Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire, leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood.

Effective leadership requires a more discerning approach: wise empathy, which recognizes that different emotional moments call for different responses. Sharing in employees’ negative emotions can accelerate burnout, while responding to those with compassion and support can protect both leaders and teams.

The opposite is often true for positive emotions, which benefit from shared celebration. If leaders take five steps designed to guide them in the practice of wise empathy, they can strengthen relationships, improve engagement and retention, and support others without losing their own footing.

Previous studies have shown that those who score high in social dominance orientation also have favorable views towards authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia—to name a few—and less favorable views of traits like empathy. Indeed, empathy is an increasingly important societal topic and has even entered mainstream political discourse. For example, Charlie Kirk, an American conservative figure, once famously argued that “empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.”

What is the relationship between these practices, traits, and orientations? Previous studies have routinely found that mindfulness and self-compassion appeared to be positively related to empathy. It seems intuitive that these intrapersonal practices could broaden to interpersonal attitudes. Could contemplative practices such as mindfulness or self-compassion not only affect empathy, but also broader social orientations?

As new footage allegedly shows Alex Pretti violently attacking law enforcement just one week before he was fatally shot, the political left continues to lean hard into emotional narratives to pressure the Trump administration on deportations.

But is this empathy honest…or toxic?

From celebrity tears to moments of silence at NBA games, the “toxic empathy” around Minnesota ICE enforcement ignores the root of the problem—and, minute by minute, it’s reshaping public trust in law enforcement and how America interprets justice.

Why Empathetic AI Matters
For customers, this shift could change the emotional equation from “I hope my insurer helps me” to “My insurer is already helping me.” In my experience, customer confidence typically grows when the amount of effort required decreases.

For insurers, empathy and automation can drive measurable value. Efficiency can improve as AI handles coordination and documentation, allowing adjusters to focus on complex decisions. Customer satisfaction and retention can rise when people feel cared for, not processed. Our company sees this daily as our AI agents manage repetitive tasks while reacting to tone, context and timing, empowering our teams to focus on emotional moments. When automation becomes empathetic, it can amplify your team's humanity rather than replacing it.

In 2012, autistic scholar Damian Milton introduced the term double empathy problem (DEP) to describe the mutual misunderstandings that can occur between autistic and non-autistic people (Milton, 2012). He challenged the long-held view that social and communication differences in autism were signs of a deficit within autistic people themselves. Instead, he suggested that these moments of disconnection arise between people, from mismatched expectations, worldviews, and communication styles.

In this framing, empathy is not something one person has and another lacks. It is a relational space that can falter when two ways of being and communicating collide. What we call social difficulty may, in truth, be a two way struggle to translate experience across different perceptual and cultural worlds. This links in to the dialectical misattunement hypothesis (DMH) which proposed that various psychiatric and developmental conditions are not a disordered function of individual brains but a mismatch of interpersonal dynamics (Bolis, Balsters, Wenderoth, Becchio, & Schilbach, 2017).

Every president I’ve ever covered gets more full of himself the longer he remains in office, and when you start out with Trump-level self-regard, the effect is grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy and ferocious overreaction to perceived slights.

Bel Jacobs and The Empathy Project team would like to invite you to the first screening of The Empathy Project film, a documentary about change and compassion in animal activism.

Commissioned by The Empathy Project, directed by Tristan Copley-Smith, the new film explores and uplifts public concern for animals, normalising advocacy by platforming a wide variety of voices from the movement. 

On Jan. 8, the film “NURSE: Empathy Heals” premiered at the ETSU Martin Center. The film is the culmination of the Nurse Narratives Initiative, a collaborative effort of ETSU College of Nursing, Ballad Health, the Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement and StoryCollab. The initiative has worked with nurses, nursing students, faculty and patients to tell their stories through a series of reflective workshops.

Executive Director of StoryCollab Allison Myers said the organization, which is a platform of the ETSU Research Corporation, supports participatory media. In participatory media, StoryCollab works to help individuals and communities tell their stories and focuses on building processes that equip participants to share their own experience the way they feel is best. The storytellers own the rights to their stories, helping establish authenticity and autonomy with respect to their stories.

“NURSE: Empathy Heals” documents a particular workshop from the initiative. Directed by an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, the documentary uses a narrative style to tell the often-untold story of nurses.

“It’s important that people see nurses as human,” Myers said.

One hundred years ago, the word empathy entered the English language, coined by largely forgotten Cornell psychologist Edward Titchener, a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt. Over the ensuing decades, use of the word empathy exploded beyond the field of psychology, becoming central to how humans discuss understanding one another.

Most therapists understand empathy to be foundational to therapeutic practice and essential to its success. Research has demonstrated that empathy is a primary contributor to the strength of positive therapeutic outcomes. It’s a term so well-researched and operationalized that we rarely even question the origin of this obvious human faculty of fellow-feeling.

