The key to making this happen for those around us is EMPATHETIC RESPONDING! The traditional definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share feelings. When we utilize empathetic responding, we are acknowledging what's being told to us and also by a certain means we're recognizing the core of the other person's humanity.
"When people feel heard it not only builds trust but it also increases problem solving!"
Rachel L Rosenthal, PhD
Access, Quality & Usability UX Researcher I Data Scientist I Human Factors i
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Design thinking as a mindset – not just a process I also use design thinking to help students move from problem talk to problem work. For me, a design thinking mindset shapes how learners frame problems and pursue solutions perceptively, by building empathy and considering alternative perspectives. In my courses, students learn to practise empathy, holistic thinking, critical questioning, experimentation and creative thinking and focus on impact – skills that support human-centred problem solving. This maps neatly on to self-determination theory.
How GenAI can amplify co-creation in higher education Spotlight guide: the practicalities of co-creation with students Questions to ask when designing collaborative online learning experiences
Empathy and holistic thinking support students’ relationship skills by practising seeing the world from the perspectives of different others; creative thinking and critical questioning support autonomy by encouraging students to understand the world in their own preferred way, and experimentation strengthens competence by creating mastery experiences through trial, feedback and refinement.
They say empathy is killing the West. The book carrying the claim, Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, sits at the top of the American charts with Elon Musk’s endorsement on the jacket, and its argument is brutally simple. We feel too much. Our kindness has been turned against us, and the cure is to feel less.
I have spent much of my life watching what actually kills societies, 24 years of it behind a camera, from the Gulf to Bosnia to Afghanistan. I can report that the diagnosis is back to front.
Take what the argument gets right first, because it is real and conceding it costs nothing. Empathy can be gamed. It is a spotlight, not a scale. It over-weights the sympathetic face in front of us and misses the victim we cannot see, and institutions can be captured by the performance of compassion until they reward the appearance of care over its results. All true, and none of it new. The psychologist Paul Bloom made the serious version of this case a decade ago, in his book Against Empathy.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming healthcare, influencing how physicians are trained, how medical decisions are supported, and how patient care is delivered. However, physician and medical education expert Jess Bunin, MD, MHPE, says one element remains irreplaceable: the empathy and human connection required to provide quality healthcare.
“AI can analyze information, recognize patterns, and support physicians in making complex decisions, but it cannot understand a patient’s fears, interpret the emotions behind their story, or build the trust that comes from a genuine human connection,” says Dr. Bunin. “The future of healthcare depends on embracing technology while ensuring that empathy remains at the center of medicine.”
Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental condition that affects how people communicate, learn, and interact with others. One common characteristic involves differences in social communication, such as knowing how to respond when someone shares an emotional experience. This specific conversational skill is often referred to as verbal empathy.
Empathy is generally understood to have two distinct parts. The cognitive component involves understanding the actual words and the intent behind what someone is saying. The affective component involves recognizing the underlying emotion, such as happiness, frustration, or sadness. Following the recognition of these two components, a person must formulate a verbal response that matches the situation to maintain a smooth conversation.
Here, we use the term “culture of philanthropy” not as it’s been used elsewhere to describe fundraising potential or the internal work environment of nonprofits. Instead, we mean something much wider: the ongoing set of behavioural norms within a society that encourages a personal and collective responsibility for empathy and action.
Here, “empathy” refers to our regard for those in need and those with whom we differ; and “action” refers to our learning about those needs and differences, together with our assisting or defending the people involved. Such a culture can be seen in a variety of ways, whether in our readiness to help, say by voluntarism or charitable donations, or in our readiness to understand and respect the outlooks and priorities of others despite our not sharing them.
Following reports that children allegedly beat a rooster to death at Lake Texoma over the Fourth of July weekend, TeachKind—PETA’s humane education division—is rushing emergency resources to local summer camps and other youth programs. The package will include empathy-building curricula with an urgent letter stressing the need for lessons that condemn violence and foster empathy for all living beings. PETA also plans to erect a sky-high message in the area asking residents who suspect any young person of abusing animals to contact TeachKind for free resources that help parents and educators cultivate compassion.
According to news reports, the rooster—identified as “Rusty the Rooster”—had become a familiar sight to visitors at Lake Texoma. The Marshall County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the incident.
What is the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire? The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) is a validated, self-report measure of emotional empathy developed by Spreng et al. (2009). It consists of 16 items rated on a 5-point Likert scale, with total scores ranging from 0 to 64.
Unlike broader empathy measures that assess both cognitive (understanding others’ perspectives) and emotional (feeling what others feel) components, the TEQ focuses specifically on emotional empathy. It captures the ability to recognize and resonate with others’ feelings. This distinction makes it particularly useful in therapy and counseling, where practitioners need to evaluate a client’s emotional responsiveness and relational capacity.
The instrument was developed to meet a specific need in psychological assessment: a brief, psychometrically sound tool that could measure empathy without the length or cognitive-load demands of earlier instruments.
