What Is Empathy? Understanding Before Responding
Empathy 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.
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Why one word covers several different things
Ask five people what empathy means and you will hear five answers: “putting yourself in their shoes,” “feeling what they feel,” “being kind,” “reading people,” “not judging.” The disagreement is not only in everyday talk. A review by Cuff and colleagues collected 43 distinct scientific definitions and found researchers still split on basic questions, such as whether empathy is mainly thinking or feeling, whether it is automatic or deliberate, and whether it has to lead to any action. (Cuff and colleagues, 2016)
That matters for you as a reader. When an article, a coach, or a quiz says someone is “high in empathy,” it is fair to ask which part they mean. Someone can be quick to understand what a coworker is worried about and still feel very little alongside them. Someone else can be flooded by a friend’s sadness and still misread what the friend actually wants.
The parts researchers usually separate
One of the most widely used questionnaires, Mark Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index, was built on the idea that empathy is a set of related tendencies. Its 28 items cover four of them: perspective taking (spontaneously seeing things from another person’s viewpoint), empathic concern (warmth toward people in difficulty), personal distress (your own discomfort when others are in distress), and fantasy (getting absorbed in the feelings of characters in stories). (Davis, 1983) Those are self-reports, so they tell you how people describe themselves, not how accurately they read anyone.
Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki draw a related line. They reserve “empathy” for sharing another person’s feeling while knowing it is theirs, call the understanding side mentalizing or cognitive perspective taking, and describe compassion as warmth and concern for someone rather than feeling their pain with them. When the line between self and other blurs and shared suffering turns into your own distress, they call it empathic distress, which tends toward withdrawal rather than help. (Singer and Klimecki, 2014)
| Response | What is happening | What it can sound like | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perspective taking | You work out how the situation looks from their side | “So the problem isn’t the deadline, it’s that nobody asked you first.” | Accurate understanding can be used without any care, for example to win an argument |
| Emotional sharing | You feel some of what they feel | “Oh no. My stomach dropped when you said that.” | You may assume they feel exactly what you feel |
| Compassion | Warmth and a wish to help, without taking on their pain | “That sounds awful. I’m here. What would help tonight?” | Help offered before understanding can miss the point |
| Empathic distress | Their distress becomes your own | “I can’t handle hearing this.” | The listener pulls away or needs comforting themselves |
One piece of news, three replies
A colleague, Dana, tells you over lunch that her father was admitted to the hospital last night and she is waiting for test results.
Reply one: “My dad was in the hospital last year. It turned out fine, so try not to worry.” This starts from your experience and lands on reassurance you cannot back up.
Reply two: “That’s so scary. I don’t know what I’d do.” This shares the feeling, but it can leave Dana managing your reaction.
Reply three: “That’s a lot to carry into a workday. What are you waiting to hear?” Dana answers that the waiting is the worst part and she cannot concentrate. Now you know something useful. You might offer to cover her afternoon call, or simply sit with her while she checks her phone. The third reply did not require you to feel her fear, only to stay curious long enough to learn what she needed.
Empathy is partly a choice, which is good news
People often treat empathy like eye color: you have it or you do not. Jamil Zaki’s review argues instead that empathy is motivated. People steer away from it when it promises pain, costs them something, or gets in the way of competing, and lean into it when they want closeness or want to be seen as kind. They do the steering with ordinary moves: choosing which situations to enter, where to look, and how to interpret what they see. (Zaki, 2014)
Experiments point the same way. Across 11 studies, Cameron and colleagues gave people repeated choices between an option that involved empathizing and one that did not. People tended to avoid the empathy option because it felt effortful and they doubted they would do it well, and when the researchers led participants to feel more capable, the avoidance disappeared. (Cameron and colleagues, 2019) In plain terms, a lot of everyday “low empathy” may be reluctance or fatigue, which is easier to work with than a missing trait.
This is also why the same person can be patient with a crying child and curt with a slow cashier. The capacity is the same; the motivation and the bandwidth are not. If you want to look at your own pattern, the empathy self-check is a reflective place to start, and this answer on having too much empathy covers the opposite problem.
What empathy does not require
You do not have to agree. “I can see why the new schedule feels unfair to you” can sit next to “I still think it is the best option we have.” Understanding someone’s position is a separate act from endorsing it.
