The “politics of empathy” might not be in vogue, but Ardern remains committed to it. Is it a strong enough weapon against authoritarianism? Elon Musk recently said that “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy”. She snorts. “What does that even mean?”

Attacking empathy is all the rage with the right, I point out, especially in the US. There are popular books called Against Empathy and The Sin of Empathy. “Well, in that environment, saying loudly and proudly that you believe in empathy and that you’ll govern in that way is an act of strength.”

But public life today is so horrible, so brutal. Why would anyone go into politics? “I think the rehumanisation of people in public life is really important,” she says.

: The Role of Empathy in Math Class; "We teach people, not content" (Allen, 2002) ; focusing on social norms to foster a culture in math class that prioritizes solving problems in multiple ways in order to listen to and respond to people who think differently from you. Two stories - one about a fifth grade class where students were explicitly taught how to listen to other perspectives. Second story is about me, how I learned math successfully in a traditional manner, developed the empathetic ability to value other viewpoints, and the bumps along the way.

Numerous studies have examined the impact of empathetic leaders in organizations. However, the systematic consolidation and categorization of these effects have not yet been conducted. This article presents a systematic literature review of 42 academic studies, carefully selected from 5 databases using a rigorous search process, with the aim of developing a concise category system that synthesizes the effects of empathetic leaders in organizations.

After discussing theoretical lenses and our methodological approach, we outline the various understandings of empathy and the measuring instruments used in the analyzed articles. As our main contribution, we then describe nine categories that summarize the effects of empathetic leaders in organizations. These categories consider affect, attitudes, empathy, equity, interpersonal relationships, leadership practice, perception, performance, and well-being. We further outline the individuals or groups affected by these effects

The last few rounds of conversations surrounded empathy for addicts and these conversations may have fundamentally changed the way I view people’s capacity for empathy. 

Many conversations online started with “I have empathy for addicts until…” and you can fill in the blank with whatever you want, until they steal drugs from a hospital or patient. 

...Until they endanger someone else’s life. ...Until they’re ungodly mean to someone who’s been nothing but good to them. What people are saying is, “I have empathy for addicts until they start acting too much like an addict.”

When Woolfalk first conceptualized her Empathics, she was addressing a society already struggling with meaningful connection. Her exhibition has the fortune, good or bad, of opening at a moment when empathy has supposedly been ‘weaponized.’ The good news is that the artist convincingly – with tenderness, skepticism, and humor – evokes a kinder world, and visitors find themselves in the presence of that rare body of artwork that even evokes the sacred.

‘It was a very different art world’ when she started, the artist said in a recent walkthrough of the show. ‘My work is made thinking about conversations in the contemporary art world. There weren’t that many artists of color being represented in the mainstream art media, so I started thinking about how I could integrate stories that related to me and my community into this larger art world.’

A community empowered to lead with empathy. Our inaugural chief wellness officer and the director of our campuswide Scarlet Well initiative to fund grassroots wellness projects, train staff peer supporters and create an interdisciplinary minor in holistic wellness. We host an annual summit that brings together more than 125 community organizations. With donor support, we are building a community behavioral treatment center and retreat for adolescents and young adults.

 Aja Romano

It’s a provocative idea: that empathy — that is, putting yourself in another person’s proverbial shoes, and feeling what they feel — is a sin. 

The Bible contains repeated invocations from Jesus to show deep empathy and compassion for others, including complete strangers. He’s very clear on this point. Moreover, Christianity is built around a fundamental act of empathy so radical — Jesus dying for our sins — that it’s difficult to spin as harmful. 

Yet as stunning as it may sound, “empathy is a sin” is a claim that’s been growing in recent years across the Christian right. It was first articulated six years ago by controversial pastor and theologian Joe Rigney, now author of the recently published book, The Sin of Empathy, which has drawn plenty of debate among religious commentators. 

In this construction, empathy is a cudgel that progressives and liberals use to berate and/or guilt-trip Christians into showing empathy to the “wrong” people. 

Philippa Smethurst

EMPATHY is not the same as kindness or compassion: it is our capacity to understand another person’s experience and feel it. If we feel, if we understand, we might show care for them.

