How can businesses deal with psychopathic employees? Dr. Paul Babiak, co-author of "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work," explains.
Are most workplace psychopaths able to empathize at all?
Dr. Paul Babiak: Lack of empathy, remorse and guilt are some of the defining features of a psychopath, whether they are incarcerated, out in public or working for an organization. So, I would say they are incapable of feeling any empathy for those they manipulate. They also do not feel any loyalty to their companies or teams, despite a persona (mask) that portrays them otherwise.
In this workshop, we will explore what it means to really listen, and strengthen that muscle together in practice. Through close reading of literary and artistic texts, we will encounter different types of illness narratives from the patient perspective, seeing the patient as an expert in their experience and a collaborator in the healing process: key tenets of narrative-based medicine. We will also unpack what happens when we receive these stories of suffering.
This workshop also offers a supportive environment for empathic listening in which to write and share illness stories we have witnessed or our own personal illness narratives.
Jeremy Howick, University of Leicester – Artificial intelligence has mastered chess, art and medical diagnosis. Now it’s apparently beating doctors at something we thought was uniquely human: empathy.
A recent review published in the British Medical Bulletin analysed 15 studies comparing AI-written responses with those from human healthcare professionals. Blinded researchers then rated these responses for empathy using validated assessment tools. The results were startling: AI responses were rated as more empathic in 13 out of 15 studies – 87% of the time.
Before we surrender healthcare’s human touch to our new robot overlords, we need to examine what’s really happening here.
Create an organizational culture of cognitive empathy. The CEO plays a central role at the top of the organization in modeling values and behaviors. By demonstrating these qualities with their direct reports and by working directly on this so-called “first team” , the CEO establishes a standard that can be cascaded through the organizational pyramid.
This culture then takes root as leaders at all levels are encouraged, recognized, and rewarded for exemplifying empathetic leadership. It’s also possible that leaders may get clarity and conviction on cultural priorities, like cooperation, transparency, and mutual accountability by viewing things through a cognitive empathy lens. It may also help with restructuring, talents moves, and succession planning.
Our theme for November is on The Foundational Practice of the Empathy Movement.
Join this Summit if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and help build the Movement. The Empathy Movement is a transformative force in addressing the growing fragmentation and polarization in modern societies. At its core, the movement seeks to reorient how individuals and groups relate to one another, shifting from transactional, adversarial and authoritarian interactions to ones rooted in mutual listening, deep dialogue, understanding, constructive collaboration and seeing our shared humanity.
The fifth session of “Psychology Talks with Prof. Nevzat Tarhan” was organized by Üsküdar University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, together with the Psychology Club and Positive Psychology Club. During the event, which drew great interest from participants, Psychiatrist Prof. Nevzat Tarhan shared thought-provoking insights on narcissism, self-balance, empathy, hope, and the role of social sciences.
He stated that a lack of empathy lies at the core of narcissistic personality traits and emphasized that people mature as they redirect their love from themselves toward others. Tarhan pointed out that the cooperation between reason and emotion helps maintain balance in decision-making and drew attention to Generation Z’s search for meaning. He stressed that empathy is the key to both individual and collective healing and underlined the importance of hope and balance.
You may think your empathy will eventually reach a narcissist—but it never does. What looks like kindness or sensitivity from them is usually manipulation, performance, or strategy. In this video, Dr. Ramani explains why giving endless empathy to a narcissist doesn’t just go nowhere—it can actually harm you in the long run.
To address this challenge, Mediazoo developed a comprehensive empathy training program that placed customers at the heart of the service experience. We created a suite of impactful films showcasing real customer stories, illustrating the stark contrast between good and bad service.
These narratives allowed employees to step into the customers' shoes, fostering a deeper understanding of their needs. A launch film narrated the essence of empathy, featuring dramatised interactions that highlighted the human impact of Zurich's services, encouraging staff to see beyond policies and numbers.
As Stanford University Professor of Psychology Jamil Zaki notes: “An AI bot can understand you, but it cannot genuinely feel with you.” He cautions against “LLMpathy”, where AI mimics empathy without true understanding, potentially leading to deeper trust erosion. The future of customer experience demands a strategic blend of technological efficiency and genuine human connection. Leveraging AI for speed and scale allows human interaction to focus on critical, emotionally charged moments where vulnerability and complexity demand authentic care.