You do not have to have lived the same thing. Shared experience can help, but it can also tempt you into telling your story instead of hearing theirs. A question such as “What has been the hardest part?” often does more than “I know exactly how you feel.”
You do not have to absorb everything. Caring about someone is compatible with saying, “I want to hear this properly, and I have ten minutes right now. Can we talk tonight?” Limits keep you available over time. And empathy never obliges you to stay in a conversation that involves threats or abuse.
A four-step empathy check you can use today
Try it in a low-stakes conversation first, such as a friend describing a frustrating week. Afterward, write down one thing the person told you that you would not have guessed.
- Notice one cue that someone is affected: a short reply, a sigh, a change in plans. Treat it as a reason to ask, not as an answer.
- Ask one open question that lets them pick the important part, such as “How is that sitting with you?” or “What’s the hardest bit?”
- Say back the core of what you heard in one sentence, using their words where you can, and add “Is that right?”
- Ask what would help now: listening, ideas, practical help, or space. Offer only what you can actually give.
Where to go next
For the difference between understanding and feeling-with in more depth, read cognitive vs. emotional empathy. To practice the listening side, see empathic listening. The empathy hub lists every guide in this series.
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
Cuff and colleagues, 2016: A review of 43 distinct definitions of empathy found eight recurring points of disagreement, including whether empathy is cognitive or affective, automatic or controlled, and whether it includes a behavioral outcome.
Benjamin M. P. Cuff, Sarah J. Brown, Laura Taylor, Douglas J. Howat (2016). Empathy: A Review of the Concept. Emotion Review, 8(2), 144-153. doi.org/10.1177/1754073914558466
Davis, 1983: Introduced the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a 28-item self-report measure with four seven-item subscales (perspective taking, fantasy, empathic concern and personal distress), treating empathy as several related tendencies rather than one trait.
Mark H. Davis (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
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
Zaki, 2014: A theoretical review arguing that empathy is partly motivated: people avoid it when it brings suffering, material cost or gets in the way of competing, approach it for positive feeling, affiliation and social approval, and steer it through situation selection, attention and appraisal.
Jamil Zaki (2014). Empathy: A motivated account. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1608-1647. doi.org/10.1037/a0037679
Cameron and colleagues, 2019: Across 11 studies (N = 1,204), people given free choices tended to avoid options that required empathizing because they found empathy effortful and doubted they would do it well, and the avoidance disappeared when they were led to feel more capable.
C. Daryl Cameron, Cendri A. Hutcherson, Amanda M. Ferguson, Julian A. Scheffer, Eliana Hadjiandreou, Michael Inzlicht (2019). Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(6), 962-976. doi.org/10.1037/xge0000595
3 questions
Questions
Is empathy the same as sympathy?
Not quite. Sympathy usually means feeling sorry for someone from the outside. Empathy involves understanding their point of view or sharing some of what they feel. Compassion adds warmth and a wish to help.
Can you be empathic and still say no?
Yes. Understanding why someone wants something does not oblige you to give it. You can say, “I can see why this matters to you, and I still can’t do it,” and both halves can be true.
Is empathy a fixed trait?
People differ in how readily they empathize, but empathy also shifts with motivation, effort, and the situation. That is why it can be practiced, and why the same person can be attentive at home and distracted at work.
Related
- No. 01Cognitive vs. Emotional Empathy: What Differs?Cognitive empathy is understanding what another person is thinking and feeling; emotional empathy is feeling some of that emotion yourself. They are separate capacities, so a person can be strong in one and modest in the other, and neither guarantees a kind response. Compassion, warm concern plus a wish to help, is a third response that researchers distinguish from both.
- No. 02Empathic Listening: Hear the Point Before HelpingEmpathic listening means attending closely enough to understand what matters to the speaker, showing that understanding in your own words, and only then choosing how to respond. In one controlled experiment, people who got paraphrasing and questions felt more understood than people who got advice or a simple acknowledgment. It does not mean never giving advice; it means advice comes after you know what the problem is.
- No. 03Common Empathy Misunderstandings and Better ResponsesThe 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.
- No. 04Perspective-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.
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