Empathy Unraveled: The Hidden Complexity of Our Most Human Skill

What science, human behavior, and the unintended consequences of caring reveal about empathy.

This is Part 3 of The Human Reckoning: A Future of Trust Series

Her worst manager was also her nicest.

A colleague mentioned this to me almost in passing, the way people share things they’ve long since made peace with. Let’s call her Maya.

Maya joined the team eager and a little unsure of herself. Her manager, Diane, was the kind of leader people hope for. She remembered birthdays. She asked about weekends and listened to the answers. When Maya turned in her first major project, Diane smiled and said, “This is great. Thank you.”

So Maya kept doing what she was doing.

Months later, she found out the project had been quietly reworked by someone else before it went to the client. A promotion she believed she was on track for went to a peer. When she finally asked Diane what she could have done differently, Diane looked pained. “You’re doing fine,” she said. “Really.”

Maya wasn’t doing fine. She had no way of knowing it.

Diane never said a harsh word to her in two years. She also never told her a single thing she could use.

I recognize Diane, and I suspect you do too. She wasn’t careless or cold. She cared, and she couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of saying something that might hurt. So she protected Maya from a hard conversation, and in doing so protected herself from it too. The cost landed entirely on the person she meant to spare.

That is the part of empathy we rarely talk about.

Empathy is more complex than we think, more consequential than we realize, and more learnable than we have been led to believe.

I’ve spent years studying empathy, teaching it, and working to build artificial intelligence capable of practicing it. When I stood on a TEDx stage to talk about How Empathetic AI Can Change the World, I was making an argument about technology. But the years I’ve spent pursuing that possibility have also changed the way I think about human empathy.

Along the way, I’ve come to question much of what we assume about this distinctly human capacity, including whether it is as uniquely human as we believe.

Empathy is, in many ways, the connective tissue of human relationships. It allows us to reach beyond our own experiences and recognize the world as someone else might see it. It helps us build trust, navigate differences, and create a sense of belonging. In organizations, it can strengthen collaboration, energize teams, and create the conditions in which people are more willing to contribute, take risks, and do their best work.

We need more of it, not less.

But our enthusiasm for empathy sometimes gets ahead of our understanding of it. We associate it with kindness, compassion, and emotional connection, often assuming that the people who feel the most are the most empathetic. We rarely stop to consider whether empathy, like other human capabilities, can be practiced in ways that are less helpful than we intend.

What if feeling someone else’s pain can sometimes make us less capable of helping them? What if our efforts to be empathetic inadvertently reinforce bias, enable harmful behavior, or prevent someone from growing? And what if empathy isn’t simply an emotional quality we’re born with, but a set of cognitive and relational skills we can intentionally develop?

I’ve come to believe that the way we understand empathy matters just as much as how much of it we possess. Its capacity to connect us is extraordinary, but good intentions alone don’t guarantee good outcomes. When practiced without sufficient awareness or discernment, something intended to bring us closer can leave another person feeling misunderstood or even cause harm.

The answer isn’t to become less empathetic. It’s to become more intentional about how we practice it.

When Feeling and Understanding Diverge

One of the reasons empathy is so easily misunderstood is that we rarely distinguish between what we experience emotionally, how we interpret those experiences, and the thinking that helps us make sense of them. Yet all three influence how we respond to another person’s emotions, and sometimes our own reactions can interfere with our ability to understand theirs.

One way to think about emotions and feelings is like lightning and thunder. Often, our bodies respond before we’ve consciously made sense of what we’re experiencing. Think of that initial response as the lightning. Our hearts race, our chests tighten, our stomachs turn, or we feel a rush of energy that seems to come from nowhere.

Then comes the thunder, the meaning we give to what we’re experiencing. Sometimes that interpretation follows so quickly that the two seem inseparable. Other times, the space between the physical response and our understanding of it is long enough to leave us confused about what we’re actually feeling.

Lightning and thunder arrive on their own. What happens after the thunder is where cognition comes in: our capacity to pause, question the meaning we’ve assigned, and consider whether it fits. We can’t stop the lightning. We can learn to question the thunder.

These processes continually influence one another. Our emotions can shape our thoughts, our thoughts can intensify or calm our emotions, and the feelings we construct are influenced by our memories, beliefs, expectations, and experiences. The same racing heart might be interpreted as excitement in one situation and anxiety in another.^[i] And when we reconsider the meaning of an experience, our emotional response can change as well.

