Empathy

TLDR: “Empathy” is overloaded, conflating social reasoning, shared feeling, and compassion. Reason and compassion are good. Shared feeling is important, but flawed and overemphasized.

Prerequisites: Emotions

Have you ever met a psychopath? I have.¹ It was wild.

I met him while traveling cross-country by bus as a young man. He had recently gotten out of prison. (He’s not the only person I met on a bus who had just gotten out of prison, but he’s the only one who was obviously psychopathic.²) He told me — quite proudly — about how he used to work as a banker who specialized in pushing predatory loans on people who couldn’t really afford to buy a house. He said he saw the borrowers as being like prey, and after extracting thousands of dollars from these poor people and driving them to financial ruin, his bank would foreclose on the property and collect insurance money from the government. When the 2008 housing bubble collapsed, he’d been identified as a bad actor (“thrown under the bus” by his colleagues, according to him) and had been sentenced to a couple years in prison. But now that he’d been released, he told me he was excited about the opportunity to get back out into the world and start taking foolish/weak/pathetic people’s money again.³

While this man was unapologetically narcissistic and predatory, he didn’t seem stupid. If anything, he was strangely charismatic, drawing me in with stories of his life. I could very much believe he’d had a high-paying job at a bank and had been able to mask his true nature behind layers of charm when he wanted.

If you look up psychopathy on Wikipedia, it begins with: “Psychopathy … is a personality construct characterized by impaired empathy.” And the entry for empathy begins: “Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another person's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.” When read literally, this seems to indicate that the man I talked to couldn’t have been a psychopath, since he seemed very capable of understanding the thoughts and experiences of others — he just didn’t care.⁴

Instead, I think the right takeaway is that our society doesn’t have a crisp conception of what “empathy” is. Like with emotion, we neglect a core part of what it is to be human, in large part because it’s invisible and internal. Here are several distinct things which “empathy” might mean:

• Social modeling (a.k.a. “cognitive empathy”) — the ability to understand and reason about someone else’s experience.

• Emotional contagion (related to “affective empathy” and “somatic empathy”)⁵ — the tendency to feel similarly to someone else.

• Sympathy/compassion (a.k.a. “compassionate empathy”)⁶ — caring about alleviating someone else’s distress.

In neurotypical people, these capacities go together. We consider the experiences of others, and, in the process feel, something like what they feel, and, insofar as that feeling is unpleasant, we seek to help them. But these capacities can also come apart, and not just in psychopaths. It’s common, for example, for people to deliberately avoid paying attention to people who are suffering (such as those who are homeless or living in severe poverty) because it’s a bummer, even if those in need could be helped — demonstrating emotional contagion without (much) sympathy. On the flip side, an Effective Altruist might dispassionately donate their kidney to a stranger — demonstrating abstract compassion without any concrete knowledge of the recipient or having any induced feelings.

Having conceptual clarity is important, not just because it’s good to know what we’re talking about in general, but also because these systems tend to carry a lot of weight in people’s psychology, underpinning everything from morality to theories of self and consciousness. When we lump these capacities together, and don’t examine their limits, we can end up assuming too much, limiting ourselves in various ways.

Empathy’s Origins

The earliest aspect of empathy to evolve was almost certainly emotional contagion. Emotions, as I discussed in my essay on the topic, are an ancient aspect of animal psychology, guiding creatures as simple as worms in the ways of finding food, avoiding predators, and mating. In any sort of setting where animals of the same kind live together, such as a school of fish, there’s an obvious utility to noticing when others around you are agitated or calm, and adjusting your emotional state to be closer to theirs.

As behaviors and emotions became more complex, emotional contagion adapted and expanded. Signs of disgust would invoke disgust. One animal yawning could spread to those nearby. One male acting dominant spurs nearby males to puff up and fight, lest they lose prospective mates. The list goes on.

In mammals and nesting birds we likely have a case of convergent evolution of the roots of sympathy, in the form of taking care of children. It is evolutionarily useful for the distress of a baby to cause distress in the parent, but it could be catastrophic for parents to merely become distressed, since that might provoke all kinds of counter-productive responses, such as running away, hoarding food, or curling into a ball. Instead, evolution selected for parents that would respond to the distress of their children by selflessly attending to the needs of the child.

While all mammals (and almost all birds) take care of their young, it seems likely that these specific impulses to caretaking tend to evolve into more broad kin-selecting sympathy in social animals. Adolescent Florida scrub-jays, for instance, will sometimes stay with their families and help raise their brothers and sisters for years after they’re old enough to go off and have offspring of their own. And beyond the more obvious cases of alloparenting, there are instances of adults helping other adults, such as when vampire bats — who can only go a few days without eating — will share food with others who weren’t lucky enough to find their own.