The word is relatively new in English. Modelled on the older “sympathy” (the ancient Greek word for compassion), it is a reworking of the German expression Einfühlung (“in-feeling”). Originally applied to aesthetics, “empathy” refers to the way in which a viewer might experience a work of art as if they were inside it, living and feeling it vicariously as somebody else. Later, it was adopted by psychologists, with the same idea of deep integration of feeling and connection between one person and another.

That, we argue, is where empathy comes in. Through experiential simulation of another’s feelings, empathy affords us a rich grasp of the distress that others feel. The upshot is that empathy isn’t just a subjective sensation. It affords us a more accurate understanding of others’ experiences and emotions.

Empathy is thus a form of knowledge that can be hard to bear, just as pain can be hard to bear. But that’s precisely why empathy, properly cultivated, is a strength. As one of us has argued, it takes courage to empathically engage with others, just as it takes courage to see and recognize problems around us. Conversely, an unwillingness to empathize can stem from a familiar weakness: a fear of knowledge.

So, when deciding complex policy questions, say, about immigration, resisting empathy impairs our decision-making. It keeps us from understanding what’s at stake. That is why it is vital to ask ourselves what policies we would favor if we were empathically acquainted with, and so fully informed of, the plight of others.

What Is Empathy, Anyway?
Empathy is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things in different contexts. “The empathy we often think about is sharing in another person's feelings,” Daryl Cameron, PhD, says. “So if I see someone, or read about someone who's sad, I catch that sadness myself, and I'm in the same emotional place.”

Cameron is an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University whose research explores the psychology behind empathy and how it guides our decisions. He explains that empathy is sometimes conflated with sympathy, which is when you see that someone else is suffering and your instinct is to help them. It can also get mixed up with “perspective taking,” a theory that describes the human ability to understand what another person is going through without sharing their emotional response—like acknowledging why the fans of a rival sports team are sad because they lost, while also celebrating your own victory.

Maria Ross, an IU Kelley School of Business graduate and author, emphasizes the importance of empathy in both personal and professional settings as a key to thriving in a divided world.

Ross, known for her expertise in strengthening empathy at work, aims to help individuals practice healthy empathy in their personal lives. Her book, “The Empathy Dilemma,” outlines five pillars of effective empathy, offering guidance on understanding and compassion.

“Empathy is about being able to see, understand, and where appropriate feel another person’s perspective,” Ross explained. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crying on the floor with your employees. It’s just a method of information gathering to try to understand where someone else is coming from.”

Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.

We see this now with artificial intelligence, where systems are increasingly trained to simulate empathic responses. Your chatbot apologizes for your frustration, your virtual assistant offers saccharine encouragement, your mental health app listens without judgment. But none of these systems feel anything. They just know what to say. We’re entering a world where “empathetic” algorithms outperform our managers at recognizing distress but lack a moral compass to decide what to do with it. And if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon mistake performance for presence. In doing so, we outsource not just emotional labor but our emotional responsibility to one another.

Hojat et al introduced the concept of empathy in the context of patient care, suggesting that empathy is primarily a cognitive (rather than affective or emotional) attribute that involves understanding patients’ experiences, concerns, and perspectives (rather than feelings), the ability to convey this understanding, and a willingness to help.2 Research shows that empathy helps improve patient satisfaction, thereby promoting their compliance, reducing patient anxiety and depression, and is associated with improved clinical outcomes.3 In addition, empathic physicians are more likely to achieve job satisfaction, psychological well-being, and make better clinical decisions.4–6

Dr. Nicole Ofiesh and Kara Matejka talk about their work prioritising empathy and perspective shifting for individualised instruction to support brain-based learning. Through stories about their experiences in individual private practice (educational therapy and cognitive therapy, respectively) and now through Brain Explained*, they share how their aforementioned practice of utilising empathy leads to brain-based learning, which is known to have a positive impact on individual learners throughout the lifespan.

Key points that Dr. Nicole Ofiesh and Kara Matejka present are when individuals gain an understanding of how best they learn, they are able to navigate barriers and capitalise on their strengths; empathy should function as the guide to supporting who were once called nontraditional learners but now make up the majority of learners; adapting new ways of thinking and broadening our perspective about learning contributes to a foundational shift of brain-based learning.

Practitioners who enhance how they express empathy and create positive expectations of benefit could improve patient outcomes. However, the evidence in this area has not been recently synthesised.

