New research finds that we can find AI responses more compassionate than expert human ones.

We are wired to seek connection—and we will seek empathy wherever we can find it, including with AI. 

While AI does not share our experience, this may not matter, especially when we want to feel understood.

An advocate for empathy-driven journalism that holds power accountable and communicates the stories of the most vulnerable, Kristof joins Mark Labberton in this episode to discuss his life’s work of reporting from the world’s most troubled regions—from Gaza to Congo, from rural Oregon to global centres of power. Known for his unsparing storytelling and deep empathy, Kristof shares the family roots and personal convictions that have shaped his lifelong pursuit of justice and hope.

They also explore how despair and progress coexist, the role of faith and empathy in healing, and how local acts of courage can ripple globally. Grounded in gritty realism, but inspired by everyday heroes, Kristof invites us to resist numbness and embrace a hope that fights to make a difference.

The researchers found that people with Alzheimer's disease scored slightly higher on a measure of empathy than peers of the same age with mild cognitive impairment, despite scoring worse on other measures of social cognition such as recognizing facial emotions and understanding the thoughts of others.

The authors of the study, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, say this may be the first time a cognitive domain has been found to improve in dementia.

Lead author, Dr. Andrew Sommerlad (UCL Psychiatry), said, "We found compelling evidence of preserved, or potentially even increased emotional empathy in people with Alzheimer's disease, compared to people in earlier stages of cognitive decline.

 Edwin Rutsch and Kevin Waldman discuss Kevin's article published in the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers entitled, "The dangerous consequences of radical empathy unchecked by reason." Kevin criticizes "radical empathy" on campuses as performative and harmful, emphasizing the need for genuine empathy that maintains critical assessment and reason. Edwin introduces his Wholistic Empathy definition model, which includes sensing into others' experiences, self-empathy, imaginative empathy and the level of overall empathy within a community. He advocates for making mutual empathy a primary social and political values.

"As a researcher, I am now compelled
to ask: Can a society have
too much empathy?"

 In the end, they agree on the importance of mutual empathy, listening and dialogue in fostering understanding and reducing extremism. Edwin proposes using empathy circles to facilitate empathic listening and dialogue, aiming to bridge political and social divides. Kevin plans to host Empathy Circles at his University to foster constructive dialogue.

For more than a decade, the literature has been dominated by the notion that medical students may paradoxically lose their empathy during medical school. However, medical curricula have significantly evolved, and the question is whether this is still the case. The present study aimed to describe the trajectories of different dimensions of empathy from the beginning to the end of a six-year medical curriculum and explore the influence of different psychosocial and health-related factors.

I wonder if as many Irish people wake up with a hangover on Good Friday as was once the case when the pubs were shuttered on this day sacred to Christians.

by Jamil Zaki
Empathy evolved as one of humans’ vital survival skills. Over millennia, we changed to make connecting easier. Our testosterone levels dropped, our faces softened, and we became less aggressive. We developed larger eye whites than other primates, so we could easily track one another’s gaze, and intricate facial muscles that allowed us to better express emotion. Our brains developed to give us a more precise understanding of each other’s thoughts and feelings.

As a result, we developed vast empathic abilities. We can travel into the minds of not just friends and neighbors but also enemies, strangers, and even imaginary people in films or novels. This helped us become the kindest species on Earth. Chimpanzees, for instance, work together and console each other during painful moments, but their goodwill is limited. They rarely give each other food, and though they may be kind to their troop, they are vicious outside of it.

This is the real danger of selective empathy. It turns human rights into conditional privileges. It turns vulnerability into a partisan talking point. And it corrodes the public’s understanding of justice, encouraging the idea that mental health or trauma are only real when experienced by the politically palatable.

Known colloquially as the “prosocial hormone,” oxytocin’s role extends into human neuroscience literature, where it has been implicated in fostering empathy, facilitating cooperation, and reinforcing social trust. However, this study pioneers the demonstration of oxytocin’s capacity to simultaneously modulate both affective and motor components of prosocial behavior through distinct neuroanatomical pathways in a non-primate mammal, underscoring conserved biological principles across evolutionary scales.

Beyond its immediate scientific implications, this discovery holds profound relevance for understanding the neurobiology of empathy and social connectedness. Philosophers, behavioral scientists, and evolutionary theorists have long grappled with the origins and significance of altruism. These new insights place the roots of helping behavior squarely within genetically and neurochemically encoded frameworks, suggesting that complex social emotions need not rely solely on higher cognitive processes but can emerge from hardwired circuits facilitating mutualistic interactions.

According to Elon Musk, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

When I read this in the Guardian, I almost fell out of my chair. Sadly, it gets worse! This heresy is not merely a hallucination emanating from Elon’s ketamine-fueled brain: It is gaining traction not only among evangelical Christians, “who have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump” but also Catholics in the JD Vance mold.⁠

Reimagining Conflict Resolution Online
Empathy-driven design isn’t limited to warm and fuzzy user experiences. It also shows up in surprising places like conflict resolution and moderation. Traditional moderation often relies on punitive measures: content flagged, accounts suspended, arguments shut down. But what if the focus shifted toward restoration and understanding?

