Regulating the costs of empathy: the price of being human

Abstract

It’s not easy being empathic. However, unlike snowboarding or yodeling or decoupage, most people manage to pick up empathy skills naturally without the aid of special lessons or designated practice sessions. Knowing what someone else is thinking and feeling allows people to coordinate their activities, something that is useful and necessary in interpersonal interactions. Like any skill, empathy differs from person to person. We can probably all easily think of individuals in our life who anchor the extreme points on a scale of empathy: the cherished person who consistently seems to have our interest at heart at one end, and the insensitive lout at the other end. However, people who never show empathy or are unable to do so are rare and striking in their inability to fit into normal social interactions. At the same time, people who are extremely empathic are rare also, for good reason: Being constantly sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others would interfere with the ability to act on one’s own thoughts and feelings. How do people generate and maintain a desirable level of empathy? In this paper, we start with the premise that normal people have some capacity for being empathic and define how that capacity is demonstrated. We then explain why empathy is something that needs to be regulated: Despite the obvious advantages of penetrating another person’s thoughts, empathy does not come without its costs. Next, we address two means of regulating empathy: by regulating exposure to stimuli that produce empathy and by regulating the effort expended in attending to another person’s experience.