Sunday, February 28, 2010

Empathy

So empathize is to feel and experience the things the other party is feeling. And this helps in human communication.

A lot of times arguments and quarrels are formed because people fail to empathize. Empathy is a difficult thing to do. It is not natural for humans to do so because humans are generally very selfish. So if we put in effort and empathize accordingly, we should be able to feel and think like the other person and discuss a win-win situation for both parties.

But here's the glitch, empathy can be misused. Someone who is manipulative enough would appear sad and dishearten to you. And this person will tell you all their sad stories and you would probably believe it. The problem here is this person is making use of your empathy to trick you into believe that all these has happen. In actual fact, none of these happened but because you're such an empathetic person, you feeled for this person and trust this person!!

This is extremely dangerous when it comes to people who can really play the scene. They will probably say they are competent communicators by saying they have a range of personalities, and so they choose which is the best for the moment, and use it skillfully to communicate. Others will see it as manipulation. So how do we differentiated it. Hmm A moral dilemma

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