A “hot-cold” empathy gap is a cognitive bias where we underestimate the influences of visceral drives or “states” on our attitudes, behaviours and choices.
This “state awareness” is something we cover in many of the breath workshops – it’s not just powerful for recovery and adaptation from training or other stressors, but to facilitate connection and contribution in a group setting.
Effectively the empathy gap says that if we are calm, it is difficult to understand how one perceives the world when they are angry (and the choices they might make) and vice versa.
This relates to any other emotion, including feeling stress or being in love.
State plays an important role in decision making.
When we walk into a shopping centre, the bright lights, music and cooler temperatures are up-regulatory. They help bring us into a state of excitation – this is a preferred state to help facilitate loud, generally obnoxious marketing.
Social media is similar, and platforms generally prioritise posts that are more extreme, or work at the ends of the emotional spectrum (fear, “cuteness,” sympathy) as they create more engagement.
As the user is the product in the social media cycle, not the customer (that would be the advertisers), engagement is helpful to maintain the cycle of addiction and hence spending.
The empathy gap can be intra-personal (we can’t imagine how it feels for “us” to be angry) and inter-personal (I can’t imagine how it feels for “you” to be angry) and it works both ways (from “hot” or activated, to “cold,” or neutral and back again..)
When the empathy gap is in play, if we lack awareness, we can get confused about the nature of the world, or the nature of another human.
As a business owner or practitioner, you also get to decide if you want to play into these hype-circles of click bait and emotionally extreme charged to try and catch people off guard in the hope of a click, or whether you want to focus on quality, consistent work to build long game trust.
