Why Trait Empathy Is the Wrong Measure

Is empathy a trait—or is it an interaction?

Source: Juan Pablo Serrano Arenas/Pexels

I've been studying empathy for most of my life. I write about empathy in books and studies and teach it across the world, and I developed a unique "big tent" model of empathy that helps people access, increase, or decrease their empathic capacities at any stage in their lifespans.

But the more I think about empathy, the more I question the concept of trait empathy. I question whether we can say that this person has this amount of empathy, and that person has that amount: she’s at 92, they're at 70, those people are at 6.5 …

Instead, I’m now observing empathy as something that exists in interactions, rather than merely in individuals.

Because your empathy can fall away in 3, 2, ...

We've all experienced the sudden loss of our empathy in interactions. For instance, if I forcefully make a statement that you don’t agree with, your empathy may fall away.

Imagine that you and I are committed vegetarians, and that's one of the ways we empathize with each other. If I suddenly glorify the health benefits of meat, it’s very likely that your empathy for me would fade or even disappear. If empathy were a trait that lived entirely within you, that wouldn’t happen.

In fact, empathy can be a very fragile thing. We've all seen that empathy can decrease in the presence of:

1. Conflict.
2. Communication barriers.
3. Difference (in age, cultural expectations, group membership, gender expression, body types, neurodivergence, etc.).
4. The presence of an emotion you don't know how to work with.
5. Fatigue and overwhelm.

Empathy isn't a stable trait; it's something that appears in interactions, and often only when all the conditions are just right.

In my work, I help people develop robust emotional and empathic skills so that they can choose to empathize even when it's difficult. I also help people learn how to turn down specific aspects of their empathy when it's hyper-activated.

If empathy were a trait, we couldn't do that, but because empathy exists in interactions, we can work with our empathy and decide how and when to use it.

Your empathy can also rise and fall at the exact same moment

The idea that empathy is a stable trait can easily be shown to be incorrect. In my book The Art of Empathy, I write about something I call “three-party empathy,"¹ which is an everyday empathy-bending behavior that you may miss if you assume that empathy is a trait.

We've been surrounded by three-party empathy throughout our lives: it's a situation in which people want us to join them in taking sides. When we take sides, we are of course on the right side, and the people who disagree with us are (of course) on the wrong side. This is an everyday behavior, but when you observe it empathically, you can see what's happening to people's empathic abilities.

Three-party empathy is especially visible on social media, where people fight for your attention and attempt to manipulate your emotions and your empathy. For instance, my activist friends on social media often create forceful and melodramatic posts about their most pressing political concerns; they clearly want me to believe as they do, be on their side, and share all of their emotions and attitudes.

They especially want me to look down on, distrust, or even despise the people on the other side of their issues. Liberal versus conservative, vegan versus carnivore, anti-abortion versus pro-choice, Israelis versus Palestinians, and on into infinity.

If I can't see the ways that my friends are trying to manipulate my empathy, I'll become entrapped in three-party empathy. I'll strongly increase my empathy for my friends and their crusades and enter into enmeshed hyper-empathy with them. But at the same time, I'll decrease my empathy for the enemies of my friends, and drop into hypo-empathy that may even degrade into dehumanization of entire groups or ideologies.

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So in my single brain at a single moment in time, I'll be simultaneously at empathy 100 and at empathy 0.

This couldn't happen if empathy were an individual trait.

And there's another problem with the idea of trait empathy

The very idea of trait empathy invites a tragic game of comparisons, where we are free to exile the people we call unempathic.

Some of these exiles are boys and men, who are wrongly called out as constitutionally unempathic, even though socialization is the culprit in teaching males different forms of empathic interactions. Autistic people are also exiled, even though they often deal with uncontrolled hyper-empathy that makes them uncomfortably hyper-sensitive to their environment.

People dealing with sociopathy, psychopathy, and narcissistic traits are also exiled from empathy, even though people in each of these groups can and do empathize. And women and girls are required to be empathic (or even hyper-empathic), which places a tremendous burden on them as "natural" caregivers and loads them up with unpaid emotional labor throughout their lives.

It is unempathic to exile people from empathy, and it is also unempathic to grade empathy as if it's a stable trait instead of a situation-dependent and socialization-dependent interactional behavior.

Reframing empathy

When I did the research for my book on empathy in 2011 and 2012, researchers were fighting over the definition of empathy. Mistakenly framing it as a trait was one reason they couldn't come to any agreement, but there were many other fights that also got in their way. I walked away from their fruitless arguments and built a definition of empathy that focused on skills and interactions rather than mere traits:

Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps you feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, thoughts, and needs of others, such that you can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.

In my model, there are no exiles and no magical people who are unfailingly empathic. Instead, there are imperfect people working to develop the skills they need to interact perceptively and empathically.

The traits of self-development and skill-building are the traits we want to support. The concept of trait empathy is a questionable measure that invites exiling and also erases the social skills, emotional awareness, and empathic labor that are the true measures of healthy empathic interactions.

_{¹My three-party empathy model is a nod to Fritz Breithaupt’s concept of three-person empathy; however, my terminology refers to more complex group-level behaviors.}