Common Empathy Misunderstandings and Better Responses
The most common empathy myths are that it is a fixed trait, that some groups simply have more of it, that more is always better, that you can read feelings from faces, and that imagining someone’s position is enough. Research points the other way on each: empathy shifts with motivation, feeling too much can turn into distress, faces are ambiguous, and asking beats guessing. Empathy also never requires agreeing or giving up your own limits.
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Many people try to be more empathic using rules that quietly work against them. Here are seven beliefs worth retiring, each with a note on the evidence and a better move to try. For a definition first, start with what empathy is.
| Myth | Closer to the truth | Better move |
|---|---|---|
| You either have it or you don’t | Effort and motivation change how well people read others | Decide in advance which conversations deserve full attention |
| Some groups are naturally better at it | Gaps on accuracy tasks can vanish when motivation is equal | Judge the response, not the category |
| More feeling is always better | Shared suffering can turn into distress and withdrawal | Aim for warm concern rather than absorbing the pain |
| Faces tell you what people feel | The same face can mean different things in different contexts | Treat expressions as prompts to ask |
| Imagining their shoes is enough | Imagining did not improve accuracy; asking did | Ask a direct, open question |
| Understanding a partner fully always brings you closer | Accurately reading threatening thoughts can lower closeness | Choose when to probe and when to let a thought pass |
| Empathy means agreeing | Understanding and endorsing are separate acts | Say what you understand, then what you think |
Myth 1: “I’m just not an empathic person”
People say this as if it settles the matter. But empathy behaves less like a fixed setting and more like something you turn up or down depending on how much you care about the outcome, how tired you are, and whether you think you will succeed. If you can be attentive with your best friend and absent with your in-laws, the capacity is there; the motivation is what changes.
Better move: pick two or three conversations a week that deserve your full attention and go into them with a goal, such as “find out what she is most worried about.”
Myth 2: “Women are just naturally better at it”
This one has a kernel of data behind it and a lot of overreach on top. In two studies of college students, Klein and Hodges found that women outperformed men at inferring a person’s thoughts and feelings only when a prior task had made sympathy salient. When participants were paid for accuracy, both men and women improved and the difference disappeared. (Klein and Hodges, 2001) The authors read this as a difference in motivation rather than ability. That does not mean nobody differs. It means a group label is a poor guide to how well a particular person is listening.
Better move: judge the response in front of you. This answer on gender and EQ covers the wider evidence.
Myth 3: “The more I feel their pain, the more I’m helping”
Singer and Klimecki separate empathy (feeling with someone) from compassion (feeling warmth and concern for them). When shared suffering turns into empathic distress, it is linked with negative feelings and withdrawal, and the authors suggest that when it becomes chronic it likely harms health. Compassion is linked with positive, other-focused feelings and helping. (Singer and Klimecki, 2014) A friend in crisis usually needs you steady, not as upset as they are.
Better move: when you notice your own distress rising, take a breath and shift the question from “How awful is this?” to “What would be kind right now?” See also can you have too much empathy.
Myth 4: “I can read it on their face”
A large review led by Lisa Feldman Barrett examined whether facial movements reliably reveal emotions. People do smile when happy or scowl when angry somewhat more often than chance, but how emotions show varies substantially across cultures, situations, and individuals, and the same configuration, such as a scowl, often signals something other than an emotion. (Barrett and colleagues, 2019) A frown in a meeting might be concentration, a headache, or disagreement.
Better move: notice the cue, then ask. “You went quiet when I mentioned the budget. Anything there?” More on this in reading social cues.
Myth 5: “If I imagine myself in their position, I’ll understand”
Eyal, Steffel, and Epley tested this across 25 experiments, from reading emotions in faces and spotting fake smiles to predicting a spouse’s preferences. Most pretest participants expected perspective taking to help. It did not consistently improve accuracy, and if anything lowered it overall while sometimes raising confidence. What did work, in a final experiment, was getting the other person’s perspective directly through conversation. (Eyal, Steffel, and Epley, 2018)
Better move: use imagination to generate questions, then ask them. The perspective-taking exercises are built around that.
Myth 6: “In a good relationship, I should know everything my partner thinks”
Accuracy sounds like an unmixed good, but it has edges. In a study of married couples discussing a real problem, spouses who more accurately read thoughts that were threatening to the relationship felt less close afterward, while accuracy about nonthreatening thoughts went with feeling closer. (Simpson, Oriña, and Ickes, 2003) Not every passing irritation needs to be excavated.
Better move: stay curious about what your partner wants you to know, and let a fleeting thought stay fleeting. Important issues still deserve a direct conversation.
