What empathy is – and isn’t
It’s not often that I am grateful to The Economist for its deep insights. But a recent article from Lexington on ‘Fratricidal empathy’ caught my attention. The article made the distinction between ‘emotional empathy’ and ‘cognitive empathy’ as a slight but important distinction in the battle being fought about how we might understand another person’s reality. This idea of ‘cognitive empathy’, as was described in The Economist is, apparently, ‘what psychologists call “theory of mind” – the ability to infer how someone else sees the world’. [The Economist, July 25th 2026]
Empathy is a much sought-after skill in today’s leadership lexicon but often empathy is used as a proxy for what is really just sympathy – the ‘sympathetic’ listening to another’s hardships in an effort to see their perspective. It works to some degree, in lightening the burden of the teller and helping them ‘feel seen and heard’ but, as the evidence shows, it rarely moves the needle on important issues of social justice and the inequalities we see in the world.
That’s why the nuance of what The Economist was so insightful to me. It was moving past the idea of just witnessing someone else’s pain towards a concerted effort to genuinely understand a world view that might be wholly different to one’s own, but that nevertheless needs to be the starting – and ending – point in leadership and how action gets taken.
I see this all the time in the way in which the West, in particular, views China and any non-Western country. Sure, they can sympathise/empathise with a different world view, but it takes an extraordinary leader (of which we have far too few) to truly ‘get in the skin’ and be able to understand a world view that might seem totally different to others. I’ve always loved the way Atticus Finch describes it in To Kill A Mockingbird
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
It’s the living and breathing of that other person’s reality – not just an emotional response – that helps you to understand their world and thus take action to the benefit of both of you.
The concept of empathy has got a bad wrap in recent years, especially from the far right who see any attempt to understand a person’s perspective as inherently ‘woke’. But that misses the finer point of some of the larger global conflicts emerging, where a lack of a more sophisticated understanding of ‘the other’, whether that’s China, Iran or Russia, is a far more dangerous proposition than anything the woke brigade could ever do. Indeed the prelude to this distinction in definition of the ‘right sort’ of empathy we are looking for was foreshadowed in The Economist article by the observation that America and Iran will never be able to make peace until this distinction is understood.
The comment in The Economist also got me thinking about a workshop I had recently conducted with a group of global leaders that had highlighted, to me at least, the failures inherent in assuming that people can and will respond to an empathetic understanding of another’s point of view to the point where it moves action. One of our participants had had the opportunity of speaking with a major head of state with a request for a ceasefire in Gaza, based on her own tragic experience of a hate crime. But the workshop participants believed this to be an impossible task, believing that this ‘empathetic’ approach was the nearest thing they could do to move the needle.
But I begged to suggest that it might be possible to move ‘hearts and minds’, provided the two were engaged properly together. Yes, we need empathy, but not in a way that reinforces victimhood, but that can take the emotional story to inviting a greater moral courage that speaks to how that other person sees the world – and then moves BOTH forward. By staying stuck at the level of only seeking emotional engagement with an issue, we lose the opportunity to transform our listeners greater moral sensibilities by offering them a deeper – and more ‘cognitive’ - view of our shared humanity.
This is not to say that emotion doesn’t have a role to play. It can and does have an impact in pushing us to engage with another person’s reality. But if it stays purely at the emotional level, it will never have the ability to truly enable negotiations to take place with the wisdom and ‘emotional’ sophistication of those able to move past ‘victim’ status towards a larger conception of justice. That’s why it’s beholden on us as leaders and activists to engage others emotionally but to do so with a depth and sophistication that goes further in enrolling someone into understanding that seeing another person’s reality is the only way we can properly and fairly, get things done. It’s the deeper thought that the word ‘cognition’ points to here.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that one necessarily panders to a world view of the other, no matter what it is, when ‘higher order’ values are at stake. Rather, the capacity to walk across the apparent divide and speak to another from THEIR vantage point, rather than your own, is the hallmark of great leadership and what is so necessary in situations of global conflict. And it isn’t about staying there, simply in that point of view, but to be present with another person’s perspective - and then to move BOTH parties forward with decisions that honour our shared humanity, which should always be the ultimate goal.