If you have read my last post about the Dark Triad of Personality Disorders (if you haven’t, click here!), you may have noticed one common factor that connected all of the three different character traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy: people who can be identified to fall into one of these categories are generally less able to experience empathy.
Of course, as always, we humans are not the same and each of us inherently has a distinct level of empathy. But a complete lack of empathy can indeed often be an indicator that there may be some “dark” human traits at work.
A lack of empathy is indeed often associated with callous and unemotional behavior, violence or aggression, and is related to problems in social communication and interactions, resulting in unstable, impaired relationships.
But what is empathy, after all? With emotional intelligence and other, “soft” skills seemingly becoming more and more important in today’s business world, empathy also seems to be one of these traits that everyone is talking about, but not everyone necessarily seems to know exactly what to look for. So, let’s talk about it!
The concept of empathy in the scientific literature goes back to “the beginning of philosophical thought”, but even long before that Edward Titchener (1909) considered the construct when he translated the German concept of “Einfühlung” (imagine a German yelling that at you :D) to English.
Since then, empathy has been studied in a multitude of studies on different effects on and of empathy across a wide variety of disciplines.
Actually, I have started to work on a project about empathy myself, more specifically about what it brings out in organizational leaders. But despite the broad range of investigations on empathy itself, it is still not quite conclusive what the construct exactly is and what not. But - of course - scholars have tried to define it.
According to one of those scholars (Davis, 1994), empathy is a form of social awareness through which a person shares an emotional experience with others - either or both on an affective and cognitive level. This already brings us to a distinction between two dimensions of empathy.
Affective empathy refers to experiencing the feelings of another person in oneself, in response to the other’s emotion(s). It is comparable to a tendency to ‘‘catch’’ emotions from watching emotions in others. If you see a friend crying, you would for example also start to feel sad, even though nothing bad happened to you personally.
It is thought to be the earliest developed system of empathy as it has been observed in infants as young as one or two days old. From that early age onwards, humans instinctively react to other people’s emotions. This happens through a neural process: when one perceives another person’s affective state, the observer’s own neural system is unconsciously activated to match the perceived affective state of the other person.
The experience of affective empathy was shown to be neurologically similar to the experience of undergoing the same affective state firsthand, as it has been shown to activate the same areas in the brain. This way the observer automatically comes to feel similarly as the target.
Not everyone is capable of that in the same way, and people with low affective empathy have a weaker transmission of such affective states. Affective empathy has additionally been proposed to occur via more cognitive mechanisms, such as observing another person’s situation and more consciously evaluating it in the same way as the target, which then leads to a similar affective reaction.
People high in affective empathy experience the same emotions as their interaction partner, which can have good and bad consequences: on the one hand, it enables them to even better understand their counterpart and to devise strategies to make the situation better for them. In this context, affective empathy is for example important for altruistic behaviours - if you feel sad yourself, it increases the chances that you would try to help the crying person, and make them feel better.
What about the consequences for yourself? If your friend wasn’t crying but rather super happy, this would be advantageous for because you would also share in some of this joy of your friend, without necessarily needing a reason of your own.
On the other hand, feeling the same emotion can also have obvious costs to the empathetic person in the case of caught negative emotions.
Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, refers the ability to identify emotional states of others without undergoing the process of “catching” and experiencing these emotions yourself. In the case of the crying friend, you would recognise that (s)he must be sad and that something bad must have happened, but you don’t start to feel sad yourself.
It is thought to develop later than affective empathy, after children learn specific cognitive abilities. Cognitive empathy is understood in such a way that people understand the mental states of others through taking a another person’s perspective, interpreting their facial expressions, or thinking back to relevant own previously experienced situations.
People high in cognitive empathy intellectually and cognitively understand the person they interact with (for example: your friend is not someone who cries on a daily basis), the situation in which they are (e.g.: your friend just coming out of a job interview) and how the other persons must feel due to this (e.g.: if it didn’t go well, obviously they must be disappointed, sad or frustrated).
They understand the reason for the tears, again, to highlight this point: without necessarily feeling these feelings themselves. In this form, empathy can be valuable for insight in such settings as counselling or law enforcement. Psychotherapists, for example, are generally at advantage when they understand which emotions their patients are experiencing (and probably even more at ease with their job when they don't catch some of the negative emotions themselves).
On a less positive note, since it offers sensitive emotional information about others, it may also underlie manipulative personalities (McIllwain, 2003). Maybe, after all, we have to start distinguishing affective and cognitive empathy in our previously discussed narcissists and psychopaths - it might very well be the case that they don’t FEEL the pain of their “victims” (impaired affective empathy), but very well understand it and make use of it to achieve their goals.
On the other hand, individuals with Asperger syndrome have for example been identified with an impairment in their cognitive but not affective empathy, i.e. they feel your emotions but can’t make much sense of what they mean and what someone else is going through (Dziobek et al., 2008).
While a person may very well be high or low in both affective and cognitive empathy, the two can be distinguished and very often one prevails over the other. Existing organizational studies have only rarely considered the potentially very different effects of these different kinds of empathy, though - which is a task I plan to take on with my future study :).
Still, most scholars now include both cognitive and affective dimensions into their concept of empathy.
Some scholars provide evidence that empathy also has a behavioral dimension (e.g., Van der Graaff et al., 2016). Behavioral empathy is action-oriented; it involves the outward expression of internally experienced (cognitive and affective) processes.
While I agree that experienced empathy does not always have to be acted upon (when it does, it can be identified as “behavioral” empathy), and thus can include a behavioral component, I still wouldn’t count it as a whole other dimension - rather as an extension to the other two types. I, myself, would thus subcategorize empathy on another axes into “experienced” and “enacted”, and thus behavioral affective or cognitive and "experienced" affective or cognitive empathy.
As always with affect and cognition, the affective type might bear more risks for the person experiencing it, as explained before. But unfortunately, not many studies exist so far that differentiate between the two, and look at some positive and negative consequences of being more affectively or cognitively empathetic.
If you have any thoughts yourself how this could play out, especially in an organizational environment, I’d be excited to know! Feel free to leave a comment or contact me privately.
I’m thinking something along the lines of affective empathy making it harder for some people to stay detached from their job and objective in some rough people-decisions, for example letting low-performers go. At the same time, it might make them more relatable and understanding if someone, for example a subordinate, is going through a rough phase.
I sincerely think this topic is intriguing, especially with emotional intelligence, of which empathy is a factor, on the rise as a desirable trait in all kinds of situations and professional roles.
So, I’ll be staying curious - and I hope you will, too!
(Not to make an advertisement, but if you feel like reading up more on empathy or other emotional intelligence traits that can help you succeed in the workplace, I can recommend Harvard Business Review’s Emotional Intelligence series - available through Amazon and other book sellers, or for free if you have a University Login account for the HBR database).
xx
Valli
Major Source:
Clark, Robertson & Young, 2019