Journalists and activists are using VR and empathy to communicate narratives such as 6×9, an experience that puts you in solitary confinement. Thousands of people in the US are put into solitary confinement for all sorts of reasons and some end up with psychiatric disorders associated with the treatment.
You can never truly empathise with their situation without experiencing the real thing, but VR is the closest people can get. It’s one thing to read about what these people go through and another to see and hear it all around you. Sure, the experience might be fleeting but it hits home when you see their environment with your own eyes.
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In a rebuke to MAGA Christianity, Ryan Gosling’s deep space spectacular argues that empathy might just save the world.
The article argues that Project Hail Mary is not just a sci-fi survival story — it’s really a defense of empathy. It focuses on Ryland Grace, a reluctant hero trying to save Earth, and especially on his relationship with Rocky, an alien facing the same cosmic crisis. The author says the heart of the film is watching two very different beings slowly learn how to understand each other, not just exchange facts.
The piece uses that friendship to push back against the recent claim in some Christian circles that empathy is dangerous or even sinful. It specifically contrasts the film’s message with Joe Rigney’s argument that empathy can blur moral boundaries. The author’s counterpoint is that empathy is not a threat to truth — it is often the only way to reach truth, because real understanding requires entering another person’s experience rather than staying detached.
When rationality leads to conclusions that are, to use Singer’s word, “strange,” it is better to err on the side of empathy and decency. It is true that empathy alone can lead us to misallocate resources. One needs to reason as well. And we may forget that, by following our social or political biases, we may be empathizing selectively. But rationality alone is still worse. The dream of reason begets monsters.
Her mother’s skillful use of empathy to defuse a potentially dangerous encounter on the streets of Tehran when she was nine has stayed with her ever since. It led to her developing the concept of stoic empathy as a way to navigate challenges.
by Alex Therrien It helps us to make close connections with people, and influences how we behave in a range of situations, from the workplace to a party.
Now scientists say empathy is not just something we develop through our upbringing and life experiences - it is also partly inherited. A study of 46,000 people found evidence for the first time that genes have a role in how empathetic we are.
And it also found that women are generally more empathetic than men.
'Important step' Empathy has an important role in our relationships.
In Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind (2026), professor of marketing Gad Saad, who poses as an evolutionary psychologist and rubs shoulders with eugenics, follows up on his The Parasitic Mind (2021) in which he explicated the “woke mind virus.” He sounds the alarm that empathy has become a “cancer” because it allegedly has no “stopping mechanism” and will eventually kill its host — the human race. The image on the front cover of Suicidal Empathy is a sheep holding up a protest sign demanding “Free the Wolves.”
While we are still catching our breaths from the disaster averted in Michigan, this may come across as an unusual sentiment, but hear me out. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, there is an overabundance of empathy, an almost toxic level of empathy emanating from Jewish voices, Jewish organizations, and Jewish sources aimed at comforting everyone but our own. To be clear: empathy, in general, is important. Jews should, and do, care about others deeply. However, this is meant as a wake up call. Just as we are instructed to do on planes, we must put our own oxygen masks on first.
The matching or mimicry of the emotional behavior of others is prevalent in many species, including humans and non-human primates. Emotional mimicry is considered to be an important facet of human empathy.
Previous studies have shown that infant and juvenile non-human primates spontaneously mimic human facial gestures, such as tongue protrusion and lip smacking. In addition, humans and chimpanzees voluntarily imitate each other's behavior. However, it has not been clear whether humans spontaneously mimic the perceived emotional expressions of non-human primates.
When we feel hurt, irritated, or caught in conflict with other people, it’s easy to get stuck in resentment, reactivity, or stress. But empathy is not only something we offer others — it can also be a gift to ourselves. In this talk, I explore the personal benefits of having empathy for others, including how it can soften the heart, reduce inner burden, and help us respond more skillfully while still honoring justice and clear boundaries.