That interplay becomes particularly important when we try to understand another person. If we’re unaware of our own emotional reactions and the interpretations we’ve attached to them, we may mistake those reactions for insight into someone else’s experience. We may assume we know what another person feels because we recognize something familiar in ourselves.

Empathy asks something more of us. It requires enough awareness of our own experience to recognize that another person’s may be very different.

Feeling Is Not Understanding

Psychologists generally distinguish between two dimensions of empathy. Affective empathy involves emotionally resonating with another person’s experience. We may feel sadness when someone is grieving or anxiety when someone we care about is afraid.

Cognitive empathy, or perspective-taking, asks us to listen actively, without distraction, and imagine what another person may be feeling without projecting our own experience onto theirs. Cognitive empathy doesn’t require us to be free of emotion. Rather, our emotions are not the point. The focus is on understanding the other person’s emotions and experience through their lens.^[ii]

In The Empathy Paradox, I explored how this distinction challenges one of our assumptions about artificial intelligence: that empathy necessarily requires the ability to feel. But before we can fully consider what machines might be capable of, we need to better understand what empathy requires of us. And one of its most important ingredients is imagination, which is central to this capacity.

Imagination allows us to go places we’ve never been. We don’t have to have lived through someone else’s experience to consider what it might be like to see the world through their eyes. We do this all the time when we become immersed in a movie or a book. We relate to characters whose lives bear little resemblance to our own, and we can even extend that understanding beyond human beings. Think of your empathy for robots in the Star Wars movies, or animals like Simba in the Lion King.

That ability to imagine another perspective is part of what makes cognitive empathy so powerful. It allows us to reach beyond the boundaries of our personal experience. But imagination also requires humility. We can imagine what someone might be experiencing without assuming that our interpretation is necessarily correct. The goal isn’t to imagine how we would feel in their circumstances, but to consider how the world might look through their eyes.

Both cognitive and affective empathy are forms of empathy, and they can reinforce one another. Emotional resonance may draw our attention to someone’s distress, while perspective-taking can help us understand what that distress means to them. But they can also diverge, and the difference can have consequences we don’t always anticipate.

Imagine sitting across from a friend who is struggling with a difficult decision. She’s exhausted, uncertain, and beginning to question whether she’s capable of handling what comes next. You listen and respond, “I know exactly how you feel. Something similar happened to me last year.” You share your experience, explain what helped you, and offer advice about what she should do.

Your intentions are good. You care about your friend, and you genuinely want to help. But something subtle has happened. The conversation has shifted from her experience to yours. You’ve assumed that because you’ve experienced something similar, you understand what she’s going through. And perhaps you do. But you haven’t established that yet.

This is one of the most common ways we confuse relating to someone with understanding them. We’re relational by nature, and sharing our experiences is often how we try to connect and offer comfort. In fact, withholding a similar experience can feel counterintuitive, almost as though we’re denying someone the reassurance that they’re not alone.

Yet in our effort to connect, we may unintentionally shift the attention away from the person we’re trying to help. What feels like an act of empathy to us can leave the other person feeling unseen or misunderstood, or even as though their experience has been diminished by comparison.

The problem isn’t that sharing an experience is inherently unhelpful. It’s that we may be responding to our interpretation of what another person is feeling rather than taking the time to understand what their experience actually means to them.

We don’t have to experience another person’s fear, sadness, or uncertainty to recognize it, explore what may be driving it, and understand how it is affecting them. We can remain emotionally present without allowing our own reactions or experiences to become the reference point.

And while emotional resonance can create a powerful sense of connection, it doesn’t guarantee understanding. Sometimes our own feelings become so prominent that they interfere with our ability to recognize what the other person actually needs.

So what actually happens when we encounter another person’s emotions? Are we feeling what they feel, imagining what their experience might be like, or interpreting their behavior through the lens of our own experiences? The answer is more complicated than we might expect, and neuroscience offers some fascinating clues.

What We Feel Is Not Evidence

Empathy is not a single emotion produced by one part of the brain. It involves interacting systems associated with emotional processing, perspective-taking, attention, social cognition, and self-regulation.

Research has identified neural networks involved in responding to another person’s distress, as well as networks associated with considering another person’s beliefs, intentions, and perspective. These systems interact, but they don’t always operate in perfect alignment. We can experience an emotional response without accurately understanding its cause, just as we can understand another person’s perspective without experiencing the same emotional intensity.^[iii]

What we feel in response to another person is not necessarily reliable evidence of what they’re experiencing.

