The empathy gap is a psychological bias where individuals struggle to accurately predict or understand the emotions and behaviors of others, or their own future selves, when in different emotional or visceral states. It is often defined as the hot-cold empathy gap, which contrasts states influenced by intense emotions like anger, pain, or hunger ("hot") with calm, rational states ("cold").
Research highlights several manifestations:
- Hot-cold gaps impact medical decisions, with patients in a "hot" state of distress (e.g., after a cancer diagnosis) making treatment choices they might reconsider when calmer. Smokers in a "cold" state also underpredict future cravings.
- Egocentric empathy gaps cause individuals to misestimate others' valuations in contexts like buying and selling, leading to financial losses and misattributions of greed.
- Empathy gaps for social pain demonstrate that those not actively experiencing suffering (e.g., bullying, ostracism) underestimate its severity for others and their past selves, impacting support for victims and policy responses.
- AI's empathy gap refers to conversational AI's failure to respond adequately to complex human emotions, especially in children, due to limitations in natural language processing and algorithmic bias, potentially producing harmful outputs.
Major learnings indicate these gaps lead to poor personal and policy decisions, causing misunderstandings and missed connections. However, empathy is a teachable skill. Strategies to bridge the gap include: pausing before reacting, practicing emotional self-regulation, and labeling emotions. Considering similar situations can also reduce affective distance and improve judgments.