00:00 – Concentration meditation and inner peacefulness 02:53 – Why concentration supports deeper mindfulness 07:21 – The three core elements of compassion 10:39 – Why empathy matters in a divided world 21:30 – The personal benefit of empathy for difficult people 28:18 – Three ways to widen the circle of “us” 32:32 – Empathy, justice, and skillful action
Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has warned that the rise of “strongman” leadership across global politics is worsening political division and weakening democracy.
Ardern, who served as New Zealand’s Prime Minister from 2017 to 2023, has often been associated with an empathetic leadership style that prioritised compassion, transparency and values-driven decision-making. But during her conversation in Sydney, she pushed back on the notion that empathy should be viewed as a softer or less effective approach to power.
When executives were asked which skills will be essential in the next two to three years to compete in an AI-driven world, 52% championed critical thinking, while only 17% rated empathy as essential. That ratio should worry anyone building a product.
To be clear: when we talk about empathy in AI strategy, we don’t mean being nice. We mean cognitive empathy, the strategic ability to model how your users actually think, decide and behave. It’s what helps you spot patterns in genuine human behaviour that your data hasn’t captured yet. Without it, you’re not just building blind; you’re building something expensive that nobody wants.
In The Empathy Paradox, Rachel McCabe analyzes the evolving role of empathy in contemporary media, film, literature, and culture. She advocates for a critical understanding of it, asking what happens when readers and viewers directly consider the complex ways that empathy guides their understanding and assessment of the culture they consume. By developing an awareness of our assumptions, she adds, we can avoid the pitfalls of self-interest and overidentification and develop more constructive applications of empathy that will help us become better readers and writers.
Empathy, our capacity to feel the inner experience of another, underlies much of our behavior and the choices and decisions we make. It is a more powerful teacher than its cousins, sympathy and compassion, in which we feel deeply for rather than with another, because the feelings it generates are so strong.
The neuroscientific exploration of empathy has taught us that it involves multiple emotional and cognitive processes, some of which rely on ancient subcortical structures in the brain (Marsh, 2018). In the 1990s, studies of monkeys led to the discovery of “mirror neurons”—specialized cells that fire whether the monkey is itself performing an activity or simply observing another performing it. Thirty years of research strongly suggests that humans also have mirror neurons, and they may be the basis for empathic responses when we see another person’s emotion or action (Bonini, Rotunno et al., 2022).
The article argues that empathy is not inherently bad, but it becomes dangerous when it is treated as the main guide for public policy instead of being balanced by reason. The author criticizes the CBC for, in his view, presenting empathy too positively and not taking enough seriously the case made by critics like Gad Saad and Paul Bloom.
Its main claim is that “excessive” or misdirected empathy can push societies toward bad decisions because people focus on emotionally powerful individual stories rather than wider consequences. The piece points to examples like homelessness, immigration, affirmative action, and crime politics as areas where emotional appeals can override careful judgment.
In the first Book of Samuel, the prophet delivers a clear command from God to King Saul: Utterly destroy the Amalekites, a vicious enemy of Israel, and
This article, written by Daniel Ross Goodman for the Washington Examiner, argues that the Democratic Party is suffering from what the author calls "Empathy Derangement Syndrome" (EDS).
The piece posits that Democrats have developed a "warped compassion" that leads them to defend hostile regimes and criminals at the expense of American citizens and victims of oppression.
Definition of "Empathy Derangement Syndrome": Derived from evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad’s concept of "suicidal empathy," Goodman defines EDS as a psychological state where empathy is extended to "the predator" (terrorists, hostile regimes, criminal migrants) while hardening against "the prey" (American citizens, victims of terror).
By Melinda Wenner Moyer Then, in 2025, Konrath and her colleagues updated their analysis to look at empathy trends through 2018. They were excited to discover that 2007 was actually the low-water point for empathy—levels dipped to their lowest that year but then shot back up. A decade later empathy in young people was higher than it had been at any other time over the previous 39 years.
This new, more positive discovery didn’t get nearly as much media coverage as the one published in 2011, which Konrath found frustrating. “I have to say that I’ve noticed good news is not as popular as bad news,” she says. Recent science supports her assertion: a 2025 study found that negative and alarming articles about children are more likely to go viral than nuanced and balanced stories.
