The Empathy Gap
The Basic Idea
Imagine that you are a smoker who is trying to quit. Right after having a cigarette, you tell yourself that it will be the last one. Quitting may seem easy in that moment because you have just gotten a fix and are not feeling cravings or withdrawal. Your confidence comes from your current visceral state, which is a calm, rational one. What you fail to understand is that later, when you are in a different, heightened visceral state, you will not necessarily be able to act in the same way or make the same decisions.
This situation describes the empathy gap, which is characterized by our tendency to underestimate the role that different mental states and emotions have on our behavior. Consequently, we make decisions based on short-term moods instead of considering how our future selves will feel. The empathy gap is often referred to as the hot-cold empathy gap because our mispredictions often have to do with being in either a ‘cold’ visceral state (a rational and logical mental state) and underestimating how our emotions will impact us when we are in a ‘hot’ visceral state (when we are influenced by strong emotions like hunger, desire, fear), or vice-versa.
While the empathy gap often has to do with a lack of empathy with our own selves, it can also describe our inability to understand other people’s perspectives or actions if they are not in the same visceral state as we are.2 For example, if you hear about a hit and run accident, you may not be able to understand what kind of person would be able to drive away after hitting someone, but you are likely judging based on a cold visceral state and not taking into account how that person may have felt in the moment.
Affect has the capacity to transform us, profoundly, as human beings; in different affective states, it is almost as if we are different people.
– George Loewenstein, an influential behavioral economist, in his paper Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