Objective
To estimate the effects of empathy and expectations interventions for any clinical condition.

Design
Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials.

Allan Rohlfs is a seasoned psychotherapist, educator, and certified trainer in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) with over five decades of experience in empathic listening and interpersonal communication. His extensive career includes teaching at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago for 30 years, where he focused on pastoral care and listening skills.  When I Listen People Speak and Come Alive, is the culmination of author Allan Rohlfs five decades long work of practicing listening and teaching.

Edwin Rutsch and Alan Rolfs discuss the evolution and impact of empathic listening, emphasizing its transformative power in personal and societal interactions. Rolfs, a psychotherapist and author, highlights his journey with Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin and the development of his book on empathic listening. They explore the challenges of scaling empathic practices, such as the Empathy Circle and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and the need for a cultural shift towards empathy. Rolfs suggests that empathic listening leads to deeper connections and personal growth, advocating for a broader dissemination of these practices to foster a culture of empathy.

What Empathy Actually Means (Beyond the Buzzwords)
Let’s be honest—“empathy” has become one of those words that gets thrown around in every corporate presentation, right alongside “synergy” and “disruption.” But strip away the consultant-speak, and empathy is actually pretty simple.

It’s asking yourself this: If I were the person on the receiving end of this system, how would I want to be treated?

When you’re looking for a job and get rejected, do you want a one-word email that says “No”? Or would you prefer something that actually acknowledges your humanity?

Artificial intelligence chatbots can draft empathetic responses to cancer questions, but how patients perceive chatbot empathy remains unclear. Here, we found that people with cancer rated chatbot responses as more empathetic than physician responses. However, differences between patient and physician perceptions of empathy highlight the need for further research to tailor clinical messaging to better meet patient needs. Chatbots may be effective in generating empathetic template responses to patient questions under clinician oversight.

Large language models (LLM) applications serve as promising artificial intelligence (AI) tools to address administrative burden and support clinical decision-making in medicine1. Conversational LLM chatbots can provide quality and empathetic responses to questions in general medicine2 and oncology3,4, as evaluated by clinicians. As chatbots are deployed in patient-facing roles, there remains debate about whether patients also perceive that chatbots can demonstrate empathy, a core competency in medicine5. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is central to establishing trustworthy patient-provider relationships which have been linked to improved patient outcomes6. However, patients, rather than clinicians, should serve as the benchmark for determining whether their experiences have been understood, shared, and addressed7.

 A new study from Uganda's Budongo Forest draws on decades of data suggesting chimps understand the specific medicinal properties of certain plants and will go out of their way to treat the maladies of their peers.

Empathy is not just a nice-to-have quality in business. It’s a strategic advantage that directly impacts your bottom line. There’s a big debate in the leadership world. Some researchers say leaders should project strength and authority to inspire teams. Others believe in empathetic leadership, where vulnerability and connection take center stage. After decades of working with teams across the globe, I’ve identified three essential questions that help illuminate empathy’s role in business: 

1. Is empathy something we activate, or something we are? 

What wouldn’t Jesus do?

Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Under normal circumstances, I would dismiss that as tech-bro hogwash. After all, anyone with a basic understanding of history, psychology or neuroscience knows why his position is absurd. But after studying the power of empathy for more than 15 years, I can’t ignore his words. And neither should you.
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Research from Wharton professor Rebecca (Becky) Schaumberg and PhD student Zhiying (Bella) Ren reveals how disagreement in a conversation is often mistaken for bad listening, regardless of how engaged the listener is. Schaumberg explains their findings.

Summary: While AI companions are marketed as a fix for loneliness, research shows that reading offers far more meaningful benefits. Reading fiction can foster social connection, reduce stress, enhance empathy, and even reshape brain activity linked to social cognition.

Shared reading and book clubs have been shown to reduce loneliness and improve mental health, especially among young adults and older populations. Unlike digital interactions, reading activates brain regions involved in understanding others, offering a powerful, low-tech solution to modern social isolation.

Key Facts:

Social Brain Boost: Reading fiction activates brain areas tied to empathy and connection.
Mental Health Aid: Readers report less loneliness, better sleep, and lower stress.
Protective Effect: Frequent reading is linked to a lower risk of dementia and cognitive decline.