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(p.vii) List of Contributors
KRISTIN ANDREWS is Associate Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at York University.
C. DANIEL BATSON is Professor Emeritus in the
Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas.
RUSSIL DURRANT is Senior Lecturer in the School of
Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of
Wellington.
NANCY EISENBERG is Regents’ Professor in the
Department of Psychology at Arizona State University.
K. RICHARD GARRETT is Associate Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at Bentley University.
GEORGE GRAHAM is Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at Georgia State University.
LORI GRUEN is Professor of Philosophy, Feminist,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies
at Wesleyan University.
JESSICA A. HOBSON is Senior Research Fellow in the
Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit of Institute of Child
Health at University College London.
R. PETER HOBSON is Professor of Developmental
Psychopathology in the Behavioural and Brain Sciences
Unit of the Institute of Child Health at University College
London and the Tavistock Clinic.
MARTIN L. HOFFMAN is Professor Emeritus in the
Department of Psychology at New York University.
DOUGLAS HOLLAN is Professor of Anthropology and
Luckman Distinguished Teacher at UCLA, co-director of the
FPR-UCLA Culture, Brain, and Development Program in
Mental Health, and an instructor at the New Center for
Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.
ANTTI KAUPPINEN is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.
(p.viii)
CLAUS LAMM is Professor and Head of the Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit of the
Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research
Methods at the University of Vienna.
HEIDI L. MAIBOM is Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati.
JASMINKA MAJDANDŽIĆ is Postdoctoral Researcher
in the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit of
the Department of Basic Psychological Research and
Research Methods at the University of Vienna.
ABIGAIL A. MARSH is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Psychology at Georgetown University.
TRACY L. SPINRAD is Associate Professor in the School
of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University.
GIUSEPPE UGAZIO is Postdoctoral Researcher in the
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit of the
Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research
Methods at the University of Vienna.
TONY WARD is Professor in the School of Psychology at
Victoria University of Wellington.
Introduction: (Almost) Everything
You Ever Wanted to Know about
Empathy
Heidi L. Maibom

The term “empathy” denotes a range of emotional responses we have

to what others feel or the situation they are in, such as sympathy,
empathic anger, or compassion, in addition to some form of
appreciation of their psychological state. It also sometimes denotes a
purely cognitive state of understanding another. Depending on the
subject area and the aims of the theorist, “empathy” may be more
narrowly defined. However, many classical empathy scales—such as
the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Bryant’s Index of Empathy, or
the Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy—measure not
simply someone’s sympathy toward others, but also her tendency to
react emotionally to them, to catch their emotions, to be distressed
when others are seriously hurt, and to take their perspective (Bryant
1982, Davis 1983b, Mehrabian & Epstein 1972). Philosophers tend to
be less ecumenical about their definition of empathy and typically
insist that “affective” empathy is an emotion-matching, other-
oriented and other-caused emotional state (Coplan 2011, Darwall
1998, Maibom 2007, Sober & Wilson 1998). Some psychologists
think of empathic concern as the prototype of empathy. Empathic
concern is an other-oriented emotion that need not match the
emotion the other person is experiencing as long as it is congruent
with her welfare (Batson 2011). This “empathic concern” (p.2) is
what many philosophers and psychologists talk of as “sympathy”
(Darwall 1998, Eisenberg 2000, Sober & Wilson 1998).
The rather diverse use of “empathy” has given rise to some
despondency among theorists, who often claim that the term has
such a broad usage that it is almost impossible to capture (see
Coplan & Goldie 2011a).1 People therefore typically specify what they
take the term to mean. It is a sound approach, and one I shall take
here. However, the rumors about the impossibly diverse usage of
“empathy” are exaggerated. In practice, almost nobody talks of an
emotion as empathetic unless the agent is aware that it is caused by
the perceived, imagined, or inferred emotion or plight of another, or
it expresses concern for the welfare of another. Martin Hoffman’s
characterization of an empathic emotion as an emotion that is more
appropriate to the state or situation of someone other than the
person who experiences it best captures the various usages of the
term (Hoffman 2000). Within the domain of empathy-related
emotions, there are many important differences in emotional
directionality, quality, and so on, but this does not change the fact
that these emotions are intimately connected, making empathy
studies a more coherent field than we are led to believe. Of course
cognitive empathy is not an emotion, but an understanding of others.
