Jamil Zaki

Almost since the term “empathy” was coined, there has been scholarly disagreement about its meaning. Today it can best be viewed as an umbrella term encompassing a host of more specific constructs, almost all of which are regularly referred to as “empathy” in some form or fashion. Promiscuous use of this global label to denote very different constructs has impaired communication among and between scholars, practitioners, and the general public. A team of 15 empathy scholars assessed this issue and created a lexicon for these specific lower-order constructs. In this article we report the result of this effort. The lower-order constructs making up this lexicon are vicarious affect , emotional contagion , emotion co-sharing , sympathy / compassion , personal distress , perspective taking , accurate inference , mimicry , synchrony , projection , and transportation . We recommend that this more specific language be used more frequently and that the umbrella term “empathy” be used more sparingly.

Is a more empathic therapist more effective? Classic models in clinical science rightfully describe empathy as an important therapeutic tool, but emerging evidence indicates that it can interfere with therapeutic goals in some settings. Here, we provide a contemporary framework that addresses this tension. We propose a model in which empathy and emotion regulation combine to create a “therapeutic emotional circuit” in which emotions flow from therapist to client and back to the therapist again via empathy. Critically, therapists can use empathy regulation to modulate this emotional flow to achieve specific goals for both their own and their clients’ emotional experiences. We then illustrate how optimal empathy regulation diverges across two empirically supported interventions: To best support clients, exposure therapy requires down-regulating affect sharing, whereas motivational interviewing requires up-regulating this empathic process. This model challenges classic intuition, revealing new directions for clinical research, training, and practice.

Young adults face a rising tide of mental illness and loneliness. We propose that an overlooked barrier for social connection is how people perceive each other’s empathy. Here, our longitudinal study of an undergraduate student community (N = 5,192) reveals that undergraduates who perceive their peers as empathic report better current and future well-being. Yet we document an ‘empathy perception gap’: people systematically see others as less empathic than others see themselves. Students who perceived their peers as less empathic were less willing to take social risks and grew more isolated over time. To disrupt this cycle, we conducted two field experiments that presented students with data on their peers’ self-reported empathy and behavioural nudges to encourage social risk taking. These interventions reduced the empathy perception gap, increased social behaviours and expanded social networks months later. This work offers a promising, scalable strategy to cultivate social well-being, simply by presenting people with data about each other.

Political partisans tend to overestimate how extreme, intolerant, and undemocratic their opponents are.Do people also misjudge the views of other members of their own party? If so, what are the consequences of these co-partisan misperceptions? We examined these questions across four online studies (N = 7,082), including two preregistered experiments and three nationally representative samples. Both Democrats and Republicans thought their co-partisans held more extreme attitudes than the average ingroup member actually did (Studies 1a-2b). Misperceptions were largest for beliefs about political intolerance, such as opposition to bipartisan cooperation and friendships. Providing corrective information shifted perceptions of co-partisans and increased political tolerance among the most inaccurate participants (Study 3). Moreover, participants who perceived their fellow partisans as more extreme beliefs felt more apprehensive about sharing their opinions and did so less often (Study 4). These findings suggest American partisans overestimate co-partisans’ political extremity and these misperceptions may encourage political self-silencing.

Humans effortlessly transform dynamic social signals into inferences about other people’s internal states. Here we investigate the neural basis of this process by collecting fMRI data from 100 participants as they rate the emotional intensity of people (targets) describing significant life events. Targets provide self-ratings on the same scale. We then train and validate two unique multivariate models of observer brain activity. The first predicts the target’s self-ratings (i.e., intent), and the second predicts observer inferences. Correspondence between the intent and inference models’ predictions on novel test data increases when observers are more empathically accurate. However, even when observers make inaccurate inferences, the target’s intent can still be predicted from observer brain activity. These findings suggest that an observer’s brain contains latent representations of other people’s socioemotional intensity, and that fMRI models of intent and inference can be combined to predict empathic accuracy.

The lump in your throat when you see a scared and hungry child, your goosebumps when someone helps that child, and the flush in your face after someone betrays you are all signs of moral emotions ... What role does emotion really play in our moral lives, and what role should it ideally play?

Nuanced portrayals of stigmatized groups in media have been shown to reduce prejudice. In an online experiment (N = 749), we tested whether a feature film depicting incarcerated peoples’ experiences in the criminal justice system can increase a) empathic accuracy and compassion toward people who have been incarcerated and b) support for criminal justice reform. We measured baseline empathic accuracy via a well-validated task, where participants infer the emotions of people sharing stories about difficult life events. All storytellers were formerly incarcerated and students. However, in half the videos we labeled them as “formerly incarcerated” and in the remaining half as “college student.” We then surveyed people’s baseline attitudes toward criminal justice reform. Next, we assigned participants to watch one of three films. The intervention film chronicled the true stories of Black men on death row. Two docudramas of similar length served as control films. Finally, participants completed the empathic accuracy task and survey again and were given the opportunity to sign a petition. Compared to those who watched a control film, participants who watched the intervention film more accurately inferred the emotions of storytellers labeled “formerly incarcerated,” and increased their support for criminal justice reform. These effects held for conservative and liberal participants alike. However, the film had no effect on feelings of compassion. Together, these results demonstrate the power of narrative interventions to not only increase empathic accuracy for members of a severely stigmatized group, but to increase support for reforms designed to improve their lives.

Undemocratic practices, such as voter suppression and election interference, threaten democracies worldwide. Across four studies (N = 4,350), we find that informational and motivational factors drive Americans’ support for such practices. Partisans drastically overestimate how much opponents support undemocratic practices, which decreases people's willingness to defend democracy themselves (S1–S2). One remedy for this dynamic is to inform people about the extent to which their rivals actually support democracy, but in polarized contexts, people are incurious about the true beliefs of outpartisans. To address this, we test a new method for improving democratic attitudes—changing beliefs about cross-party empathy. Empathizing across disagreements can improve connections and boost persuasion. When people learn about these valued consequences of empathic engagement, their curiosity about outpartisans increases (S3), and they choose to learn about opponents’ support for democracy, which reduces their own support for undemocratic practices and politicians (S4). Our findings suggest that fostering support for democracy requires not just informational strategies but also motivational ones. The power of our combined approach comes in that—instead of presenting people with information about outpartisans—it induces them to seek out that information themselves. Together, these results highlight how cross-party empathy beliefs can increase people's curiosity about those they disagree with and disrupt processes of political escalation.