It's no secret that the U.S. school system is struggling with kids far below where they should be in terms of grade levels and teachers leaving the profession in droves. Former teacher Mike Bonitatibus puts the blame squarely on showing too much empathy in the classroom.

Empathy is an important part of being a good person. We should all be able to understand how others are feeling and be sensitive to their issues. However, as the idiom goes, too much of anything is never good, especially when it comes to kids. But most people think of that in terms of sugar, not empathy.

Another type of empathic response that decreased after the AI intervention was motivational empathy, for example, You are doing the best you can or I think that is a great start. In the figure below from the study, I found it interesting that as motivational empathy, which people naturally expressed a substantial portion of the time, decreased, validating emotions and encouraging elaboration increased after the AI coaching.

I could not help but feel that people’s expressions began to sound quite similar to what I think of as the typical conversational style of common AI chatbots. At the same time, on the receiving end, motivational empathy did not seem to come across as especially empathic or as making people feel heard.

What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected.

Saad says "maladaptively irrational altruism" has gripped our culture. He calls it a mind parasite that has hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. He says we are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline, with bad policies instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over the truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. Saad says this is not only not humane—it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

In this episode of The Empathy Edge, people and culture strategist Julia Armet — a workplace facilitator and proud neurodivergent leader — joins Maria Ross to explore how empathy transforms work and inclusion. Julia shares her personal journey navigating neurodivergence and introduces the double-empathy problem — a powerful lens for understanding communication across differences. 

This empathy deficit—whether it stems as in Trump’s case from contempt, or as in Democrats’ case from the desire to reduce politics to statistical probabilities—is endemic. An inability to capture the loyalty of skeptics or redirect their ire by understanding what inspires, soothes, scares, and repulses human beings explains Trump's military failures.

It also explains his domestic political failures, the broader authoritarian turn in Republican politics, and even certain technocratic tendencies among Democrats. Whenever leaders treat civilians principally as instruments, they misjudge how those people will respond to events and appeals and affronts. This, unsurprisingly, makes it hard to win any contest in which the masses have a say. Wars, yes. But elections, too.

by Andi Zeisler

The Trump administration and the MAGA movement have embraced overt anti-empathy as its defining stance, and the Christian nationalists, eugenicists, business leaders, and proud bigots who have the president’s ear now rail against empathy as a sin and a cancer. Elon Musk believes that “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy,” and the idea that Democrats and progressives have made empathy “toxic” has become one of the right’s favorite talking points.

Today lets talk about the upcoming April 4th Empathy Summit.
Register https://tinyurl.com/ESReg2026-04-04

Our summits are comprised of a number of 15 minute presentations on the chosen theme for the quarterly summits. After the presentations the attendees are invited to participate in an Empathy Circle.  Past summits have been on conflict resolution, training programs from around the world, and empathy book authors.

In addition the summit is reunion and re-connection of circle trainers, trainees, facilitators, practitioners and supporters.

Our  theme for April, 2026, is How Might We Build the Empathy Movement? 

Do you struggle with empathy when conversations are tough?
Wonder how to use empathy to reduce tensions?
Need more tools to help clients?
You are warmly invited to join us for a practical and interactive introduction to Deep Listening and Empathy based in the model of Nonviolent Communication.

Learn three powerful strategies to grow your empathy muscles and reduce tensions in challenging interactions.

For: Coaches, therapists, educators, human service providers, intimate partners

Gain a competitive advantage in the age of AI.

Accelerate hiring, improve business performance, and reduce costs by applying cognitive empathy – a skill that can be learned.

This masterclass introduces a practical approach to cognitive empathy and its application in a business environment.

Participants will gain concrete tools and know-how that can be immediately applied in practice – particularly in hiring, leadership, and team collaboration.

What you will learn

How to apply cognitive empathy in the hiring process

How to improve decision-making about candidates and teams

How to increase collaboration efficiency and team performance

How to connect empathy with real business outcomes

Empathy is a human mechanism, like attention. It's part of our ability to understand the emotions of others. The problem is that it's heavily biased by our environment.

This biased selection of empathy makes it easy for specialists to dehumanize groups by attributing negative or even animal characteristics to them. Take, for example, the discourse surrounding the presence of Arabs in France, Canada or the United States. They are seen as a problem, and their suffering is systematically denied. This sometimes even serves as a way for groups to victimize themselves over minor or even non-existent phenomena, such as those crying "anti-white" racism as soon as a criticism is made of the white population or an actor of color is cast in a role.

Empathy can be one of our best qualities ― a force that deepens relationships, builds trust and helps us show up for others. But in some dynamics, that positive instinct can be turned against you.

