Empathy: The Salve for Prejudice The key to understanding prejudice is to use empathy to uncover the root of the bias and the negative physical effects it causes.
Empathy is the capacity to understand and respond to the unique experiences of another. It is not an emotion or a feeling but a capacity that is innately present. Empathy is part of our genetic endowment; it is essentially our ability to read others accurately, to see beyond the surface into the soul of another human being.
Empathy is often confused with sympathy. Sympathy, as opposed to empathy, occurs when we identify with another person’s experience even when we do not actually know whether our experiences are similar. For example, you hear that a neighbor is being transferred to Texas, and you immediately respond by saying how sorry you are that her family has to move.
She responds by telling you that she is going to work for her sister’s clothing chain as a buyer, and it’s the opportunity of a lifetime; plus, she and her husband will be near family and close to her old university and college friends. You realize with embarrassment that your quick reaction was not factual but emotional, projecting how you would feel rather than slowing down and gathering the facts.
Shermin Kruse is here to talk to us about her latest book, Stoic Empathy. She shares what stoic empathy means and how the fusion of these seemingly opposing forces is particularly relevant today. She shares her personal story and how her immigrant journey shaped her understanding of empathy and stoicism. Sher also talks about how she leveraged stoic empathy as a lawyer to great success. We discuss practical tools for building influence and emotional regulation that you can start using today with your employees – or your partner or kids!
Whether you’re a corporate leader, educator, parent, or simply seeking tools to navigate personal and professional challenges with integrity, you will love this conversation!
The world would be a better place if we had more empathy for one another. The more you learn about another’s history and burdens, the better you can understand why they act the way they do. Perhaps the adage is true that to know all is to forgive all. Compassion springs from understanding, and understanding from identifying with the other, and somehow finding yourself in the other and the other in yourself.
Purpose Empathy can be divided into cognitive empathy (CE) and affective empathy (AE). CE is defined as the accurate understanding and appropriate response to others’ thoughts whereas AE is defined as the accurate understanding and appropriate response to others’ emotions.
The overall purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to assess the effectiveness of empathy interventions in physicians and physicians-in-training in increasing CE and AE. Specifically, we are interested in examining whether specific teaching methods and intervention designs may contribute to greater empathy intervention effectiveness for CE and AE outcomes. Method Studies searched included randomized controlled trials conducted between 1971 to 2022 examining empathy interventions for medical students and physicians.
Thirty-six studies, consisting of 3,833 participants, met the inclusion criteria. Data were analysed using random-effects pairwise meta-analysis.
Results Empathy interventions have moderate effect sizes on both CE [d = .50 (95% CI = .30, .70)] and AE [d = .46 (95% CI = .30, .62)]. Heterogeneity of effects was evident for both analyses.
Empathy and its subcomponents are well documented throughout the animal kingdom, indicating the deep evolutionary origins of this socioemotional capacity. A key behavioural marker of empathy is consolation, or unsolicited bystander affiliation directed towards distressed others. Consolation has been observed in our closest living relatives, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes). However, systematic comparisons are absent, despite potential for interspecific differences. Bonobos are often considered less aggressive, more emotionally sensitive, and more socially tolerant than chimpanzees—key characteristics purported to drive consolation
Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In these past few years, it seems as if empathy is being demonstrated much less in children. They’ve been growing up with a lack of it compared to other generations. Every child is known to be taught many values at home, empathy being a major one. But how effective is empathy truly on younger generations?
Many argue that with the rise of technology, many children have started to isolate themselves from the world. As humans, we rely on social interactions to go on with our lives. Many have begun to stray away from verbal interactions for conversations through a screen. This has made many lose communication with kids and interactions decrease.
Empathy is the ability to experience what another person is going through as a real sensation, a genuine emotion or even physical reaction, in body and mind. It’s what causes us to flinch or look away when we see a dog getting hit by a car or a fellow human experiencing real trauma.
Early on in my years rostered as a psychotherapist in the 1980s, I learned that there’s a subset of the human race — maybe we should call them “Lizard People” because they’re so cold-blooded — who literally lack the ability to experience what others are going through. Instead of being empathic, their processing of other people’s pain (or joy or elation or any sensation or emotion) is entirely intellectual.
My review of Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy garnered quite a bit of interest. A lot of it was positive. Some of it… not so much.
