A psychologist at the Nuremberg War Crimes trial, G.M. Gilbert made an observation about the nature of human evil that he had witnessed in the face of the Holocaust of World War II: “Evil is the lack of empathy,” he said.

I believe this quote is relevant to a growing movement within the American Christian church culture today. The issue troubling me is the promotion of a teaching called “toxic empathy.” It is the idea that if we engage or have working friendships with people who have beliefs that are to some degree in conflict with the teaching of Christ and Scripture, that we might be promoting a biblically false form of empathy and toleration: we might be promoting a form of “toxic empathy.”

New research reveals how people process empathy when they see someone in pain, showing that physical attractiveness and moral history both influence our emotional responses. The findings indicate that moral judgments dominate our conscious feelings of pity, while physical attractiveness exerts a subtle influence during different stages of brain activity. The small study was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Quick Summary Sympathy means feeling sorry for someone from your own point of view. Empathy means understanding and sharing their feelings from their point of view. Sympathy says "I feel for you," while empathy says "I feel with you," so empathy usually leaves a person feeling understood rather than pitied.

Empathy shares a person's feelings from their side, while sympathy looks at their pain from your own. Both show care, but they make people feel very different.

Imagine a child who comes home upset because nobody sat with them at lunch. One parent says, "Oh no, I'm so sorry, you'll make new friends." Another parent sits down and says, "That sounds really lonely. Tell me what happened." Both parents care, but the first reply is sympathy and the second is empathy.

Empathy, often misunderstood, is a complex, learnable skill, not just a feeling. Recent Stanford research shows VR training can enhance empathetic communication. True empathy involves five key aspects: perspective-taking, focusing on *their* experience rather than projecting our own; emotional attunement, paying attention to feelings and using sensitive language; curiosity, staying open to unknown factors before judging; empathic concern, caring without rescuing or dictating solutions; and responsive empathy, tailoring support to individual needs. Empathy isn't agreement or fixing problems, but deeply understanding others by asking, "Help me understand more about what you're experiencing," before offering advice.

A prominent Catholic bishop and commentator has waded into the ongoing culture war over empathy and its role in Christianity, siding with conservative influencers who argue that practicing empathy carries great risk. Bishop Robert Barron, who heads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and founded the popular online media organization Word on Fire, devoted a recent podcast and homily toward undercutting the role of empathy in U.S. culture.

In a YouTube video posted Sept. 6, Barron said, "If you put empathy, so defined, in the center of your preoccupation, truth, reality, justice and love are going to be threatened." 

What does it actually take to put people over politics? Republican and Democrat students discover ways to resist the pull to demean or villainize people with whom they strongly disagree.

About the Symposium
This year, our Research Symposium theme is “What is the role of empathy in democracy?”

Join thousands of like-minded individuals from around the world for a thought-provoking symposium. Purchase a ticket to experience these dynamic speakers in person—high above the city of Toronto at the beautiful Globe and Mail Centre—or join us online.

Rarely do leaders from business, politics, healthcare and public life gather to examine one question from so many perspectives.

While the word “empathy” is modern, its practice is deeply woven throughout Scripture. From God’s commands to care for the vulnerable to Jesus’ example of entering fully into human experience, the Bible offers a vision of empathy rooted in love, humility, and action.

I thought I knew what empathy meant.

I thought it meant trying to understand what another person was experiencing. Trying to, like my mom would say, put myself in another person’s shoes and imagine what they were feeling.

It seemed like a good thing. A simple virtue.

But then I began hearing empathy described as a weakness. I heard it paired with words like “dangerous,” “ruinous,” or even “sinful.” Confused, I found myself wondering how a word I’d always associated with compassion had some people warning Christians against it.

It made me curious: Is empathy biblical? What does the Bible say about empathy?

Gad Saad, evolutionary behavioral scientist and author of "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" speaks with David DesRosiers on this week's edition of "Get Real."

Saad argues that Darwinian natural and sexual selection should be applied to the human mind and behavior just as they are to physical traits. He criticizes social-science approaches that treat people as infinitely malleable blank slates, detached from biology, and describes how evolutionary theory explains the value of virtues like reciprocity, but he says empathy can become maladaptive when taken to an extreme.

This year, we awarded 101 grants to changemakers across the country.

The American Empathy Project had a simple goal: get people in a room, together, to help their neighbors.

We distributed $100,000, mobilized 1,800 volunteers, and enabled projects in 37 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico).

A single act of participation in your community sends a seismic ripple through a cynical world. Remember: The world can feel broken, but people are still good.

Learn more about the American Empathy project, and the organizations featured in this video, at AmericanHumanist.org/Impact

The trend is raising concern about how well prepared ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other popular LLMs are to provide appropriate emotional support.

To address this concern, Georgia Tech researchers have developed a new neural framework that examines how different training sources influence empathy and social reasoning within these AI-powered models.

“A lot of people are using LLMs to help process the death of a loved one, or maybe their girlfriend broke up with them, or their boyfriend cheated on them,” said Glenn Matlin, a Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing.

Matlin said the new framework he and a Georgia Tech-led research team have developed audits neural networks with an LLM and estimates the influence documents, transcripts, and other data sources have on a model’s output.

The magic of empathy not being sympathy, not being compassion even, but being a precursor to compassion, and you start applying empathy in that form to all problems, and they solve real fast. And so, I just remember thinking, this empathy, it’s a very caring thing to do. Shouldn’t I be able to do that with people that matter to me?

I mean, why has it got to be restricted to somebody who’s in crisis?” “Mm-hmm.” “I started to experiment with it in my personal life and my professional life. And every now and then, I’d hit a home run that I didn’t expect. At one point in time, I remember being in a conversation with a person, and she said to me, ‘You’re reading my mind.’

