Empathy

How many times have you cried while watching a movie? Maybe you’re someone who always bawls during a dramatic scene in a romantic comedy because you relate to the protagonist’s dating misfortunes, or perhaps you’ve only ever teared up at the particularly confronting images in dramas or documentaries about war and genocide, imagining what it would be like to see your own family torn apart so horrifically. Regardless of your sensitivity level, almost every human has at some point imagined themselves in another person’s situation and understood some of their experience. Empathy is the capacity to perceive, understand, and resonate with the emotional and cognitive states of others, often leading to prosocial behavior. It involves both cognitive empathy, which requires perspective-taking and understanding another person’s thoughts or mental state, and affective empathy, which is the emotional attunement we feel when sharing or mirroring another’s emotional experience.

Feeling sad or moved by the characters on screen could also be known as sympathy, a concept closely related to empathy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, empathizing and sympathizing are actually distinct processes. While sympathy involves being moved by or mirroring another person’s emotions, empathy involves understanding another person’s experience from a cognitive and intellectual perspective while simultaneously resonating with the feeling on an emotional level. One imagines what it would be like to be in the other person’s situation, and despite understanding that the other person’s experience is distinct from their own, they feel it as if they were actually the one going through the same thing.¹

While sympathy is passive and often involves feelings of pity or feeling bad for someone else while maintaining your own perspective, empathy involves a more active understanding of the feelings as if they were your own. 

Within the broader term, empathy is usually split into three main types: cognitive empathy, which entails the intellectual understanding of others’ experiences, emotional empathy, which involves detecting and resonating with others’ emotions, and compassionate empathy, which includes a desire to help and alleviate their suffering.² 

Empathy has been documented across time, cultures, gender, and species.^3,4,5,6 Our drive to empathize with others (or not) has likely played a role in our human evolution.3 As our technology evolves and the body of research on empathy expands, so does our understanding of the biological underpinnings of the phenomenon.⁷ Because empathy is primarily about connecting to others and understanding their experiences as individuals who are distinct from us, figuring out how we can further cultivate empathy between people and animals of all different backgrounds may be one of the most powerful ways to encourage a little more patience, kindness, and compassion in the world at large.