The good news is that empathy is a learnable skill. This insight forms the bedrock of Zurich’s global customer strategy. Since 2023, we’ve successfully rolled out a Global Empathy Training Programme, as a key part of the customer strategy, across over a quarter of our workforce. Our employees have completed nearly 46,000 hours of bespoke training, equipping them to respond with emotional intelligence and authenticity in vulnerable moments. The impact has been tangible and measurable.
Inquiries into fatal healthcare tragedies in the UK – from Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust to various patient safety reviews – have explicitly named lack of empathy from healthcare professionals as contributing to avoidable harm. But here’s the real issue: we’ve created a system that makes empathy nearly impossible.
Doctors spend about a third of their time on paperwork and electronic health records. Doctors must also follow pre-defined protocols and procedures. While the documentation and protocols have some benefits, they have arguably had the unintended consequence of forcing the doctors to play the bot game. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised when the bot wins.
EmpathyTech 2025: Let's dive deep into how technology can bring us closer together through empathy and understanding! EmpathyTech Philadelphia is where technology and empathy meet tocreate innovation that truly serves people of all abilities and all ages. This year’s theme, Inclusion — Every Step of the Way, reflects our dedication to ensuring that every advance in technology is empathy-driven, inclusive, and built to support people at every stage of life.
The 2025 event will take place at the prestigious Lincoln Financial Field, with a day full of speakers, vendor tables, and networking. Building on the success of past EmpathyTech events in Oslo and Philadelphia, this conference brings together leaders and changemakers who share a vision for technology that empowers, connects, and fits our philosophy of:
Why you should use empathy in business: Is there a place for empathy in the workplace? Google recently identified empathy as THE difference maker. Why is empathy important in business and what does these new statement from Google and Adobe mean for business?
In this video Joshua Freedman, Six Seconds' CEO, talks about why you should use empathy in business, and explores 3 obstacles leader face that will help you understand how you can use empathy to get better results for yourself for your team and for your organization.
Want to see how companies around the world are working on empathy and emotional intelligence? 6seconds.org/cases
The Science Behind Empathetic Leadership Research demonstrates that empathetic leaders drive higher employee engagement, increased innovation and superior financial performance.
The neurological explanation is compelling. When employees feel understood and valued, their brains operate in a state conducive to creativity and problem-solving. Conversely, when they perceive threat or indifference from leadership, their cognitive resources shift to self-preservation, limiting their capacity for innovation and collaboration.
According to McKinsey, psychological safety is consistently one of the strongest predictors of team performance, productivity, quality, safety, creativity and innovation across industries ranging from medical teams in hospitals to software development teams at Big Tech firms.
As the founder of the UK’s first empathy centre, focused on improving healthcare outcomes through greater understanding of patient perspectives, I am keen to seek out international best practice in this area.
What started as a conversation with a colleague about working with the other empathy specialists around the world has transformed, two years later, into a global network of 13 centres across five continents.
The Global Empathy in Healthcare network has established a model for implementing empathy into healthcare worldwide – and from 2027 will be implementing a World Empathy in Healthcare Day. This enables our team at the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare and our partners around the world to develop teaching and training in line with the latest global insights.
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent systems have demonstrated increasing capability in understanding and expressing human emotions. However, no objective and standardized metric currently exists to evaluate how empathetic an LLM’s response is. To address this gap, we propose a novel evaluation framework that measures both sentiment-level and emotion-level alignment between a user query and a model-generated response.
The proposed metric consists of two components. The sentiment component evaluates overall affective polarity through Sentlink and the naturalness of emotional expression via NEmpathySort. The emotion component measures fine-grained emotional correspondence using Emosight. Additionally, a semantic component, based on RAGAS, assesses the contextual relevance and coherence of the response.
Empathy as our superpower can motivate us to push back against the chaos and casual cruelty that seems to be our new reality. But even more important is the deep empathy that will be needed to create not just a durable democracy, but one that can provide the basic necessities of life for all of us.
— In a time when our society seems more polarized and fractured than ever, community religious leaders are preaching for empathy and understanding as their flocks crave civil discourse.