Of course, there was the (predictable) trolling from anonymous male accounts on Twitter/X. My approach there was simple. Ignore. Block. Carry on with my life.
But there were also those who readily dismissed my review, in toto, for one of two reasons:
Once More Unto the Empathetic Breach written by Joseph Rigney | May 7, 2025 A Response to Critics
Generally, authors welcome engagement with their views, if for no other reason that such interaction shows that their work has touched a nerve. That’s certainly the case with my work on empathy over the years. Since the release of The Sin of Empathy, I’ve seen a number of criticisms of the work. Some of them, such as Russell Moore’s recent article, don’t even bother to attempt to understand the arguments, but are content to vaguely strawman unidentified fellow Christians. Dr. Moore’s failure of imagination when it comes to the dangers of untethered empathy is particularly ironic since he commends empathetic imagination. And his claim that those (like me) who criticize empathy in the modern world are liberals is, well, something else.
At its core, this simple act is what empathy looks like in practice. It is placing yourself in the shoes of another, to use that metaphor, and doing what you can to show care. According to Elon Musk and a growing number of Christian nationalists, empathy is a danger for our country, indeed for the Western world.
In a recent Saturday morning Weekend Edition, NPR host Sarah McCammon aired an interview with Musk broadcast from the “Joe Rogan Experience” in which Musk claimed the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. In a discussion of immigration he says what we have is “civilizational suicidal empathy.” Jettisoning empathy is also convenient when as McCammon notes you are “making massive cuts to the federal government, including humanitarian programs at home and overseas.”
No need to consider the impact on children, seniors, Veterans or the lives of people who depend on aid for food or the most basic form of health care.
Summary: People are more likely to choose to empathize with groups rather than individuals, even though they find empathizing equally difficult in both scenarios. Using a card-based empathy selection task, participants opted to empathize 53% of the time when shown groups, versus just 34% for individuals.
Researchers suggest that groups provide more contextual information, making empathizing feel more intuitive or meaningful. Despite the higher emotional effort involved, participants rated their ability to empathize with groups as more effective, potentially encouraging their choice.
Empathy Choices: Participants were significantly more likely to choose to empathize with groups (53%) than individuals (34%).
Emotional Effort: Empathizing was rated as effortful and distressing in both cases, yet still preferred for groups.
Context Matters: Groups may offer more cues and context, making empathy feel more effective and rewarding.
When you think of workplace wellness, you may picture gym memberships and yoga mats. But joy, empathy, and inclusion also create a healthy and high-performing workplace culture! We need to reimagine what wellness means!
Today, Misha Safran, shares how empathy intersects with inclusion to foster innovation and equity. We also discuss how to reframe the misconceptions about empathy that exist in high-pressure workplaces. With brilliant mindset shifts and practical tips, she shares how leaders can model empathy without feeling performative, and how to navigate conflict using empathy and emotional intelligence. Misha shares the four elements of joy and why you can be more successful when you embrace them so your team can break free from chaos and transform that energy into creativity, problem-solving, and success.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Empathy is love, care, and concern – not agreement. It’s having conversations, it’s listening to know what’s going on, and it’s having healthy boundaries. Empathy before accusation. Empathy might look different depending on personality – it doesn’t have to mean being touchy-feely or crying on the floor with your employees. Especially in conflict, urgency causes chaos – slow down, take a pause, take a breath, and respond, don’t react. Slow down to build up.
Background Medical curriculum development rarely involves patients, educators, and students, meaning that key stakeholders' voices are not adequately represented in curricular content. In this paper, we describe the co‐production of an empathy‐focused medical curriculum involving patients, educators, and students. Approach We adopted the National Institute for Health Research
co‐production principles to develop three curriculum streams:
1) delivering evidence‐based empathy lectures,
2) involving patients in biomedical science teaching, and
3) implementing longitudinal empathic communication and clinical skills teaching. Patients, educators, and students were purposefully sampled from one medical school. At least one co‐production workshop was conducted for each curriculum stream, combined with written engagement.
“For a long time, bonobos have been thought of as the more empathic ape, whilst chimpanzees are typically spoken about as the violent, despotic ape.
“However, we found that chimpanzees are just as likely to console one another as bonobos,” explained Dr Jake Brooker, who led the study. Age plays a crucial role in the empathy of these great apes. In both bonobos and chimpanzees, the youngest are the first to offer comfort to their peers.
