternate points of view? An over-emphasis on the personal that risks rendering invisible the social assemblages in which objects and people are enmeshed? That depends on a concept of personhood that is distinctly Western? Empathy only makes sense in a world inhabited by bounded and autonomous selves. It loses much of its potency in contexts where relational or more ‘permeable’ selves are ascendant. Such contexts are not limited to non-Western societies or pre-modern times but include the construction of selves and voices online. These digitally constructed selves and relationships are based on participation and collaboration where boundaries are permeable; ever-shifting with likes and retweets. That’s quite a different thing really.
Empathy is not enough
Empathic experience is a form of knowledge. Alone, however, it is insufficient. If it doesn’t query assumptions and epistemologies, empathic experience, often a corollary of ethnographic practice, has limited value. To feel compassion for a mother in pain or joy is not enough to understand the cultural values and ideas constituting motherhood today. And without the latter, brand strategy or product innovation is rendered moot. Feeling empathy for a woman who cuts jewelry ads from the newspaper and puts them in her jewelry box, in hopes that her husband will purchase the real thing as a gift, does not help us understand the social and cultural meanings of gold in the U.S. (though the pieces of paper in the jewelry box do). Strategic decisions about distribution channels, in the case of gold, don’t depend on empathy but on making explicit ideas, notions, values framing this woman’s actions.
Lack of empathy, derision towards the paper-treasure-builder for example, arguably precludes knowledge, giving empathy a significant role in the research process. Communicating a desire to understand and giving respect to research participants who are partners in our endeavors are valuable reasons for attempting empathy. But rather than thinking of empathy in relation to understanding users, think of it, as Karl Mendonca argues, as an opportunity to better understand ourselves, specifically the epistemological moorings that the research team and client organization bring to the project. Empathy-creating, immersive experience allows us to learn about our own worldviews, query the validity of our own assumptions about customers and users and, as a result, create the conditions for alternate products/services/design solutions. Innovation is found through an analysis of meaning, itself derived from what someone says, does, doesn’t say and doesn’t do.
In the end, when empathy is the ascribed goal of market, design or innovation research the endeavor risks self-projection not enquiry; missing the larger analytic understanding of what is going on; making mistakes of perspective by thinking of the user or the person as the object of analytic attention. A reliance on and currency in empathy perpetuates false imaginings when we tell ourselves exactly otherwise.