There’s an image of empathy we all know that is beautiful: the fullness of completely understanding someone else, the symbolic walk in shoes that are not one’s own. The knowledge that someone else can share a pain so acute that would otherwise seem unbearably solitary. It’s an image inherent to empathy’s definition, an image many believe in wholeheartedly. Several studies conducted by Stanford researchers alone suggest people are motivated to feel empathy, that empathy is highly associated with social desirability, that it is as beneficial as it is admired.
The Empathy Paradox
Understanding The Empathy Paradox can transform relationships by enabling you to appreciate differing perspectives and foster collaboration.
Against Empathy
Most people see the benefits of empathy as too obvious to require justification.
Opinion | To Make the World Better, Think Small (Published 2016)
It is easy to become numb to suffering. Feeling empathy for individual victims can overcome the numbness.
Empathy, Thick and Thin
When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences gro
Shared Reality: Experiencing Commonality with others' Inner States about the World
Humans have a fundamental need to experience a shared reality with others. We present a new conceptualization of shared reality based on four conditions. We posit (a) that shared reality involves a (subjectively perceived) commonality of individuals' inner states (not just observable behaviors); (b) that shared reality is about some target referent; (c) that for a shared reality to occur, the commonality of inner states must be appropriately motivated; and (d) that shared reality involves the experience of a successful connection to other people's inner states. In reviewing relevant evidence, we emphasize research on the saying-is-believing effect, which illustrates the creation of shared reality in interpersonal communication. We discuss why shared reality provides a better explanation of the findings from saying-is-believing studies than do other formulations. Finally, we examine relations between our conceptualization of shared reality and related constructs (including empathy, perspective taking, theory of mind, common ground, embodied synchrony, and socially distributed knowledge) and indicate how our approach may promote a comprehensive and differentiated understanding of social-sharing phenomena.
Practicing with Language Models Cultivates Human Empathic Communication
Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a response is attributed to AI, recipients feel less heard than when comparable responses are attributed to a human. We built a conversation platform in which participants are asked to offer empathic support to an LLM expressing realistic troubles and conducted a randomized experiment collecting 33,938 messages spanning 2,904 text-based conversations between 968 participants and their LLM conversational partners. We find participants report feeling empathy but systematically fail to express it, but an LLM coaching intervention offering personalized feedback on effective empathic communication significantly boosts it without homogenizing participants' responses. Moreover, we derive a data-driven taxonomy of idiomatic empathic expressions in naturalistic dialogues across personal and workplace trouble scenarios. These results advance the scientific understanding of how empathy is expressed and demonstrate a scalable, AI-based intervention for scaffolding and cultivating it.
Undersociality: miscalibrated social cognition can inhibit social connection
A person’s well-being depends heavily on forming and maintaining positive relationships, but people can be reluctant to connect in ways that would create or strengthen relationships. Emerging research suggests that miscalibrated social cognition may create psychological barriers to connecting with others more often. Specifically, people may underestimate how positively others will respond to their own sociality across a variety of social actions, including engaging in conversation, expressing appreciation, and performing acts of kindness.
How Social Isolation Is Killing Us (Published 2016)
Research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being.
Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Meta-analysis
Research has consistently shown that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit Empathy deficits. The aim of this study was to systematically review and meta-analyze the research conducted in the domain of cognitive and affective Empathy in Autism. The author also attempted to see the influence of moderators, such as age, culture, and measure-used, on the effect sizes. To fulfill the objective, the meta-analysis was performed on 35 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria with the help of the Meta-essentials, which is a free excel meta-analysis tool that facilitates the integration of effect sizes from various studies. The results indicated that the ASD group differs significantly from typically developing (TD) group in both cognitive and affective empathy. The effect size for cognitive empathy was very large (1.26), whereas, for affective empathy, the effect size was medium (0.58). Further, there was a significant moderating effect of the type of measure used on cognitive empathy. However, there are a few limitations of the present meta-analysis. Firstly, it does not shed light on how symptom severity in Autism influences empathy. Secondly, all the possible moderating variables influencing empathy could not be considered. Lastly, the generalizability of the findings may be limited owing to the limitations present in the included studies themselves. The present meta-analysis has implications for conceptualizing cognitive and affective empathy appropriately, and developing appropriate measures to assess empathy in the Autism population.
What is it like to have never felt an emotion?
Some people seem to lack the capacity to feel joy, sorrow or love. David Robson discovers the challenges and surprising advantages of “alexithymia”.
The Speculative Empathy & Radical Hope of Disclosure Day
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users.
I feel therefore I am: on holiday with my ape cousins | Aeon Essays
The more we learn about the emotions shared by all mammals, the more we must rethink our own human intelligence
Elegant theories and the problems of social psychology
This perspective article provides a commentary on the current state of theories used in social psychology, with a particular emphasis on the importance of distinguishing between theoretical models ...
Social Verification Theory: A New Way to Conceptualize Validation, Dissonance, and Belonging
Academic Abstract In the present review, we propose a theory that seeks to recontextualize various existing theories as functions of people’s perceptions of their consistency with those around them. This theory posits that people seek social consistency for both epistemic and relational needs and that social inconsistency is both negative and aversive, similar to the experience of cognitive dissonance. We further posit that the aversive nature of perceiving social inconsistency leads people to engage in various behaviors to mitigate or avoid these inconsistencies. When these behaviors fail, however, people experience chronic social inconsistency, which, much like chronic rejection, is associated with physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. Finally, we describe how mitigation and avoidance of social inconsistency underlie many seemingly unrelated theories, and we provide directions for how future research may expand on this theory. Public Abstract In the present review, we propose that people find inconsistency with those around them to be an unpleasant experience, as it threatens people’s core need to belong. Because the threat of reduced belongingness evokes negative feelings, people are motivated to avoid inconsistency with others and to mitigate the negative feelings that are produced when it inevitably does arise. We outline several types of behaviors that can be implemented to avoid or mitigate these inconsistencies (e.g., validation, affirmation, distancing, etc.). When these behaviors cannot be implemented successfully, people experience chronic invalidation, which is associated with reduced physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. We discuss how invalidation may disproportionately affect individuals with minoritized identities. Furthermore, we discuss how belongingness could play a key role in radicalization into extremist groups.