Typically, however, it involves perspective taking or imaginatively
engaging with others in their situation. That is, in cognitive empathy
we are re-centering our thoughts so that they may be said to be more
reflective of those of a person in that situation than of the situation
we are in ourselves. Hoffman’s basic idea, then, is extendable to all
forms of empathy.
Most think that it is possible to have cognitive empathy without
affective empathy. I can think of another’s emotions without thereby
experiencing these emotions myself. Is the reverse true? It is widely
agreed that to be able to affectively empathize with others, we need
only a cursory understanding of the nature of others’ emotional
states and of the fact that they are states of another. Shaun Nichols,
for instance, argues that we need only be able to tell that the other is
in distress or pain to be able to empathize with their distress and
pain (Nichols 2001). Similarly, Frans de Waal and Stephanie Preston
understand empathy in terms of a perception-action model (see
below), which also involves little cognitive sophistication (Preston &
de Waal 2002). At the same time, it is evident that any sophisticated
empathizing requires more advanced cognitive capacities. How much
is debated. At the extreme end, we have Peter (p.3) Goldie who
maintains that to empathize, I must be “aware of the other as a
centre of consciousness distinct from myself,” I must have a
“substantial characterization” of the other person, and I must have a
narrative that I can imaginative reenact (Goldie 2000, 195). But such
a stringent account leaves out what most people would call empathy
and most of what the psychological literature regards as empathy.
Probably the cognitive sophistication that most have in mind when
they think of developed empathy lies halfway between Nichols’
minimal position and Goldie’s pregnant one.
1. Affective Empathy and Empathy-Related Emotions
It is typical to distinguish between emotional contagion, empathy,
sympathy, and personal distress. The below is representative of how
many philosophers and psychologists think of these constructs
(Maibom 2012a, Sober & Wilson 1998):
(Affective) Empathy
S empathizes with O’s experience of emotion E in C if S feels E
for O as a result of: believing or perceiving that O feels E, or
imagining being in C.
Sympathy
S sympathizes with O when S feels sad for O as a result of
believing or perceiving that something bad has happened to O,
or S feels happy for O as a result of believing or perceiving that
something good has happened to O.
Emotional Contagion
S’s feeling E is a case of emotional contagion if S feels E as a
result of believing that O feels E, perceiving that O is T-ing, or of
imagining being in the C of O.
Personal Distress
S is personally distressed by O’s experience of emotion E in C if
S feels E—not for O, but for herself (S)—as a result of believing
or perceiving that O feels E, or imagining being in C, OR as a
result of believing that something bad has happened to O.
S refers to the subject who experiences the emotion, O to some other
person who is the source of the emotion Sexperiences, E to an
emotion, T-ing is a bodily expression typically associated with an
emotion (e.g., smiling or crying) (p.4) and C is a circumstance or a
situation. To say that S feels E for O is to say that the E that
Sexperiences is empathic; it reflects S’s awareness that she is not
feeling the emotion directly or for herself, but she is feeling it for O.
These emotional reactions are deeply interpersonal insofar as they
are caused by some awareness of what is happening to someone else,
although emotional contagion may (typically) happen below the
threshold of conscious awareness. To distinguish them from one
another, one needs to ask whether: (i) the emotion is experienced
directly (for the self) or for someone else, (ii) the object of the
emotion is the other’s emotion or their welfare, and (iii) what the
subject feels aims to match what the object (the other person) feels
or not (emotion matching). In empathic distress, one feels distress
for the other; in personal distress, one feels distress for the self. In
empathy the focus is on what the other is feeling or might reasonably
be expected to feel, whereas sympathy is directed at the other’s
welfare, regardless of what he is feeling. Empathy aims to match the
emotion that the other experiences or could reasonably be expected
to experience in her situation. By contrast, the affective quality of
sympathy only matches in the broadest possible terms the welfare of
the other: sadness or some similar emotion when the other person is
negatively affected by what is happening to him, and happiness when
he is positively affected by his circumstances.