New edition enriches the medical education research and practice of those interested in teaching clinical empathy Details the development and extensive psychometric support for the widely recognized Jefferson Scale of Empathy Expansion of evidence-based content evident by the list of over 1,700 publications cited in the text and reference list
One of the main drivers of the current excitement around artificial intelligence is its uncanny ability to act almost human. Unlike the stiff chatbots of the past, recent models can more effectively respond to a user’s emotions with nuance and understanding. The effect is convincing enough that some people attribute complex human abilities such as empathy to these computerized companions.
Local governments across the United States are the most trusted level of government — 67 percent of residents trust them to handle local problems and 62 percent feel their local elected officials represent them or their community’s interest very and somewhat well.*
City, town and village leaders interact daily with their residents on main streets, in schools and throughout their communities, actively listening, discussing key issues and solving issues. NLC is working to support local leaders as they serve their residents – to improve civic discourse, public engagement and building communities where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.
Although the white “Christian” nationalists are insisting that empathy is a sin, the voices of our Carlisle, Cumberland Valley and Boiling Spring High School students are a call for empathy, kindness, concern for others, and working together for the common good.
Offenses to common decency, the rule of law, and to our deeply held faith are appallingly common. There are those who profess that empathy and kindness to those in need, which is the heart of all major faith traditions, are dead. Or worse yet, that empathy is a sin.
Psilocybin is a serotonergic psychedelic shown to have enduring antidepressant effects. Currently, the mechanism for its enduring effects is not well understood. Empathy and prosocial behavior may be important for understanding the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin. In this article we review the effect of psilocybin on empathy and prosocial behavior. Moreover, we propose that psilocybin may induce a positive feedback loop involving empathy and prosocial behavior which helps explain the observed, enduring antidepressant effects.
Empathy in governance means the capacity of leaders and institutions to understand, feel, and respond to the lived realities of citizens which is rapidly emerging as a powerful currency for nation-building. In parallel, empathy is not a soft virtue reserved for private relationships; it is a strategic leadership capability. Nations that succeed in building resilient institutions and inclusive economies often do so because their governance structures are designed with a deep awareness of the human consequences of policy decisions. Empathy bridges the distance between policymakers and the people they serve, ensuring that governance is not merely about authority but about stewardship.
At a time when global politics is defined by confrontation and “strongman” leadership, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern believes something different belongs at the centre of power: empathy. Speaking at the All About Women event at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday, Ardern reflected on the values that shaped her six years in office — and why empathy, often dismissed as soft or overly emotional, is in fact a crucial political value.
Central to that philosophy was empathy — something she believes politics has historically glossed over. “Empathy is a political value,” Ardern said, reflecting on the approach she tried to bring to government.
Her empathy-led leadership, she continued, wasn’t just about rhetoric or symbolic gestures.
The study, a systematic review published in the Journal of Adolescence, analyzed data from 13 studies involving more than 10,000 adolescents with an average age of about 16. It found a small positive association between social media use and overall empathy.
“While the association between social media use and total empathy was small, I was a bit surprised that it was positive given the mixed findings among the individual studies,” said Erin McDonald (Ph.D. ’25), the study’s lead author.
McDonald conducted the research as a doctoral student in psychology at Georgia State. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and Harvard Medical School.
Not all types of social media use showed the same relationship with empathy.
Studies that measured how often teens engaged with social media — checking feeds, posting or messaging — showed stronger associations with empathy than studies that measured total time spent online.
Empathy is understanding and feeling what someone is going through. Compassion is empathy, then action. And strong leadership in a startup community is an action sport. If you’re only empathic, you can become the community equivalent of a “thoughts and prayers” tweet: heartfelt, sincere… and ultimately not very useful when the building’s on fire.
A practical application of this thought exercise is easy to appreciate. Many of us treat others far better than we treat ourselves. By seeing your future self as another person, you can start showing empathy for a separate individual. You can begin to look at your short-term-oriented choices not just for their immediate consequences, but also for their impact on this future character. Imagine your future self as a close friend or family member, and it is harder to make choices that disadvantage this person or put them at risk for suffering or failure.
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