In parallel, my guess is that social modeling evolved in response to predator-prey dynamics. If a predator can learn to imagine the world from the perspective of its prey, it can track things like whether the prey is alert or calm, and which way an animal is likely to run if attacked. Unlike emotional contagion, which (in many cases) does not need a firm distinction between self and other, tracking the mind of a prey animal requires clearly understanding that its fear does not imply the predator should be afraid. And while there is an advantage to prey that can model predators, the resource investment is asymmetric — a fox preparing to hunt can dedicate its full attention to modeling how a rabbit will run, while a rabbit that spends similar energy trying to model foxes (and eagles and all the other threats coming from all angles) throughout its day will exhaust itself well before any predator appears.⁷

In the evolution of predatory animals with social structures, like wolves, lions, dolphins, ravens,⁸ chimps, and humans, the capacity for modeling prey likely expanded and combined with the neural structures used for taking care of kin. This more psychologically complex conception of other members of the same species likely unlocked things like advanced hunting strategies, imitative culture (including tool use), deception of other members of the group, and forming long-term alliances with non-kin. (Alliances, being particularly important, were likely anchored by instincts related to caring for children, such as crying and consolation.)

There is reason to think that this rise in cognitive empathy was particularly relevant to the evolution of human beings. As early hominins learned to hunt in packs, and in particular to scavenge carcasses and crack open bones with stone tools to get access to calorie-dense marrow, they unlocked both the resources to grow much larger brains and had an environment where those with the most ability to coordinate and learn were rewarded. As group size increased (in order to share knowledge and face off against other African savanna carnivores), early hominins who had the ability to deceive and manipulate others and to identify and punish the untrustworthy had an evolutionary edge, kicking off an intelligence arms-race. All of which would be impossible without a rich ability to imagine the world from the other monkey’s perspective, so to speak (along with a rich collection of other factors, such as the huge caloric surplus that came with the harnessing of fire).

Against Empathy?

In his influential 2016 book, Against Empathy, Paul Bloom makes a compelling case that empathy is bad. Or more particularly, he argues that the experience of emotion that is brought on in connection with others, which I've been describing as emotional contagion, is an inferior basis for moral action compared to cold rationality. On the whole, I agree with this thesis, and broadly recommend the book. The spark of mutual-emotion is terribly hit-or-miss, biased, and unprincipled.

But I do think it would be a mistake to broadly condemn emotional contagion. And indeed, even Bloom has some nice things to say about it at the end of Against Empathy. Most notably, he and I share the position that this kind of empathy can be fun, both as a way of connecting with others⁹ and as a primary way of experiencing art. Harry Potter doesn’t need to be a real person for me to feel “his” excitement about becoming a wizard. Indeed, the word “empathy” was coined in 1909 as a translation of “Einfühlung,” which is the act of connecting one’s emotions with a work of art. And just as experiencing pain can be fun, experiencing sadness, anger, horror, and disgust in an artistic context can be a great way to explore and become familiar with those feelings in a safe context — something that would be impossible without emotional contagion.

But the most important aspect of this kind of empathy, I believe, is guiding people towards caring. While acting compassionately does not require having any particular emotional response, the two are strongly linked. Consider rats that have access to a lever which produces food, but gives an electric shock to another rat nearby. Rats in this experiment express something like sympathy, pushing the lever less often than if it caused no pain to others. This basic response could be the result of abstractly caring about the other rat, or it could be the simple result of emotional contagion causing the acting rat to feel bad whenever it pressed the lever, causing it to behave more compassionately. In a similar way, children experience natural rewards and punishments through emotional contagion that direct them towards helping others. Those who, for whatever reason, don’t have the same emotional contagion, are more likely to be callous and mean. (Notably, those who have normal emotional contagion but reduced social modeling may appear similarly uncaring, but are significantly less likely to deliberately hurt others.)

In this way, emotional contagion is a bit like the training wheels on a bicycle. On a bike, it is difficult to learn to balance without first having speed, and trying to go fast without having skill can be scary. Training wheels help give kids confidence and put them into a context where it’s easier to learn the relevant things. Analogously, emotional contagion allows kids to naturally find their way into win-win relationships where it’s relatively easy to learn to value the feelings of others.