Edwin Rutsch and Dave Snyder (EmbracingRacialUnity.org) discussed the role of empathy in bridging racial and political divides, especially within the church. Dave is equipping Christians to talk race, build church unity and put things right in our communities. Dave shared his journey in a historically white church that became more diverse, highlighting the challenges and the importance of empathy in building unity.
Some of Dave's Videos include Christians Are Getting Empathy Wrong- Here's What The Bible Actually Says
by JAMES DOMDERA, MD WHAT IS EMPATHY? Empathy is commonly described as the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, but more formally it's the ability to accurately understand and appropriately respond to others' thoughts and emotions.2 It can be further divided into cognitive empathy (understanding others' thoughts and perspectives) and affective/emotional empathy (understanding others' emotions).3
For those of us trained to be emotionally detached in the clinical setting, empathy can seem risky. But empathy and boundaries are not mutually exclusive.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? Clinically, we know that empathy improves outcomes. In a study of adult patients with chronic pain, physician empathy was associated with better outcomes.4
Free speech limits are shifting as younger people weigh the right to speak against the duty not to wound with words.
Can empathy and truth be reconciled?
Does this mean that “safe space” and free speech exclude one another? Not necessarily, but only if we understand safety as protection from real violence and threat, not from the discomfort of thought. The problem appears when “safe space” means a zone free from all ideas that someone may regard as harmful.
Empathy and truth can be reconciled, but not when empathy begins to define which truth may be spoken. Truth is often uncomfortable by nature. If it never wounded, we would not need courage to speak it.
Civilization is destroying itself, says the Canadian scholar who is fleeing Montreal for the U.S.
The Strengths: Why It Resonates
Saad’s concept offers a clean framework for a frustration shared by many modern critics. By using an evolutionary biology lens, he brilliantly articulates why unconditional tolerance can lead to a paradox where a society tolerates its own destruction. Framing the critique around empathy rather than malice explains why otherwise well-meaning people support policies with disastrous long-term consequences. His personal history as a refugee lends real emotional gravity to his warnings about civilizational collapse.
The Criticisms: Where It Falters
On the flip side, critics argue that "suicidal empathy" operates more as a politically weaponized buzzword than a rigorous psychological metric. Media analysts point out that Saad relies heavily on provocative anecdotes—such as European grooming scandals or selective immigration cases—to generalize complex systemic issues. Opponents argue that pathologizing empathy is an effort to dismantle social safety nets and dehumanize marginalized communities, such as asylum seekers.
Ultimately, the piece is a provocative, polarizing read that serves as a core text for the modern anti-woke movement, heavily praised by figures like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, while being deeply critiqued by the progressive left as an assault on fundamental human compassion.
The simple act of noticing someone's eye color can build your empathy, explains Alan Alda, who got so curious about empathy one day that he began to experiment on himself. Any time he'd interact with someone, he would try to figure out what they were feeling, and name their emotional state (using strictly his inside voice).
Despite these advances, they have not eliminated the human suffering that often accompanies chronic immune-mediated disease, including fibromyalgia, fatigue, central sensitization and the polysymptomatic distress many patients experience. At the same time, there has been renewed interest in patient empowerment and the therapeutic value of empathic communication, driven by growing evidence that empathy can improve health-related quality-of-life measures and potentially influence biologic pathways linked to immune function and well-being.
“Empathy is more important now than ever because of how healthcare has evolved,” says Cleveland Clinic immunologist Leonard Calabrese, DO, Director of the R.J. Fasenmyer Center for Clinical Immunology. Dr. Calabrese has maintained a longstanding educational and research interest in empathy since his early involvement in medical humanities at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.
On July 25, 2026 the Empathy Center will be conducting a Facilitator training course on Zoom. The intent of this training is to teach the participant how to organize and conduct Empathy Circles.
Free Empathy Circle Facilitator Training course on Zoom. Classes start July 25, 2026. Enroll in our training course to learn mutualism, reflective listening, and empathy circle facilitation.
The course is experiential and consists of 4 classes taught over 4 consecutive Saturdays. Each class lasts about two and half hours. In addition to attending 4 sessions of 2.5 hours each, there are weekly assignments to complete that may take 1-2 hours. We will also pair you weekly with an empathy buddy to practice empathy.
The only prerequisite is to attend at least two Empathy Circles prior to attending a training. We have recently started a drop-in Empathy Cafe on Thursdays at 6 PM, Pacific Time at https://zoom.us/j/3521266686. By attending this Empathy Cafe one can fulfill the two circle prerequisite.
Empathy fatigue doesn’t usually look like disengagement. Instead, it presents as cognitive and emotional narrowing. Practitioners may become more focused on resolution than exploration, rely more heavily on precedent than context and show reduced tolerance for ambiguity. In this state, there can be a stronger pull towards control, tightening processes, streamlining decisions or seeking to limit further escalation, and this is where organisational risk begins to emerge.