“Weaponized empathy is a pattern of using empathy, compassion or guilt to influence another person’s behavior, often at the expense of personal boundaries and preferences,” Caitlyn Oscarson, a licensed marriage and family therapist, told HuffPost.

Empathy varies across individuals but can be strengthened through structured reflection and practice.

Mentalization—the ability to understand minds—can be taught and is linked to better mental health.

Early attachment experiences shape how people interpret others’ intentions and respond emotionally.

Recognizing one’s reactive patterns creates opportunities to respond more thoughtfully in relationships.

A microphone and oyster shell passed from hand to hand in a circle of folding chairs as neighbors spoke about their own spirituality and listened to others’ without interpretation.

The Natick Freedom Team, a volunteer anti-bias, racism and bigotry organization, gave residents the chance to explore their neighbors’ belief systems at an interfaith listening circle March 25 at the First Congressional Church of Natick.

“Our goal is to listen and help create an opportunity for people to share,” said Don Greenstein, an ombudsperson at Brandeis University and member of the Natick Freedom Team who led and moderated the circle. “It was met and then some.” 

Title: Empathy in Action: Strengthening the Patient-Provider Connection - Part I
Runtime: 5 min 57 sec
Speaker: Tara Harding, DNP
Empathy in Healthcare: A new educational initiative, "Empathy in Action," launched this week focusing on how healthcare providers can use specific "active listening" techniques to prevent patient "un-hearing," which is a leading cause of delayed diagnoses in 2026.

Learn how to communicate with more empathy by putting these four principles into practice. Having empathy is good, communicating empathy is better. u.

A listening that goes beyond words
Highly empathetic people don't just listen to what is said. They also perceive what is not expressed. They pay attention to nonverbal communication, silences, micro-expressions, and subtle changes in attitude. This observational ability often allows them to understand a situation in its entirety, even without hearing everything explicitly.

Background
Reduced empathy is a hallmark of individuals with high (i.e., clinical) levels of psychopathy, who are overrepresented among incarcerated men. However, a comprehensive, well-powered mapping of cortical structure in relation to empathy and psychopathy is still lacking.

Conclusions
Men with high psychopathy had reduced empathic concern, increased SA, and a compressed macroscale organization of CT, indicating selective co-alterations in empathy and cortical structure. Future work should build on these novel insights in both the general and incarcerated populations to inform the treatment of psychopathy.

You love the people around you and desire to support them — but your soul is also drained. It’s common for those of us who are tender-hearted, sensitive, and attuned to others’ needs to struggle with compassion fatigue. Thankfully we can learn to steward the gift of empathy Jesus has given us by setting boundaries and practicing soul care.

Join us for this episode of Soul Talks for part three of a teaching Bill and Kristi shared at the American Association of Christian Counselors. It’s impossible to overflow with empathy for others unless it’s a wellspring in your own soul. You’ll learn when and how to offer empathy and get equipped with practices (like Calming Touch Prayer and Empathy Prayer) so that your care remains healthy and fruitful.

Resources for this Episode:

The Bible studies, research, diagrams, and practices referenced in this episode can be found in our book Deeply Loved: Receiving and Reflecting God’s Great Empathy for You

Robert Bortins
We have been told a lie so often and so convincingly that most Christians have absorbed it without question: empathy is the highest virtue. To be a good person, a good parent, a good neighbor, you must feel what others feel, affirm what they affirm, and follow wherever their emotions lead.

But what if this version of empathy is not a virtue at all? What if it is, in fact, a sin?

I recently sat down with Dr. Joe Rigney on Refining Rhetoric to discuss his new book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2025). Joe is a fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College in Idaho, a pastor at Christ Church, and the author of eight books. He has spent over a decade studying how compassion gets corrupted, and his conclusions should challenge every Christian parent, pastor, and leader who cares about raising children who can think clearly in a morally confused age.

noticeable shift is taking place across entrepreneurship, and it is being driven by women who are building companies grounded in lived experience, emotional intelligence, and practical problem-solving. These founders are not waiting for permission or perfect conditions. Instead, they use empathy and identify gaps in everyday life to create businesses that respond directly to them.

A new theory by Dr. Damian Milton (2012) suggests that both the neurodivergent and neurotypical person in a social interaction are involved equally in the “miscommunication” within the interaction — and the “empathy problem [is] a two-way street” (Milton, 2012)

. A double empathy means that in the interaction, both the autistic and neurotypical person are attempting to understand and empathise with the other; however, a disjoint occurs since the way each experiences the world, as well as their personal understandings, is vastly different.

The problem then is not that Autistic people lack the ability to empathise or socialise, but rather that the way in which they do so is not what a neurotypical person is expecting, and vice versa. This theory presents a shift in the way interactions between neurodivergent and neurotypical people are viewed, and the difficulty of social interactions are not to be blamed on the Autistic person’s cognition alone.