But, also like training wheels, it can be risky to learn to be compassionate and moral entirely through empathy — one can become too dependent on the crutch. Against Empathy does a great job expounding on the risks and biases here. We care too much for those who resemble us, and not enough for those who are alien. Bloom also does weakly acknowledge that affective empathy can be a kind of “moral guide,” but I think a balanced view would give it credit for being the primary developmental tool for compassion, moral thought, and learning to conceive of others as equally conscious and real as ourselves.

Empathy in Utopia

In a more enlightened world, we wouldn't make the mistake of lumping three distinct psychological capacities under the single muddled term “empathy.” The Utopian language has separate words for social modeling, emotional contagion, and compassion — much as we distinguish between sight, hearing, and touch rather than calling them all “sensing.” This linguistic precision reflects a deeper understanding: these capacities serve different functions, develop through different mechanisms, and can be cultivated independently.

Utopia sees social modeling and compassion as straightforward virtues. The ability to understand others’ perspectives enables cooperation, reduces conflict, and allows for the kind of complex coordination that makes civilization possible. Compassion — the genuine desire to help others — forms the bedrock of moral action. Thanks to being more distinct from emotion, Utopia conceives of compassion as less centrally about pleasure and suffering, and has a more holistic and/or pluralistic notion of what it means to help others as ends in themselves.¹⁰

Emotional contagion, however, receives more nuanced treatment. Utopian educators teach children to learn how to dial their emotional resonance up or down as circumstances warrant, understanding it as a powerful tool rather than a moral compass, per se. Sometimes it's valuable to feel deeply with others — such as when celebrating a loved one's triumph or experiencing art. Other times, excessive emotional contagion can be counterproductive or even harmful. It’s bad for doctors to feel their patient’s pain. Disaster relief coordinators shouldn’t be paralyzed by the emotional weight of each individual story when forced to triage thousands of victims to save the most lives. Even therapists are better off being understanding, warm, and emotionally unshakable, rather than awash in the feelings of their clients.

Most importantly, children in Utopia learn early that emotional contagion is only one possible pathway towards morality, and one that cannot be fully trusted. They’re taught to think of affective empathy similarly to how we think of folk physics — a useful heuristic that works well enough in everyday situations but which has known flaws. Just as you wouldn’t design a bridge based on intuitive physics, you shouldn’t base moral decisions solely on who makes you feel sad. Feelings are data, not conclusions.

This clarity extends to how Utopia handles its psychopathic citizens. In our world, we conflate the psychopath personality traits with antisocial behavior, creating an unhelpful stigma.¹¹ Utopia, recognizing that compassion and morality can exist without emotional resonance, has developed interventions that help psychopaths integrate into society and find moral wisdom without relying on a one-size-fits-all insistence on emotional responsiveness.

Indeed, some Utopian fiction features psychopathic heroes — characters who are able to make difficult moral choices based on principles instead of tribalism. These stories help neurotypical citizens appreciate the unique strengths that different minds bring to their society, and give psychopaths positive role models to emulate. There is still a strong sigma around predatory behaviors, and an understanding that psychopaths are at greater risk of becoming predators, but with a healthy understanding that nobody is destined to evil, and nobody should be excluded or condemned for factors beyond their control.¹²

I would argue that Geralt of Rivia, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond are all examples of heroes who are at least 95th percentile psychopathic, and it would be good to champion them as heroic psychopaths.

1. It’s also very likely that I’ve spent significant time interacting with psychopaths without realizing it. By some definitions, about 1% of the population are psychopaths. I happen to think that psychopathy is uni-modal, and is thus more like a spectrum, rather than something with an objective threshold. Regardless, psychopathy is a form of social dark matter, and most people with these traits tend to hide them. I’m using my anecdote on the bus as a lens on empathy, rather than to claim I’ve only met one psychopath or this is what all psychopaths are like, or whatever.

2. Don’t let my few experiences with ex-cons sour you on the prospect of this kind of travel. I actually recommend cross-country bus (or train) rides for young people seeking adventure. You get to meet a lot of different kinds of folks who are bored and happy to talk about their lives in a setting that’s significantly safer than hitchhiking. (And most people getting out of prison are actually pretty normal.)

3. I don’t remember the specific language he used, but I do remember being somewhat shocked at how much he wasn’t hiding his hunger to screw people over. He wanted me to know what kind of person he was. He was proud of it. Maybe he was just messing with me (which would’ve been its own kind of psycho), but he seemed remarkably sincere.

At the end of the conversation, I told him that it seemed to me that his sentence hadn’t been long enough. Strangely, if my memory serves, he seemed somewhat offended at that.

