The Action of Empathy in Informal Communication
Mari Yoshida (AY 2012)
Communication is an essential part of participating in society. In recent years, with the development of media and other forms of communication and changes in society, the forms of communication have become more diverse. Among them, the importance of informal communication has been recognized. Informal communication is defined as "informal and casual communication within an organization or group, such as chatting at work". Informal communication in organizations is "in harmony with the formal hierarchical structure of the organization and is an integral part of achieving the overall goals of the organization. Previous studies have attempted to encourage informal communication by creating informal spaces or evoking empathy through reminders. However, these studies measured the quantity of conversations, not the quality. Therefore, this study focused on empathy in informal communication and aimed to examine its effects from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.
The study followed the following steps. First, a survey about the elements that evoke empathy was administered to 13 participants who were asked to read an introduction to a fictional character with four emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and to indicate which of the four emotions they most empathized with in the introduction. The survey also included a pre-survey questionnaire about empathy. The results of the survey showed that the introductions with fear evoked the most empathy. We decided to use these results in our experiment.
Next, based on the results of the survey, we gathered 12 participants in the experiment and conducted a conversation experiment. The experiment was conducted by dividing the participants into two groups: one group was asked to talk about a topic identified in the survey that promoted empathy (the experience of being scared), and the other group was asked to talk about a topic that did not promote empathy (junior high and high school teachers). The conversation began with a 2-minute self-introduction, followed by 13 minutes on the given topic, for a total of 15 minutes. In this experiment, in addition to analyzing the conversation data, we also asked the participants about their satisfaction with the conversation after the conversation.
The analysis of the data obtained in the experiment revealed the following: The number of utterances was higher in the group that promoted empathy than in the group that did not. In addition, the groups that were asked to talk about a topic that promoted empathy tended to use polite words such as "is/are" at the end of their utterances.
A possible future direction is to incorporate a qualitative perspective, such as that used in this study, into the informal space, as suggested in previous studies, in order to clarify the nature of informal communication in a more natural way, from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.
(Translated by DeepL)