Consider how easily we assign meaning to someone’s behavior. A person who becomes quiet may be sad, angry, overwhelmed, distracted, or simply processing what they’ve heard. Someone who cries may be experiencing grief, relief, frustration, or joy. We recognize the outward expression, but its meaning is not always what we assume.

Our brains are continually interpreting these signals through the lens of our histories, expectations, and learned associations. That process helps us navigate social interactions quickly, but it can also lead us to conclusions that feel intuitively correct without necessarily being accurate.

Perspective-taking gives us another way to approach those moments. Rather than treating our first interpretation as fact, we can consider alternative explanations, pay attention to context, and ask questions that allow the other person to clarify their experience.

There is also an important role for emotional regulation. When our own emotional response becomes intense, it can compete for the attention we need to remain curious and receptive. Recognizing that response, without allowing it to determine our interpretation, can help us remain present with another person’s experience.

When these capacities work together, something remarkable becomes possible. Emotional awareness helps us recognize that another person may be struggling. Perspective-taking allows us to consider what their experience might mean to them, rather than what it would mean to us. Curiosity keeps us from settling too quickly on an interpretation, while emotional regulation helps us remain present even when the conversation becomes uncomfortable. Together, these abilities allow us to respond with greater sensitivity, understanding, and intention. They help us move beyond simply recognizing another person’s emotions toward creating a connection in which that person can feel genuinely understood.

These processes help explain why empathy is more than an automatic emotional reaction. It involves capacities that can work together, sometimes imperfectly, and that can be strengthened through awareness and practice.

The Power of Being Understood

There is something powerful about the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and understood. It doesn’t require someone to agree with us, solve our problems, or even share our experience. Sometimes, simply knowing that another person is willing to understand the world as we see it changes how we experience the relationship.

I’ve often said that empathy is the bridge from uncertainty to openness, and from resistance to readiness.

When people feel understood, they become more willing to lower their defenses, consider another perspective, and engage in conversations they might otherwise avoid.

That openness creates the conditions in which trust can begin to grow.

And trust changes what becomes possible.

In our personal relationships, it allows us to be vulnerable without constantly protecting ourselves from judgment. It creates space for honesty, difficult conversations, and the kind of understanding that strengthens relationships even when we disagree.

In organizations, the implications extend well beyond how people feel. When employees believe their leaders are genuinely interested in understanding their experiences, they’re more likely to speak up, share ideas, acknowledge challenges, and participate in finding solutions. A leader who practices empathy can uncover obstacles that might otherwise remain hidden beneath disengagement, frustration, or resistance to change.

Consider an employee who has become unusually quiet in meetings. One leader might interpret the behavior as a lack of initiative. Another might become curious about what has changed. Perhaps the employee has lost confidence, feels excluded from important decisions, or has learned that speaking up carries more risk than remaining silent. Understanding the difference can fundamentally change how the leader responds.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a senior executive who had been asked to teach an AI system everything he knew about winning customers. He told me, quietly, that he wasn’t giving it everything. In meetings, he looked fully on board. No one asked what was underneath, so no one knew. Silence and compliance can look a lot like agreement from the outside.

Seeing what sits underneath is where empathy begins to influence performance. When people feel seen, heard, and understood, it can strengthen trust. And where trust is supported by consistency and accountability, people are often more willing to engage, collaborate, challenge assumptions, and contribute ideas. Those are the conditions that support innovation and productivity.

Empathy doesn’t replace strategy, competence, or accountability. It helps create the human conditions in which those capabilities can be more fully realized.

We often talk about empathy as though its greatest value is making someone feel better. But its influence can extend much further. It can change what people are willing to share, what they’re able to consider, and what they’re prepared to do next.

But if empathy has this much potential to influence human behavior, we also have to consider what happens when it is misdirected, overwhelmed, or used without sufficient discernment. Understanding how empathy works means acknowledging that it doesn’t always work in our favor.

When Caring Causes Harm

We tend to imagine empathy as an antidote to cruelty, prejudice, and conflict. Often it is. But the very capacity that allows us to understand another person can also reinforce our biases, distort our judgment, or be used to cause harm.

Consider how readily we empathize with people who resemble us, share our values, or belong to groups we identify with. We may feel tremendous concern for one person’s suffering while remaining relatively indifferent to another person’s equally serious circumstances. A compelling personal story can move us more than evidence of widespread suffering affecting thousands of people.

Our empathy can become selective without our even recognizing it. Rather than correcting our biases, it may reinforce them.^[iv] Selective empathy can distort our judgment by narrowing whose experiences we consider.