It is worth remembering that these AI chatbots are not displaying real empathy, but rather simulating it based on what they have learned from huge datasets of human interactions.

Empathy is having a moment. Scientific research has indicated empathy works against selfishness and indifference, strengthening societies. But there’s a growing number of mostly conservative voices — in the U.S. and in Canada — who strongly disagree. Their argument is that empathy can be dangerous — driving irrational thinking and behaviour in public life. The result is a growing battle over empathy in a world that has never seemed to need it more.

Empathic Leadership
During the 90’s and noughties it felt to me that some progress had been made. People started to openly talk about caring and listening to their teams. Even mindfulness became a bit of a buzzword. However in the last decade we seem to have reached a new plateau with corporate messaging about welfare and wellbeing being ubiquitous, whilst the pressure on teams, in particular leaders, has increased.

Many organisations claim that they are only as good as their people. If that is true and if your organisation relies on the people in it to thrive, make money and grow it is vital to understand and be aware of what your people are going through.

Dan’s experience reveals the power of empathy in healing. Research by Kitzmüller et al. (2019) backs it up by showing that empathic care and listening to people’s stories led to improved recovery and a greater sense of meaning and manageability. Yet, what happens when the healing power of empathy backfires and leads to burnout?

Empathy is having a moment. Scientific research has indicated empathy works against selfishness and indifference, strengthening societies. But there’s a growing number of mostly conservative voices — in the U.S. and in Canada — who strongly disagree. Their argument is that empathy can be dangerous — driving irrational thinking and behaviour in public life. The result is a growing battle over empathy in a world that has never seemed to need it more.

Empathy is under attack with claims that it can be toxic and dangerous to society.

That’s despite the fact a number of scientific studies have found empathy to be highly beneficial to society and likely innate. The ability to feel what someone else is feeling, can be the impetus for compassion and altruism — an important social glue.

But a growing chorus of mostly conservative writers, podcasters and influencers — mainly in the U.S. but also in Canada — argue empathy is too easily manipulated. They say it’s being hijacked by progressives to justify equity, diversity, abortion, immigration and other progressive causes.

Gad Saad is one of those voices critical of empathy as a given common good. He is an author, a popular podcaster and commentator. His upcoming book is called Suicidal Empathy: Dying To Be Kind, an examination of “the descent to madness by highlighting the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked."

Empathy is having a moment. Scientific research has indicated empathy works against selfishness and indifference, strengthening societies. But there’s a growing number of mostly conservative voices — in the U.S. and in Canada — who strongly disagree. Their argument is that empathy can be dangerous — driving irrational thinking and behaviour in public life. The result is a growing battle over empathy in a world that has never seemed to need it more.

Cognitive empathy: understanding the story behind the feeling
Cognitive empathy is less about feeling and more about insight. It is the mental ability to grasp what someone else might be thinking or experiencing, even if you do not feel it yourself.

A manager using cognitive empathy might not personally share an employee’s panic about a deadline, yet still understand the pressure they feel, the fear of failure, and the backstory that makes this project so sensitive.

Dark empathy allows you to recognize what someone is feeling without emotionally merging with them. You can identify distress, insecurity, or manipulation while staying internally regulated. This emotional distance keeps you from spiraling when others do. It allows you to act strategically instead of reactively.

A 2025 analysis by the Personality Research Institute found that individuals high in cognitive empathy but low in emotional contagion were overrepresented in leadership roles. Researchers noted this group could remain calm under pressure without becoming detached or cruel. This balance helped them make decisions others avoided. Emotional clarity, not emotional intensity, drove effectiveness.

'Nurse: Empathy Heals' film premieres at ETSU Martin Center for the Arts

Allison Myers and Dr. Dena Evans, share with us all the details of the film "Nurse: Empathy Heals" that premieres this Thursday evening at Martin Center for the Arts at ETSU! Please watch the video to discover more about this powerful film that tells the narrative and stories of Nurses lived experiences.

The world is polarized between empathy and cruelty. In this program we profile three visionary women who ground their work in empathy.

Jean Shinoda Bolen is a psychiatrist, analyst and feminist activist who uses empathy in her clinical work.

Congresswoman Norma Torres has represented her southern California district for over a decade, fighting for humane treatment of immigrants.

And Nadia Mahmoud Giol is a practitioner of Nonviolent Communication, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together to touch the human side of one another.

Empathy fatigue often shows up subtly. You might feel irritation when another ‘important issue’ appears on your feed, or guilt for not sharing, donating, or speaking up. Emotional numbness may hide behind humour or memes. Over time, tragedies blur together, losing their human specificity. When everything is framed as equally urgent, the mind flattens it all.

Social media worsens this fatigue by turning care into performance. Silence is read as indifference. Rest is mistaken for ignorance. There is constant pressure to prove compassion through reposts, comments, and visible outrage. Empathy becomes something we display rather than something we practise. When compassion turns into unpaid emotional labour, exhaustion is inevitable.