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Empathy

Why Lived Experience Matters

The limits of empathy.

Key points

  • Empathy cannot always replace lived experience; people who have been through something know the nuances of dealing with it.
  • By claiming to understand what people are going through, we sometimes hurt them by offering misguided solutions.
  • We cannot always judge people who have been through different experiences in life by the same standards that we judge ourselves.

One of the most common movie tropes is that something tragic happens to a character, and their friend tries to console them saying “I know what that must feel like.” The friend usually gets met with a retort that goes something like this—“No. You have absolutely no idea what it feels like.” There’s a reason this trope is so common, and it has to do with lived experience. All of us have been through hard times, and we know how much it rankles when someone who hasn’t been through the same experience as us claims to understand what we’re going through, or worse, offers us advice based on their own point of view.

The Importance of Lived Experience

Lived experience matters for many reasons, not least of which is that only someone who has been through an experience knows the nuances and complexities of dealing with it. This is why, for instance, it is so important for company boards, policymakers, and even community surveys to make sure they are diverse and include the voices of people who have been through experiences as different from each other as possible.

Examples of situations where a group of people is excluded from an arena abound—to cite just one example, research for medical conditions affecting women, including endometriosis, are severely underfunded. In a medical and scientific community that has for decades been dominated by men, this is not surprising in the least, but has very real consequences for women all over the world.

When Empathy Just Doesn't Cut It

People are often told to empathize with others by “walking a mile in their shoes,” but the person stepping into the shoes comes with their own prejudices, baggage, and life experience. Of course, empathy is important, but it can only take us so far. By claiming to understand what other people are going through, we hurt them not only by offering them advice that might be totally out of place, but also sometimes by offering them solutions that might be completely misguided.

Very often, when people are in a position to help those in need, they end up offering solutions through their own lenses without first consulting the communities they aim to help. I recall visiting a home for orphaned children as a college student in India, and coming back with the realization that children get really attached to people, and that spending an hour or two with the kids and gaining their trust only to never return, was unfair and shortsighted. What happened that day was simply that I had decided, with blinders on, that I wanted to “do something good” with my time and settled upon what I thought would be good for the children.

The Insights That Lived Experience Can Offer

What, then, is the best way to contribute to society, if we are so inclined? One possible way would be to enter an arena that we have some experience with. Many colleges offer programs where current students meet up with alumni of the college to get career advice, and to clarify any questions they have about their future career paths. The alumni, having recently been through experiences that the students might encounter in the near future, act as the perfect sounding boards, and the insights they might offer can hold real value.

Lived experience is one reason why groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous are so popular. Is any community better than a group of people who have gone through the exact same experiences as you have? The effortless understanding and the non-judgmental nature of such groups is what makes them so appealing and so effective. The insights that one can get from a group that has been through similar experiences are far superior to those given by well-meaning friends and family who might just not get it.

Speaking of “just not getting it," parents often are at a loss to understand their teenage children, largely because they’ve just forgotten what it feels like to have been one. Older people often invoke lived experience with the younger generation by telling them “I’ve been through the stage of life you’re going through, and so I know what I’m saying.” But this is often a moot point because a) times change, b) it’s usually not the exact same experiences that people go through, and c) different people can react to pretty much the same situation in very different ways.

The Mismatch Between Lived Experience and Empathy—The Focusing Illusion

There’s a fascinating explanation for why there’s usually such a big mismatch between lived experience and people’s perception of that experience from the outside, and it’s called the focusing illusion. This term, coined by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, is used to describe how we tend to give too much importance to a distinctive aspect of something just because we focus on it. In Kahneman’s words, “Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.”

The focusing illusion can be dangerous because it can cause us to view people in a uni-dimensional manner, causing us to pity them, or worse, offer them solutions that they might not even need. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in this TED talk, believing a single story about a person can cause us to make flawed assumptions about people and dehumanize them. When we label a person as poor, for instance, we don’t see them as anything else. We don’t see that they have a life that is as nuanced as anyone else’s.

The Importance of Expertise and Deeply Listening to Communities

I don’t mean to say, however, that only people with lived experience can make meaningful decisions for themselves or their communities. This is where expertise comes in. A psychiatrist, for instance, doesn’t need to have experienced a hallucination to know what medications to prescribe to a person with schizophrenia. An economist need not have experienced poverty to offer solutions to the world’s problems, and so forth.

If a person who wishes to help a community doesn’t have expertise in the field they’re entering (which would be ideal), empathy has a role to play too, but any intervention can only go so far (or miss the mark entirely) if solutions are offered without consulting and deeply listening to the communities at the receiving end. Also, when it comes to charitable causes, it is very often a case of the rich helping the poor, which comes with a power differential that can make it very hard for the recipient of the charity to say no.

Without lived experience, not only can we not understand what a person has been through, we simply cannot judge them by the same standards we judge ourselves. We cannot, for instance, judge a daily wage laborer for not “making the time” to attend every parent-teacher meeting at school. Not everybody has a flexible job and the freedom to take a few hours off work. When we judge others by the same standards we use to judge ourselves, we are in essence saying “only my experience matters and not yours."

Understanding the limits of empathy and conceding to the irreplaceable insights that lived experience can offer has the potential to make dialogue deeper, and solutions more meaningful.

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More from Aditi Subramaniam, Ph.D.
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