That narrowing rarely announces itself. Most of the time, it looks like loyalty.

Consider James, a director who inherited Marcus along with the rest of his team. Marcus was the best performer in the group by every measure that showed up in a quarterly review. He was also hard on the people around him. He interrupted, dismissed ideas in meetings, and corrected colleagues in front of clients.

James didn’t ignore it. He talked with Marcus directly. He found him a coach. And Marcus seemed to be trying. He apologized when he overstepped. He spoke openly about the pressure he was under and about the father whose approval he had chased his whole life. Each time James sat with him, he came away understanding Marcus a little better, and believing a little more that change was coming.

Meanwhile, Priya stopped offering ideas in meetings. Two others asked to transfer. The team learned to route around Marcus rather than through him. Projects that used to take a week started taking two.

James’s empathy was real. It was also focused almost entirely on one person. Marcus sat across from him every week with a story James could understand. The rest of the team’s experience reached him secondhand, if at all. A compelling individual story will almost always feel more urgent than a diffuse pattern of harm, even when the pattern is costing far more.

If Priya had been the one sitting in James’s office every week, he would have understood her just as well. She never was.

James was right to understand Marcus. Where he went wrong was letting that understanding outweigh everyone else’s. Compassion and accountability are not mutually exclusive, and seeing why someone behaves the way they do doesn’t oblige us to keep absorbing what that behavior costs the people around them.

There is another way empathy can become misdirected. Sometimes our emotional response becomes so intense that we lose the perspective needed to respond helpfully.

Emotional empathy can become overwhelming. When we witness someone else’s suffering, we may experience distress so intense that our attention shifts toward managing our own discomfort. Instead of remaining available to the person who needs us, we may withdraw, rush to reassure them, or try to resolve their problem before we’ve understood it.

Researchers distinguish between empathic concern, which is oriented toward another person’s welfare, and personal distress, which centers on our own uncomfortable response to witnessing suffering. That distinction helps explain why feeling more doesn’t necessarily translate into helping more.^[v]

There is also a less comfortable possibility: the ability to understand another person’s emotional experience can be used against them.

Someone who recognizes another person’s fears, insecurities, or vulnerabilities may use that knowledge to provide support, or to influence and manipulate them. Understanding what another person feels does not automatically mean we care about their well-being.

Cognitive empathy is a capability. How we use it is an ethical choice.

Then there is what Kim Scott describes in Radical Candor as ruinous empathy,^[vi] a pattern in which caring about someone leads us to avoid the direct feedback or difficult conversation they need.

A manager notices an employee struggling but hesitates to address the problem because she doesn’t want to damage the employee’s confidence. A parent repeatedly rescues a child from disappointment because watching the child struggle is painful. A friend avoids confronting destructive behavior because preserving the relationship feels more important than risking an uncomfortable conversation.

In each case, the intention may be caring. But the outcome can be harmful.

We protect someone from temporary discomfort while inadvertently allowing a larger problem to develop. And sometimes what appears to be empathy is actually our own discomfort with conflict. We tell ourselves we’re protecting another person’s feelings when we may also be protecting ourselves from the difficulty of an honest conversation.

This raises a question we rarely ask: Is empathy about making someone feel better in the moment, or helping them navigate their experience in a way that serves their long-term well-being?

The answer may depend on the circumstances. Sometimes the most helpful response is quiet understanding. Sometimes it’s reassurance. And sometimes it requires honesty that neither person finds particularly comfortable.

If even a quality we consider so positive can produce these unintended consequences, perhaps we need a different way of thinking about what healthy empathy requires.

Empathy Has a Healthy Zone

How can something we regard as one of our most important human qualities also contribute to bias, manipulation, emotional exhaustion, and harm?

I’ve encountered this paradox before.

In my book, The Imposter Lies Within, I coined the term The Healthy Zone to describe a framework I developed around an important principle: human emotions and behavioral tendencies cannot always be categorized as inherently positive or negative. Fear can protect us or paralyze us. Doubt can encourage thoughtful examination or undermine our confidence. Perfectionism can inspire excellence or make us feel that nothing we do will ever be good enough.

What determines whether these responses serve us is often their intensity, context, and how we respond to them.

Empathy deserves the same consideration. The question isn’t simply how much empathy we have. It’s whether the empathy we’re practicing is appropriate to the situation and genuinely serves the person we’re trying to understand.