4. To be clear, many psychopaths are low intelligence, and the “evil genius” trope is not accurate. If you find psychopaths by looking in prisons or at people with low impulse control you’ll definitely find that they’re below average. But this is because criminals and impulsive people tend to be below average intelligence, not because psychopathy itself is strongly correlated with cognitive ability in either direction. Psychopaths tend to have about the same intelligence as neurotypicals, with high-functioning psychopaths simply being better at masking.

5. Psychologists insist that emotional contagion is not the same thing as affective empathy, and that the key distinction is that with affective empathy there’s a clear self/other boundary and we understand that the feelings we’re getting from the other person are distinct from our own.

I kinda hate all the terms here, and think this is a somewhat muddled distinction, especially in the context of “cognitive empathy.” Like, what sets affective empathy apart from cognitive empathy is that our mental processing of the feelings is not restricted to abstract reason, but instead spills over into our bodies, making us feel akin to the other. But… isn’t the emotion spilling over exactly what emotional contagion describes? Why isn’t affective empathy = emotional contagion + cognitive empathy + self-awareness?

Somatic empathy, and the distinction with the other terms is also bad. Is yawning somatic empathy or emotional contagion or something else entirely? Is it somatic empathy if I feel hungry or cold or uncomfortable when thinking about someone who is hungry or cold or uncomfortable? What makes “disgust” an emotion, but “restless” not one? The lines seem fake.

And “emotional contagion” is also a terrible term, not just because it implies a restriction to emotion rather than feelings like hunger that we usually don’t lump under emotion, but also because it implies that the emotions just hop over like viruses, outside of our control. But people can learn to control how much of this kind of empathy they feel towards others! “Hardening one’s heart” is a real thing, and one can definitely become more or less emotionally resonant with practice.

6. Some people hold that there are important differences between sympathy, compassion, and compassionate empathy. I am less convinced of the importance of keeping these distinct, but here’s my rough guess about how they tend to come apart, in case it matters:

• Sympathy (lit. “feeling together”) can be more detached and passive. People tend to use the word “sympathy” when they’re talking about people whose caring is too weak to result in action.

• Compassion (lit. “feeling with”) has a connotation of sincerity and intensity, and usually implies more activity, even if that activity is just being emotionally supportive.

• Compassionate empathy implies some other form of empathy, such as social reasoning or emotional contagion, being present in addition to compassion.

7. This caloric math can also help us understand why highly intelligent predators (especially those that use teamwork) are overwhelmingly warm-blooded. The cognitive demands require sustained neural activity that cold-blooded metabolisms can rarely support. One of the more notable possible exceptions are crocodiles, which have been observed to very occasionally hunt together in complex ways. Still, warm-bloodedness, despite its overall caloric cost, is almost always what provides the steady fuel supply needed for the kind of sustained, complex cognition that makes sophisticated modeling of other minds — and thus intelligent hunting — possible.

8. Researching this essay, I was fascinated to learn that not only will crows form mobs and chase off bigger birds, but there are known instances of corvids actively hunting in packs! In particular, there are accounts of brown-necked ravens working together to hunt big lizards (60-90cm!) by having some of their pack guard the lizard’s burrow while the others slowly chipped away at the prey until it died, only after which did the guards join in the feast. Similarly, brown-necked ravens can also work together to drive off vultures from ostrich eggs that only the vultures can crack.

9. Describing the role of affective empathy in connecting with others as “fun” is perhaps under-selling it. In my experience, people bond with those who share their moods. While a mixture of cognitive empathy and compassion is often a good response to the suffering of others — people often don’t want their negative emotions to spill onto their friends and loved ones while processing their feelings — a dispassionate acknowledgment of joy, triumph, and excitement can often come across as ambivalent and uncaring.

10. As an example, Utopia might have a fable about a hero who helps their friend achieve a dream of becoming a glorious athlete, even though it involves putting their friend through a lot of anguish and struggle, and never really “pays off” in terms of aggregate pleasure.

11. This is why I’ve avoided the term Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) in this essay, and generally don’t consider psychopathy a disorder in itself. Just because someone finds lying easy, doesn’t mean they’re a liar. Even though I started this essay off with an anecdote about a psychopathic criminal, I hope it’s clear that I am firmly against pathologizing neurodivergence, even when it’s correlated with evil. In Utopia, the word for “psychopath” does not share an etymology with disease.

12. One good parallel might be men. Men are much, much more likely to be violent predators than women, and it may even make sense for certain people to be warned about men or guard themselves around men. But it is, of course, foolish to assume that all men are dangerous, and wrong for society to condemn or exclude someone simply because they are a man.