Young bonobos are both more likely to comfort and to be comforted, whereas in chimpanzees, this role is mainly taken on by young males and close social partners.
These empathic behaviours are expressed through simple but evocative gestures, such as embracing, hand grasping and touching… behaviours reminiscent of humankind’s own.
Empathy might be shifting under AI’s influence. In Artificial Empathy, I explored how AI mimics human emotions. Then the Empathy Algorithm asked whether it could surpass us. In AI and the Empathy Economy, I examined how AI is reshaping industries, and the Empathy Apocalypse questioned whether AI’s emotional power would stabilize society—or break it. The key question is whether AI helps maintain a stabilizing balance of human empathy or disrupts it, pushing the system toward instability.
This volume is concerned with theories of emotions that can be described as empathetic ones, either because they presuppose the human capacity for empathy or because they are essential to how empathy operates.
By looking at how philosophers in the history of Western philosophy from Ancient Greece up to the twentieth century have understood these emotions, it becomes possible not only to gain a deeper understanding of certain empathetic emotions and their relation to the concept of empathy, but also to see how these emotions are placed within a broader moral, social, or religious context.
Taking into account this context is essential when it comes to engaging with such issues as whether sympathy provides an adequate basis for a theory of human sociability and fellowship, how compassion and pity play key roles in moral life and in the formation of the practical identities of human beings, roles that have been both positively and negatively evaluated, and whether the altruistic character and concern for others that have traditionally been ascribed to certain emotions can be reconciled with competing values such as self-love and the self-directedness of its concerns.
This week I heard more than once the growing narrative that empathy is a weakness, or worse, a “sin.” Even seeing those words on the page makes me wince. The attempt to frame caring about people as a flaw or a problem comes from a place of malintent, and that’s why I value the history, research, and even pop culture that make it undeniable: caring about people matters.
It feels like such an obvious thing to say, but sometimes we need to check in and make sure we’re clear.
I’ll put my social worker hat on for a sec and just for clarity say, empathy isn’t about abandoning reason or “taking on” someone else’s pain. It’s about recognizing our shared humanity and choosing to care.
Empathy. It’s one of the buzzwords of our culture right now. Everyone wants to receive empathy or to be seen to be empathetic. But what is it? And can we describe Jesus as empathetic?
First, a definition from dictionary.com Empathy Noun The psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts, or attitudes of another. I FEEL YOUR PAIN
I feel your pain. Really? Do you? This is our common understanding of empathy, but it’s mistaken. ‘Vicarious’ communicates the idea that we use our imaginations to participate in the experience of others. That’s not the same as actually feeling my pain. It just isn’t.
In this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, we are joined by Julia Carrie Wong to discuss Elon Musk’s recent opposition to empathy, how it comes out of the Christian right, and the relationship it has to previous discussions of longtermism.
During his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk levelled a critique at empathy, calling it “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.”
If your first instinct is to brush this off as another example of Musk’s awkwardness, we suggest you think again. As journalist Julia Carrie Wong noted in The Guardian in April, Musk’s comments have appeared “amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.”
A diverse coalition of figures have taken up this “war on empathy,” including pastor Joe Rigney, conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and marketing professor Gad Saad.
Each has coined their own meme-able phrase: “The Sin of Empathy,” “Toxic Empathy” and “Suicidal Empathy,” respectively.
In today's fast-paced world, where communication often feels rushed and superficial, the art of listening has never been more critical. As leaders strive to foster environments of trust and collaboration, the concept of 'Radical Listening' emerges as a transformative approach that goes beyond conventional listening techniques.
This blog post explores the profound impact of Radical Listening on leadership, offering insights into how this empathetic practice can revolutionize the way leaders connect with their teams. By embracing Radical Listening, leaders can unlock deeper understanding, enhance team dynamics, and ultimately drive more meaningful and purpose-driven success.
This video explores the "Empathy Paradox" in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), where individuals excel at recognizing emotions in others but often misinterpret them as negative due to heightened sensitivity. This distorted perception can lead to overreactions and impulsive behavior, especially in emotionally charged situations. While people with BPD have strong empathic skills, their heightened sensitivity often makes them feel overwhelmed and impairs decision-making.
Chronic social dysfunction is also driven by a learned distrust of others, making it difficult for those with BPD to form stable, positive views of people. This often results in an expectation of disrespect, hurt, or abandonment in interactions.
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