When practiced in a healthy way, empathy does more than help us avoid misunderstanding. It allows a leader to recognize potential where others see only performance, a parent to understand the fear beneath a child’s behavior, and two people with very different perspectives to find enough common ground to remain in conversation. Its value lies not simply in how much we care, but in how effectively we translate that care into understanding and action.

This is where my own perspective on cognitive empathy becomes particularly relevant. I’ve come to believe that cognitive empathy offers the most reliable foundation for practicing empathy in a healthy, intentional way. It allows us to understand another person’s experience without requiring us to become emotionally immersed in it. It encourages perspective-taking, curiosity, and the ability to remain grounded when someone else’s emotions are intense.

That doesn’t mean affective empathy has no value. Emotional resonance can alert us to suffering and motivate us to care. Nor does cognitive empathy automatically lead to ethical behavior. As we’ve seen, understanding another person’s emotional vulnerabilities can be used to help or to manipulate.

For me, the healthiest expression of empathy brings together cognitive understanding, compassion, emotional regulation, and discernment. It keeps the other person’s experience at the center without sacrificing our capacity for judgment.

Compassion adds an important dimension. Understanding another person’s experience doesn’t necessarily mean we are concerned about their well-being. Compassion brings that concern into the relationship and can motivate us to respond through words, actions, or simply our willingness to remain present. But compassion also requires discernment. What feels comforting in the moment may not always be what serves someone best.

Consider a frightened child. A parent who becomes overwhelmed by the child’s fear may inadvertently intensify it. A parent who recognizes the fear, considers what might be driving it, and remains emotionally regulated is often better positioned to provide reassurance and support. The parent’s ability to understand doesn’t depend on experiencing the same degree of fear.

The same principle applies in healthcare, leadership, friendship, and intimate relationships. We can recognize another person’s distress without becoming distressed ourselves. And sometimes, maintaining that distinction is precisely what allows us to help.

We don’t have to feel what someone else feels to understand them. But we do have to be willing to see beyond what we ourselves would feel in their place.

That’s a more demanding skill than simply imagining ourselves in someone else’s shoes. It asks us to recognize that their experience may be fundamentally different from our own. And it requires us to remain curious long enough to discover what that difference might be.

Empathy Can Be Learned

If empathy were simply a trait, some of us would have it and some of us wouldn’t, and there wouldn’t be much anyone could do about it. The evidence points the other way. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that empathy training can improve empathic skills, although the effectiveness varies depending on the training and how empathy is measured.^[vii] That matches what I’ve seen in years of coaching and teaching. People get better at this when they practice it deliberately.

A few habits make the most difference.

1. Notice the lightning. When someone shares something difficult, pay attention to your own reaction first. A tight chest, an urge to fix, a memory surfacing. You can’t stop it, but you can name it, and naming it buys you a moment of choice before it shapes your response.

2. Question the thunder. Treat your first interpretation of what someone is feeling as a guess. Then ask. “What’s the hardest part of this for you?” will tell you more than “I know exactly how you feel.” Your own experience may help eventually, once you understand theirs.

3. Check whose experience is missing. James understood Marcus. He never asked what the rest of his team was living through. When one story feels especially compelling, ask who isn’t in the room.

4. Ask what kindness requires over time. Diane chose comfort in the moment, and Maya paid for it later. Sometimes the empathetic choice is the conversation that’s hard for both of you.

5. Measure it from the other side. The real test of empathy is whether the other person walked away feeling seen, heard, and understood, however much you felt along the way. When in doubt, ask: “Did I get that right?”

Understanding Is Only the Beginning

Empathy is not simply something we feel. It’s something we practice, and the way we practice it can make all the difference.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity isn’t simply to become more empathetic, but to become better at understanding what empathy asks of us.

To remain curious when our assumptions are challenged, compassionate when judgment would be easier, and discerning enough to recognize when understanding someone requires more than making them feel better.

Because understanding another person’s experience is only the beginning. What we do with that understanding is where empathy becomes meaningful.

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^[i] Lisa Feldman Barrett, The Theory of Constructed Emotion (2017)

^[ii] Do I Feel or Do I Know? Neuroimaging Meta-Analyses on the Multiple Facets of Empathy (2020)

^[iii] Decety & Jackson, The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy (2004)

^[iv] Paul Bloom, Empathy and Its Discontents (2017)

^[v] Batson, Fultz & Schoenrade, Distress and Empathy (1987)

^[vi] Kim Scott, How to Lead with Radical Candor (TED)

^[vii] Teding van Berkhout, E., & Malouff, J. M. (2016). The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 32–41.