In general, people’s interest in one another is practical and behavioral. The minimum knowledge required to elicit desired behaviors and to prevent undesired behaviors from occurring is about all people want.

If we feel we have to understand a person’s experiences to accomplish this, we will make the effort, but otherwise, we will avoid these kinds of questions, because understanding experiences requires a kind of involvement in the other’s perspective resembling immersion in literature, where one’s own worldview is temporarily suspended and replaced with another. And sometimes we don’t come back, fully. Something of the literary world stays with in our own, and we see things differently. An understander stands a good chance of being permanently and sometimes profoundly changed by such modes of understanding.

What most people prefer is the kind of relationship scientists have toward matter. The behaviors of objects are observed in various conditions from a distance, and the knowledge is factual: when this happens, this follows. The matter doesn’t explain itself to the observer: the observer does all the explaining. Whatever intentional “thickness” is added to the behaviors is taken from the observer’s own stock of motives. This kind of objective knowledge doesn’t change us or how we see the world; it changes only our opinions about the things we observe.

For a brief moment, the business world felt it needed to understand other people as speaking subjects as opposed to behaving objects. And for a brief moment it appeared that business itself could be changed through the experience of this very new kind of understanding. But now analytics has developed to such a degree that businesses can return back to their comfort zone of objectivity, and tweak human behaviors through tweaking designs, until they elicit the desired behaviors.