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A very similar effect is the "backfire effect"

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Backfire_effect

I've been spending a lot of time focusing on this with customer support. When a customer is hot about a problem it doesn't help at all to show facts about anything. It really helps though to begin with a place of empathy of how you understand how they feel if you were in a similar situation. For example, had a great experience with Indinero recently when I was hot about a problem. Their customer service rep though approached it exactly from how he would feel the same way as me in such a place and here's how they'll fix it. If he just started with the "here's how we'll do better" I don't think he have gotten through to me in the situation. I've been using this a ton with problems ranging from dealing with my 2 year old to hot topics for customer support, and it's really impressive how well it works.

Yes, in many ways it's simply practicing empathy. But for some reason without thinking about the tactic folks who want to be practicing empathy don't seem to get to that point.

FWIW: I talk about this topic more in depth in video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzGOdE92z9I

2 comments

The simpering sympathising and apologising thing can go much too far as well. My reaction to that is "stop apologising and fix the damned problem".

Experience teaches that it's almost always a sign of someone who's not empowered, or worse, not capable, of actually improving the situation. At worst their role is to actively impede the process, a circumstance far too frequently encountered.

If you watch the video in GP, he talks about situations where he can't or doesn't want to fix anything. For example there's nothing to fix when customers send out spam, it's the customer who has to change their behavior. And people don't like being told that they are at fault. So the point is about how to ease them into understanding that without becoming angry at the company.

Of course, he is dead wrong about nothing to do. He just does not want to inconvenience his own customers.

I took a course this summer called "Design Thinking," which is about a methodology that emphasizes empathizing with the users of a product or service to improve that product or service. Empathy is an extremely powerful tool for communication between people, which is so fundamental to almost everything we do in life.