[MUSIC]
Empathy, understanding how others think and feel is what connects us.
Empathy bonds us to our families, friends and colleagues, and
it influences how we treat one another.
Instinctively we know this, but we don't fully appreciate the importance of empathy
in designing great products, and improving employee performance.
We also tend to miss just how easily we can cultivate it.
HopeLab is a non-profit focused on harnessing technology to
improve health and well-being.
Their first product was a video game for kids battling cancer.
HopeLab researchers started by listening to the kids' stories, and they learned
that the young patients fear cancer treatment almost as much as cancer itself.
They have to leave home for the hospital, and take chemotherapy.
A process that's often painful in its own right.
Yet sticking to regular treatment is critical to their survival.
HopeLab's challenge emerged to shift the kids' attitudes so
they viewed chemotherapy not as another awful part of having cancer, but
rather a weapon for them to use.
Hope Lab designed the game called Remission so
that you guide a robot named Roxxi through the body as she blasts away cancer cells.
When Roxxi runs low on ammo you have her find a chemo tap to power up.
So she can more effectively fight the cancer, and the video game worked.
In one study, the kids who played remission versus a control game
took their antibiotics more consistently, and
doctors found higher levels of chemotherapy in their blood.
What's more, the results of another study showed that,
when players were actively playing remission, the mesolimbic
region of the brain, the reward pathway associated with motivation, was activated.
This activation was associated with a shift in attitudes toward chemotherapy
that helped boost players adherence to treatment.
Through empathic insight,
seeing the world from the point of view of a young cancer fighter,
HopeLab created the game to help these kids more effectively fight their disease.
[SOUND] Now let's look at employee performance.
University fundraisers captured the imagination of psychologists Adam Grant
and his colleagues, who were intrigued by the motivational factors that drove
the fundraiser's success when they called alumni to ask for donations.
Now typically the fundraisers don't know the scholarship recipients,
the direct beneficiaries of the donations.
So in one study the researchers asked some of the fundraisers to spend five minutes
speaking with the scholarship student, enabling them to establish
a personal connection to the student before making their calls.
The result?
The fundraisers who established a personal connection spent twice as long on
the calls, and nearly tripled donations compared to a control group.
Fostering empathy makes work personal.
The good news for business leaders is that empathy is a skill that can be learned.
Psychologist Karina Schumann and her colleagues ran one study
where they told half of their participants that empathy is an innate trait.
The other half were told it's a skill that can be developed.
Those in the second group were more empathetic, spent more
time listening to others and demonstrated an increased willingness to help others.
What's more, new technology is making it even easier to teach empathy.
Jeremy Balinson and his colleagues at Stanford use virtual reality simulations
to give people the experience of walking around in someone elses shoes.
The results of their studies, show that taking on the perspective of another,
even for a few minutes, creates more empathy.
We've known for a long time that empathy strengthens our bonds and
impacts how we treat one another, but now an increasing amount of evidence
suggests that fostering empathy can also help us design better products, and
improve employee performance.
This deep and powerful resource has largely gone untapped
in arenas where it can serve us so well, but
perhaps most importantly this work shows that empathy can be learned, and
that integrating it into our professional life is a choice we can all make.