Myth 7: “If I understand them, I have to agree, or give in”
This belief makes people avoid understanding altogether, because understanding feels like losing. You can say, “I get why the change frustrates you; you lose your quiet morning,” and then, “I still need us to start at eight.” The first sentence is empathy. The second is your position. Neither cancels the other. And understanding someone’s anger never requires accepting threats or mistreatment.
Better move: practice the two-sentence form above. For more on acknowledging feelings without endorsing every claim, see emotional validation.
Find your own favorite myth
- Read the seven myths and pick the one you act on most often. Be honest; most people have one or two.
- Recall a specific recent moment when that belief shaped what you said or did.
- Write what you said, then rewrite it using the better move for that myth.
- Use the rewritten version once in the coming week and note how the other person responded.
Back to the empathy hub.
Use the free EQTiger assessment to choose a starting point for reflection. Read what the assessment includes and the limitations before interpreting your result.
Research notes
Klein and Hodges, 2001: In two studies of college students, women outperformed men at inferring a target person’s thoughts and feelings only after a sympathy prompt, and paying for accuracy improved both genders and erased the difference, pointing to motivation rather than fixed ability.
Kristi J. K. Klein, Sara D. Hodges (2001). Gender Differences, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When it Pays to Understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(6), 720-730. doi.org/10.1177/0146167201276007
Singer and Klimecki, 2014: This primer distinguishes cognitive perspective taking (inferring what someone thinks), empathy (sharing their feeling while knowing it is theirs), emotional contagion (sharing without that self-other distinction) and compassion (warm concern with a wish to help).
Tania Singer, Olga M. Klimecki (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875-R878. doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054
Barrett and colleagues, 2019: This review found that people do smile, frown or scowl with matching emotions more often than chance, but expressions vary so much across cultures, situations and individuals that a facial configuration alone cannot reliably reveal what someone feels.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella, Aleix M. Martinez, Seth D. Pollak (2019). Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1-68. doi.org/10.1177/1529100619832930
Eyal, Steffel, and Epley, 2018: Across 25 experiments, being told to imagine another person’s perspective did not consistently improve accuracy about their feelings or preferences (if anything it lowered accuracy while raising confidence), whereas asking the person directly did improve accuracy.
Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, Nicholas Epley (2018). Perspective mistaking: Accurately understanding the mind of another requires getting perspective, not taking perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547-571. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000115
Simpson, Oriña, and Ickes, 2003: In videotaped problem-solving discussions between married couples, reading a partner’s relationship-threatening thoughts more accurately went with a drop in the perceiver’s feelings of closeness, while accuracy about nonthreatening thoughts went with a rise.
Jeffry A. Simpson, M. Minda Oriña, William Ickes (2003). When accuracy hurts, and when it helps: A test of the empathic accuracy model in marital interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 881-893. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.881
2 questions
Questions
Are women more empathic than men?
In one pair of studies, a gap between women and men in reading another person’s thoughts and feelings disappeared when everyone was paid for accuracy, which points to motivation. A group label is a poor guide to how well any individual listens.
Is being an “empath” a real thing?
“Empath” is a popular label, not a scientific category. People do differ in how strongly they react to others’ feelings, but strong reactions are not the same as accurate understanding.
Related
- No. 01What Is Empathy? Understanding Before RespondingEmpathy is the capacity to understand another person’s point of view or to share some of their feeling while still knowing the feeling is theirs. Researchers split it into parts, mainly perspective taking, emotional sharing, and concern for the other person, and those parts do not always travel together. In daily life it works as a sequence: notice, check your read, then respond in a way that fits what the person actually needs.
- No. 02Reading Social Cues Without Assuming You KnowA social cue, such as a frown, a short reply, or a pause, tells you that something may be going on, not what it is. Research on facial expressions finds that the same face can signal different emotions, or no emotion, depending on the person and situation, and people overestimate how clearly their tone comes through in writing. Read cues alongside context and what you know about that person, then ask a light question when the answer matters.
- No. 03Perspective-Taking Exercises That Check Your GuessesThe strongest evidence on perspective taking says that imagining another person’s viewpoint, on its own, rarely makes you more accurate about what they think, while getting their perspective by asking does. So the most useful exercises use imagination to generate possibilities and then check them with the person. Below are five exercises built that way, from a two-minute prediction test to a calmer way to review an argument.
- No. 04Emotional Validation Without Pretending to AgreeEmotional validation is communicating that someone’s feeling makes sense given what they are experiencing, without necessarily agreeing with their conclusions or their requests. In one lab experiment, people who received invalidating responses during a stressful task showed more negative feeling and higher heart rate than people who were validated. Validation is a starting point, though: when a serious problem needs to change, warmth alone can leave it untouched.
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