Care for the vulnerable, the inherent dignity of all people and prioritizing the common good over individual interests are among the common principles religious leaders cited as themes in their messages for uniting fractured communities.
The burnout crisis makes this worse. Globally, at least a third of GPs report burnout – exceeding 60% in some specialties. Burned-out doctors struggle to maintain empathy. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a physiological reality. Chronic stress depletes the emotional reserves required for genuine empathy.
The wonder isn’t that AI appears more empathic; it’s that human healthcare professionals manage any empathy at all.
Empathy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” in leadership—it’s essential. In today’s workplaces, leaders aren’t just managing workloads; they’re managing emotions, motivation, and human connection. Empathy is what makes leadership relational, not just transactional. Psychology, as a scientific field, studies how empathy operates in human beings, highlighting its importance as a universal trait among human beings.
Despite already having a reputation for exceptional work-life balance and being named a Top Employer for 16 consecutive years, Zurich Insurance Group aspired to cultivate a cultural change towards an even more empathetic workplace culture. Their mission was to enhance the well-being of their front-end teams by addressing the stress and challenges tied to difficult conversations. By equipping employees with the skills to navigate these challenging interactions, the goal was to improve the experience of their clients and mediators, leading to higher satisfaction scores.
The program focused on improving employees' emotional well-being and relationships with their clients, offering tailored solutions for all teams within the organization. "Hello Empathy" received the 2023 special award from the Spanish Institute of Change Management.
New research reveals 73% of consumers avoid businesses that don’t show empathy with almost half (43%) taking their business elsewhere when brands fail to deliver 71% believe AI cannot recreate genuine human connections and 92% value direct human interaction over 24/7 availability Following the introduction of Zurich’s empathy training program, 26% of global employees have completed almost 46,000 hours of training
In our busy world, it’s rare to really feel listened to. At Empathy Café, we slow down and create a space where you can talk, share, or just be, and be truly heard, without interruption.
You’ll be paired with someone and take turns speaking and listening. You can share whatever is alive in you: your thoughts, emotions, or silence. The listener's role is simply to be present, reflect back what they hear, and offer empathy.
No need to perform or impress. Just come as you are. We begin together with a short introduction and then guide you through the practice.
Want to develop your empathy? Empathy is one of the core skills of emotional intelligence and it takes practice to develop empathy. In this video we'll give you 5 questions to develop your empathy. Top leaders recognize empathy as an essential skill for success but can empathy be developed? These are the real questions to increase empathy that Six Seconds certified practitioners use with clients all over the world . Now you can have access to these powerful tools and methods.
"Emotions are messages from you to you" Joshua Freedman, Six Seconds CEO, shares best tips and 5 questions to develop empathy. So if you are ready to develop your empathy skills but just need some questions to get started, its time to develop empathy and grow your emotional intelligence practice.
Empathy isn’t just about feeling sorry for people. It’s about understanding their emotions, experiences, and perspectives without losing yourself in the process. In this video, Darren F Magee explains what empathy really means and how to use it in a healthy, balanced way.
You’ll learn the difference between empathy and sympathy, explore cognitive, affective, and somatic empathy, and discover how empathy works on both emotional and psychological levels. When empathy is balanced with boundaries, it becomes one of the greatest strengths we can develop. Without boundaries, it can lead to burnout, emotional exhaustion, and overwhelm.
Whether you’re an empath, someone working in a helping profession, or simply trying to build better relationships, this video will help you understand:
What real empathy looks like
- How to recognize empathy burnout - Why empathy needs emotional boundaries - How to say no with empathy - How to strengthen emotional intelligence and connection - Understanding empathy helps us connect deeply, reduce conflict, and protect our own emotional health.
Belinda Parmar, chief executive of The Empathy Business, highlighted that while large language models could absolutely provide empathy, they do not possess the levels of emotional intelligence which advisers have.
A study by Microsoft found ChatGPT was the most empathetic, however Parmar noted LLMs can get confused with empathy and sympathy.
Additionally, Parmar said the LLMs can produce ‘empathy bloating’ whereby it provides constant flattery to the user and therefore may not always say what the user needs to hear.
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