Empathy in Engineering
There is an interesting article found on myEWB about a study done at Linköping University in Sweden. Researchers directed a questionnaire to 200 hundred students in six different study areas to measure the individual’s level of empathy. Surprisingly, or not so, engineering students tended to be less empathetic than their counterparts. The entire paper is accessible only with a full subscription to the website, but the abstract is sufficiently informative:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=127657&CultureCode=en
What does this mean for the workplace? Does the lack of empathy in engineers limit their full potential? Have you encountered any situations at work or at school where empathy was an important factor? Is there a difference between men and women engineers with respect to level of empathy?
I question what studies like this are trying to accomplish. Maybe it’s the indignant engineer in me, but I find a study of only 200 people on a highly subject topic such as empathy dubious from a statistical point of view. I’d also suggest that students, especially engineering variety, don’t have enough context about their future work to accurately speak to some of these question. But maybe that’s just me not wanting to see if from the other perspective
Yes, the sample size of the study might not have provided statistically significant results. However, I think the article raised the point that the profession of engineering is not meant to operate in a silo of only equations and graphs. Absolutely engineering education should better prepare students for the context of the engineering work they are about to embark on. Yet there is only so much formal engineering education can teach. A lot of the soft skills I use to navigate the workplace were picked up when I was on the job interacting with tradespeople and designers. Engineers should be able to empathize with their colleagues as they are increasingly working on teams with other people to collaborate on increasingly complex problems.