The Importance of Empathy

by Terry Gault

 

This is compelling evidence that empathy is most important when engaged in communication with others.  It speaks specifically to the importance of empathy when practicing Empathic Paraphrasing or Interchangable Empathy technique in our Dialogue, Listening and Influence workshops.

"People just don't sue doctors they like," is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. "In all the years I've been in. this business, I've never had a potential client walk in and say, 'I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.  'We've had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we'll say, 'We don't think that doctor was negligent. We think it's your primary care doctor who was at fault.' And the client will say, 'I don't care what she did. I love her, and I'm not suing her.'"

 

Recently the medical researcher Wendy Levinson recorded hundreds of conversations between a group of physicians and their patients. Roughly half of the doctors had never been sued. The other half had been sued at least twice, and Levinson found that just on the basis of those conversations, she could find clear differences between the two groups. The surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did.

 

They were more likely to engage in active listening, saying such things as "Go on, tell me more about that," and they were far more likely to laugh and be funny during the visit. Interestingly, there was no difference in the amount or quality of information they gave their patients; they didn't provide more details about medication or the patient's condition. The difference was entirely in how they talked to their patients.

 

The psychologist Nalini Ambady listened to Levinson's tapes, zeroing she removed the high-frequency sounds from speech that enable us to recognize individual words. What's left after content-filtering is a kind of garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm but erases content. She had judges rate the slices of garble for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn't.  -excerpt from Blink

Read more:  Doctors often shift focus from patients to themselves

 

This is about the tendency that some people have to tell their own stories as a way to build rapport and relationships.  However, I believe that keeping the focus on the other party or the customer is the BEST way to build rapport and relationships. 

 

That’s what we focus on in our dialogue-based workshops.

photo credit: bobster855