CivilServant, a nonprofit founded at MIT Media Lab – now a part of Cornell University’s Citizens and Technology Lab, ran experiments on Reddit showing that simply changing the tone of a moderator’s intervention – using polite language instead of neutral or stern warnings, reduced hostility in comment sections. When moderators explained why rules existed instead of just enforcing them, users were more likely to comply and less likely to lash out.

Nicholas Kristof:
I think that it’s that when people are put to the ultimate test, some people turn out to be cowards basically or to have really malevolent tendencies, and others just turn out to be extraordinary. I think it probably has something to do with brain chemistry and upbringing. I’m a believer that empathy is something that, like a muscle, can be nurtured. I look at history and I think there has been some real moral progress. I think that was partly a function of literature and literacy.

It appears that the first mass movement in the world on behalf of people, other than oneselves, was only in the 1780s, the British Abolitionist Movement, which is so recent. And the first international relief effort was only at the time of the Irish potato famine. Now you go onto any university campus and look at a bulletin board and there all these mass movements on behalf of other people and relief efforts. So I do think there is some progress and I think probably that has a lot to do with encouraging empathy.

Criticisms of empathy are coming fast and furious. Books like Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy presaged Elon Musk’s worry that modern countries are beset, as he says, with a “civilizational, suicidal empathy.” Standards corrode. Borders become meaningless. Emotional manipulation reigns. Leadership is compromised. No one resists the woke. 

Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2024) captures something deep and abiding in the church today. On a practical level, in identifying the “sin of empathy,” Rigney describes a relatively new phenomenon: the moral power of a particular female perspective in our lives. Rigney, like Allie Beth Stuckey, provides the name: the sin of empathy. 

Rigney starts with the common sense of the matter. The pity Christians naturally feel for the downtrodden can be manipulated to excuse the victim. 

In recent months there has been a lot of talk from some Christians about a sin that is plaguing our society. It’s taking over the minds of our kids and corrupting our loved ones. What is this dastardly new trick of the Devil? Empathy. That’s right, the Devil is luring us away from God by getting us to see the world from the perspective of our neighbor. Think this sounds a little strange? Well, the Beyond Sunday Team does too. So, this week the Team makes the case for Empathy!

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Summary: Viewing stress as a potential motivator can improve productivity and wellbeing without reducing empathy or willingness to support others. Researchers developed a brief online intervention that teaches participants to reframe stress more positively using education and visualization techniques.

Despite concerns that this approach might lead to emotional detachment or less support for others, participants remained just as attuned to others’ distress and likely to help. These findings support the use of stress mindset interventions to enhance performance without compromising interpersonal relationships.

Key Facts:

Mindset Shift: Viewing stress as a challenge rather than a threat improves coping and motivation.

No Empathy Loss: Participants who reframed stress were equally likely to support others in distress.

Practical Tool: A 15-minute online intervention effectively shifted participants’ stress mindset.

Ben Shapiro

This week, Democrats decided to expend their quickly diminishing political capital in defence of deported Salvadoran illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

By Pol Allingham

Researchers found that those who regularly smoke marijuana find it easier to recognize and understand how others feel.

Chronic users are also more capable of sensing how others are feeling, according to researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The team argued this could be due to weed smokers feeling less “discomfort” around emotional people.

Brain scans also revealed cannabis users’ anterior cingulate – a region linked to empathy – was particularly active.

Empathy comes in multiple flavors
You might be wondering what, exactly, empathy is. You’re not alone. As of 2016, psychologists had 43 (!) different definitions for empathy, and more have been added since then.1 Confusion abounds.

What most experts agree upon today is that there are at least two kinds of empathy, and both are about understanding another person’s emotions. One kind is emotional or affective empathy, which is when you feel someone else’s joy or pain and share their emotional experience. The other kind is cognitive empathy, commonly referred to as perspective taking, which is when you perceive that someone else is feeling joy or pain and you’re able to infer how that might affect them.2

What is actual empathy in leadership, and why are we missing it?
We place empathy on the pedestal, like it’s the great white whale and ultimate achievement. And sure, in a world that seems to be increasingly nasty, aggressive, and frightening, we could probably do with a whole lot more of it. 

But here’s the thing: Sometimes we practice fear and politeness, and call it ‘empathy’. We spend so much time and energy in ‘meekdom’ – afraid of saying the thing that might make someone else uncomfortable, or might suggest there is another way to look at things than the prescribed idea the other person currently has (and how RUDE it is to suggest someone else is wrong, right?)

This meekdom – playing meek, being meek, holding back – is serving no-one. Especially if you are in a leadership role.

A useful framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm. Her research on the topic, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University, and she joins Mongabay’s podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.

“Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work,” she says.