And I’m like, no, I’m reading your emotions. It feels like I’m reading your mind. And then I began to really understand the different levels of it. Hostage negotiators across the US will tell you, yeah, it works with bad guys, but it doesn’t work at home. And I wasn’t willing to accept that premise.” “Your approach is rooted in — the term you use is ‘tactical empathy.’ Can you explain what that is and why it’s effective in negotiation?” “Yeah, the real roots are in Carl Rogers, this American psychologist, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s

As a doctor, these findings concern me, but don’t surprise me. People crave empathy, humility, and active listening. AI—as well as friends, family, and social media—can provide that. Whether they provide accurate information is, however, up for debate.

Empathy alone isn’t, of course, a substitute for good data. Our analysis shows what may work in the face of confusion: recognizing that people are far more likely to accept good advice when they believe their concerns are truly heard. That principle applies not only to the exam room, but to anywhere public health asks people to place their trust in expertise.

Empathetic leadership: Often heralded. Less often successful.

We’ve heard for years that empathy is a leader’s best tool. But there’s research that suggests it’s not always the most practical tool.

The empathetic leader is supposed to have a genuine interest in the lives, challenges and feelings of their employees and colleagues. On top of that, they try to understand others’ needs and be aware of their feelings.

Quite honestly, that’s a tall order.

And that’s why many managers in the past few years have felt pressured to fake the high-level empathy that’s often reserved for close friends and beloved family members.

by Walt Rakowich
That’s where empathy gets tricky.

We often can have an intellectual understanding of a situation. We can know the details and facts even if we weren’t involved, and we can know the event likely would have caused someone to have an emotional response. We can even imagine how that person might have felt. But we can’t always have an empathetic understanding where we know or feel what another person is going through. Our limited imaginations often won’t let us share in the emotions they are experiencing.

Thankfully, innate abilities can come to our aid, according to Helen Riess, chief scientific officer of Empathetics and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Brain research, she notes, shows that empathic people can “exhibit unconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of others to a greater degree than individuals who are unempathic.” In other words, some people express empathy just by intuitively reflecting what they see in others.

What happens when we think of empathy not only as an individual quality, but as something we can cultivate collectively? In this conversation, we’ll explore the science of empathy with Edwin Rutsch, founder of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. 

We’ll look at what empathy is, what makes it difficult to practice, and what gets in the way of creating more empathic relationships and communities.

But this isn’t just about understanding empathy. Together, we’ll explore how we can put empathy into practice in our everyday lives, and how small, intentional actions can contribute to a more empathic culture around us.

We’ll consider questions such as:

• What does science tell us about how empathy works?

• What are some of the common challenges and misconceptions around empathy?

• What prevents us from empathising with others, especially when we disagree?

• How can we strengthen our own capacity for empathy?

• What simple practices can help us bring more empathy into our relationships, communities and everyday interactions?

• And how can individual acts of empathy contribute to a broader culture of care and understanding?

This is an invitation to move beyond empathy as an idea and explore it as a practice, one that each of us can cultivate and share with others.

Empathy allows us to connect with others and understand someone else’s experience. Empathy strengthens the social fabric that sews us all together. It encourages kindness to strangers, help to those who need it and pushes for a stronger connection amongst humanity.

Becoming educated and aware of issues around the world does not make you responsible for fixing them, but rather allows for understanding and consideration of those issues and the people affected.

By Elizabeth Bruenig

According to Gad Saad and his powerful acolytes, compassion is a recipe for “the collective suicide of the West.

A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others. This is a trend I’ve written about before, but I’ve been intrigued by the way these figures have lately been adopting the language of the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad and his influential book, Suicidal Empathy, released earlier this year. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.””

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle warns that relying on AI chatbots for companionship degrades our capacity for human empathy by allowing us to bypass the emotional complexities of real relationships. Because chatbots offer frictionless interaction without the risk of judgment or the fatigue of mutual "give-and-take," users gradually lose the relational skills needed to genuinely connect with and understand others. Ultimately, this "deskilling" process makes interacting with machines feel easier than navigating human emotions, replacing authentic empathy with a manufactured, corporate-driven illusion of intimacy.

In his bookSuicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad describes a phenomenon in which empathy, normally a valuable human instinct, can become detached from considerations of reciprocity, self-preservation and long-term consequences. In his account, compassion becomes counterproductive when the desire to appear tolerant overrides a society’s willingness to defend its own institutions and values. As Saad warns: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct.”

How The Empathy Gap Begins: With A Dangerous Assumption​
Social entrepreneurs frequently enter communities carrying education, professional expertise, technology, funding, institutional connections or social privilege. These resources can be enormously useful, but they can also create an illusion that because we understand a social problem intellectually, we understand the people experiencing it. We may not. Knowledge can tell us that a population faces a particular problem, and sympathy can make us care about that problem. Empathy, however, requires us to encounter the human reality underneath it. Wisdom begins when that encounter changes what we build.

Conflict is unavoidable, but a professional mediator says the way people respond to it can either widen divides or open the door to resolution.

Doug Noll, a professional mediator and distinguished fellow of the International Academy of Mediators, argues that while some people see empathy as a weakness, that view misses a key distinction. Noll says critics of empathy are “half right” because “boundaryless empathy can be exploited by manipulating people into affirming things against their better judgment.” But he says it is a mistake to dismiss empathy itself as a weak trait, calling it “a powerfully soft skill.”

Noll, who is also co-founder of Prison of Peace, an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University’s Strauss Institute for Dispute Resolution, a speaker and an author, says the answer is not to “feel less.” He warns that “hardened hearts only deepen divides.”