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Empathy

Adam Smith

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) distinguished between understanding another's situation through imagination (a cognitive process) and actually feeling distress at their suffering (affective resonance). He used "sympathy" and "fellow-feeling" rather than empathy, but the conceptual seeds are there.

Nancy Eisenberg

Produced extensive research on empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behaviour since the 1980s, including The Caring Child (1992) and numerous journal articles on emotional regulation and empathy development.

C. Daniel Batson

Shaped experimental empathy research with his empathy-altruism hypothesis, summarised in Altruism in Humans (2011, Oxford University Press).

Norma Feshbach

Tthe first to explicitly operationalise empathy as having distinct cognitive and affective components in developmental psychology. Her work in the 1970s, including Feshbach, N.D. (1975), "Empathy in Children: Some Theoretical and Empirical Considerations," The Counseling Psychologist, 5(2), 25–30, outlined empathy as requiring both the cognitive ability to take another's perspective and an affective capacity to experience vicarious emotion.

Mark Davis

(1980, 1983) developed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), which became the standard measure distinguishing empathy components — perspective-taking and fantasy (cognitive) versus empathic concern and personal distress (affective). His 1983 paper "Measuring Individual Differences in Empathy: Evidence for a Multidimensional Approach" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126) is heavily cited.

Goffman's Dramaturgical Model

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman argued that social life operates like theatre:

  • Front stage - where we perform for audiences, managing impressions
  • Back stage - where we drop the performance
  • Scripts and roles - socially expected behaviours we enact
  • Impression management - controlling how others perceive us

Simon Baron-Cohen

Primarily work on Autism: - Empathising-Systemising (E-S) Theory - The Empathy Quotient (EQ) - Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), the science of evil - Theory of Mind research, with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie on false-belief tasks (the "Sally-Anne test")

If we decompose empathy into:

  1. Emotion recognition — identifying what someone feels
  2. Perspective-taking — understanding why they feel it
  3. Affective resonance — feeling something in response
  4. Empathic response selection — knowing what to do or say

Autistic difficulties seem concentrated in (1), (2), and (4), while (3) may be intact or even heightened. Baron-Cohen's "Zero-Positive" label flattens this into a single deficit score, which loses important nuance. Milton's double empathy problem reframes this more symmetrically: neurotypical people are equally bad at reading autistic emotional expression. The failure is mutual, not located in one party.

In Zero Degrees of Empathy, he argues empathy serves as:

  • A brake on cruelty — His central thesis is that "evil" can be reconceptualised as empathy erosion. When empathy is functioning, it prevents us from treating others purely as objects. It creates a felt barrier to harm. The book opens with his childhood question about Nazi atrocities and frames empathy as the mechanism whose absence permits such behaviour.
  • Social glue — Empathy enables coordination, bonding, trust, and cooperative living. It's what makes human sociality work at scale.
  • A moral foundation — He positions empathy as more fundamental than rule-based ethics. Rules can be gamed or followed mechanistically; empathy provides direct access to another's welfare as something that matters.

Baron-Cohen doesn't elaborate this extensively, but the background assumption is standard evolutionary psychology: empathy evolved because:

  • It supports kin care (responding to offspring distress)
  • It enables reciprocal altruism (tracking others' states to maintain cooperative relationships)
  • It facilitates group cohesion (shared emotional states binding groups together)

Empathy for what purpose, in what contexts?

Is empathy for:

  • Preventing harm? (his emphasis)
  • Facilitating helping?
  • Enabling accurate social prediction?
  • Creating felt connection?
  • Regulating group behaviour?

These aren't identical, and a system optimised for one might not serve another. Someone could have exquisite empathic accuracy (useful for prediction and manipulation) without any motivation toward care — which circles back to the psychopathy profile.

He essentially treats empathy as intrinsically good without fully interrogating whether all its functions are prosocial or whether it can misfire.

Does the "empathy as brake" framing resonate with you, or does it feel incomplete?

This is Baron-Cohen's terminology from Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011).

He proposed that empathy exists on a bell curve, and that some individuals fall at the extreme low end — "zero degrees." He then distinguished two categories:

"Zero-Negative"

These are individuals whose lack of empathy causes harm to others. Baron-Cohen identified three personality disorders in this category:

  • Type N (Narcissistic) — Empathy is compromised by excessive self-focus. Others exist primarily as mirrors or instruments for self-esteem regulation.
  • Type B (Borderline) — Empathy is unstable and overwhelmed by emotional dysregulation. The person may swing between intense attunement and complete disconnection, particularly when attachment fears are triggered.
  • Type P (Psychopathic/Antisocial) — Cognitive empathy intact (they can read others well), affective empathy absent (they don't feel with others). This enables manipulation without remorse.

The "negative" designation reflects that these presentations typically result in harm — to relationships, to others' wellbeing, sometimes criminally.

Zero-Positive

This was Baron-Cohen's more controversial category, referring to autism. He argued that autistic individuals may also show very low empathy scores but that this doesn't lead to cruelty. Instead, their strong systemising drive provides an alternative moral framework — rule-based rather than affect-based. They may struggle to read emotions intuitively but can still behave ethically through learned principles.

Criticisms

The Zero-Positive framing attracted significant pushback from autistic self-advocates and some researchers who argued:

  • It conflates cognitive empathy difficulties (reading emotions) with lack of caring
  • Many autistic people report intense affective empathy — sometimes overwhelming
  • The framing risks stigmatising autism by placing it on a spectrum with psychopathy

The double empathy problem (Damian Milton, 2012) offers an alternative view: empathy failures between autistic and neurotypical people are bidirectional, not a deficit located solely in the autistic person.