And then the one that folks should know more about from my world. In 2020, three political scientists, Elizabeth Simas, Scott Clifford, and Justin Kirkland, asked what dispositional empathy does to your politics. If empathy were the indiscriminate, universalizing flood of Saad’s nightmare, high-empathy people would be the most even-handed, the most willing to extend grace across the aisle. The opposite is true. People high in empathic concern are more affectively polarized, not less. They show more partisan bias in judging political events. They take more satisfaction when the other side suffers. Empathy in the wild is not a searchlight sweeping the horizon for anyone in pain. It’s a spotlight, and it points at your own.
A Better Definition of Empathy Here’s what empathy actually is:
Empathy is the ability to recognize and emotionally connect with what another person is feeling — not necessarily by sharing their specific experience, but by understanding the feelings that experience produced. That distinction matters more than it might seem. And it’s one that comes up constantly in self-worth work, men’s therapy, and any space where people are trying to feel less alone in what they’re carrying. It also has significant clinical and neurological support — something researchers like Jean Decety and Tania Singer have spent decades documenting.
by @Andie Korenge The U.S. is also facing an empathy deficit Experts agree that America is in an empathy decline. Professors of psychology at Duke University and Northeastern University have said as much, as has a professor of medicine looking at the issue from a health perspective.
You can look at politics and social media feeds to see the empathy gap in action.
In 2022, Pew Research Center polling revealed that Democrats and Republicans are doing a bad job of putting themselves in each other’s shoes. Seventy-two percent of Republicans reported believing Democrats are more immoral and dishonest, while roughly 63% of Democrats reported believing that Republicans are more immoral and dishonest.
Burnout among oncology professionals continues to be a significant challenge, driven by compassion fatigue, increasing patient acuity, staffing shortages, and the emotional demands of caring for patients with cancer. Solutions often focus on utilizing Employee Assistance Program services, promoting self-care, and improving work-life balance. Kidron et al. introduce another perspective by examining empathy as a moderator of burnout among oncology clinical research coordinators (CRCs).
CRCs are an often-overlooked but an essential part of oncology care, responsible for screening patients for clinical trials, coordinating study visits, communicating with sponsors, and supporting patients throughout their research participation.
I will begin by looking at the progressive side of the coalition by looking to Gad Saad who offers an important insight into one dimension of this phenomenon through his concept of “suicidal empathy.” His theory helps explain why some progressives are reluctant to subject what are labeled marginalized groups or ideologies to the same level of moral scrutiny that they apply to others.
Groups viewed as historically marginalized therefore acquire a degree of moral immunity from criticism because disagreement itself is interpreted as hostility toward victims. According to this view, when an individual or a group is regarded as marginalized, they acquire a kind of moral immunity from criticism because disagreement is interpreted as hostility toward victims. In many Western institutions, identity and historical oppression go hand in hand.
In Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster Disclosure Day, the aliens’ message to humanity, on the brink of nuclear war, is that it must embrace empathy. Pretty uncontroversial, surely?
Not for Gad Saad, the outspoken Canadian evolutionary psychologist and sociologist, whose latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, has topped the New York Times and Audible nonfiction bestseller lists.
by Lou Agosta Find out what's going on with the anti-empathy movement and how to answer and debunk the dangerous half truths, lies, and total nonsense....
Listen to this episode from A Rumor of Empathy with Lou Agosta on Spotify. One can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and the would-be critique of empathy uncharitably takes the weakest version of empathy and refutes it. In contrast, a rigorous and critical empathy engages in a process of continuous improvement of empathy by “cleaning up” the empathic breakdowns of emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation, resulting in the expansion of empathy in the individual and the community.
“Disclosure Day” is a kind of bridge between both modes of Spielberg — a thrilling chase movie filled with wonderment that’s nevertheless grounded in reality and recent history. And its most ardent message is quite earthbound. Blunt’s character’s clarity comes from looking people in the eye. As much as it’s about aliens, “Disclosure Day” is about empathy.
“I think every movie should have a great emphasis on empathy because empathy sometimes feels like it’s in short supply,” Spielberg says. “We have it, sometimes we can’t use it. Sometimes it’s not allowed to be used if you want to stay aligned with your friends and your belief systems. But I think empathy is there for all of us.”
The simple act of noticing someone's eye color can build your empathy, explains Alan Alda, who got so curious about empathy one day that he began to experiment on himself. Any time he'd interact with someone, he would try to figure out what they were feeling, and name their emotional state (using strictly his inside voice). This exercise inspired psychologist Dr. Matthew Lerner to conduct a scientific study on empathy, and how it can be bolstered by practicing visual perception.
In a modern environment where data can be unreliable and trust is low, the article argues that brands must move beyond transactional metrics and utilize empathy to truly understand human nuances. It highlights that while AI can recognize patterns and automate messaging, it cannot manufacture the cultural relevance and emotional connection required to build genuine relationships with consumers. Ultimately, the piece advocates for shifting from passive observation to active cultural participation, allowing organizations to bridge the empathy gap and ensure human-centric strategy and innovation.
Las marcas no deben depender solo de datos cuantitativos o automatización. Para conectar con los consumidores en entornos de desconfianza, deben usar la empatía y la participación cultural activa para lograr una innovación verdaderamente humana.
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