Emotional contagion is often thought to be the most basic emotional
reaction to the emotions of others that is still empathic in nature. It
is said that we “catch” others’ emotions, for example, their mirth,
sadness, or anxiety. The term “catch” is meant to reflect the fact that
the process is often relatively automatic and involuntary. Reactive
crying in infants is often thought to be the first expression of
emotional contagion (Simner 1971, Sagi & Hoffman 1976, Martin &
Clark 1982). Reactive barking in dogs may be the canine equivalent
(see also contagious yawning in chimpanzees, Campbell & de Waal
2011). Many think that mature empathy develops out of this basic
tendency to feel what others feel. Yet emotional contagion need
contain little awareness of the other as experiencing the emotions
that are caught this way. Perhaps it doesn’t even involve any real
understanding that the other is a minded or feeling other. If I catch
your mirth, for instance, I might just end up feeling happy without
much thought about why that is. In my mind, spending time with
you makes me happy. Of course, I amalso capable of thinking of you
as a minded other, but that is orthogonal to the issue of what is
involved in emotional contagion. Emotional contagion appears to
play an important role in social relationships beyond that of
understanding or feeling with or for the other. For instance, people
who mimic one another report liking each other more (Hatfield,
Cacioppo, & Rapson 1994).
Often we are aware that we feel what we feel because of what another
feels; we feel sad because she feels sad. Some people, like Eisenberg,
would regard (p.5) this as empathy proper. I talk of empathy proper
as an emotion that is felt for the other in addition to with them, but
it is important to stress that the “feeling for” that I have in mind is
not meant to include “concern” as a feeling or attitude felt separate
from, and in addition to, the particular emotion that is felt for the
other (empathic anger, say). The extent to which “feeling for,” as I
am using the expression here, connotes concern for another is the
extent to which such a feeling or attitude is implicit in the fact that
one feels an emotion that is more appropriate to the situation of the
other than to one’s own. “Feeling for” is to be understood broadly so
as to include cases where I am angry with a person because that
person wronged you where, in a sense, you are neither the object nor
the subject of my emotion. What makes it a case of empathetic anger
is that I am feeling it not directly as a sort of objective moral anger,
but rather I feel it on your behalf.
I take it that what distinguishes empathy from personal distress is
that whereas in personal distress the distress is felt for oneself just as
in ordinary distress, in empathic distress it is felt for the distressed
other. Described in this way, empathic distress seems to be a
development of the emotional contagion of distress. Personal
distress, on the other hand, may be just “caught” distress, or another
development of emotional contagion, though what would
differentiate the two is unclear. It is therefore tempting to think of
emotional contagion as the original affective state that underlies all
empathy, personal distress, and, as we shall see, sympathy. This may
ultimately be what Preston and de Waal have in mind with their
perception-action model (though the model includes many
interesting details glossed over here). According to this model “the
attended perception of the object’s state automatically activates the
subject’s representation of the state, situation, and object, and . . .
activation of these representations automatically primes or generates
the associated autonomic or somatic responses, unless inhibited”
(Preston & de Waal 2002, 4). Note, however, that in this model what
causes empathy is seeing the affect of the other. In mature persons,
thinking of the other’s thoughts, feelings, or of their situation is a
cause of empathy, as is imaginatively engaging with her perspective.
Setting aside for the moment the phylogeny and ontogeny of
empathy, it seems that what transforms emotional contagion into
other-related emotions is cognition. Cognitive capacities and/or
activities morph contagious distress into empathic distress, for
instance. That is, we may get to feel an emotion by “catching” it,
while being aware that the other person is experiencing this emotion,
and thus thinking that we are feeling what we are feeling because he
is feeling what he is feeling. This thought process might be what
transforms contagious distress into empathic distress. That is, this
might be what transforms the emotion, whichever one it happens to
be, from being directly felt (p.6) to being empathic. With
experience, such transitions become relatively automatic. This is
speculative, of course.
It is also often thought that sympathy is a development either out of
emotional contagion or empathy (Eisenberg2000, Hoffman 2000).
Hoffman (2000) sometimes talks of it as a later developmental state
compared to empathy. For Nancy Eisenberg (2000), sympathy
typically is a reaction to the emotional arousal caused by empathy,
cognition, or perspective taking. For someone like Max Scheler
(1973), sympathy is only made possible by the subject’s prior
empathizing with the other. By contrast to empathy, sympathy is not
emotion matching but welfare directed. We sympathize with
someone in a bad situation because of her situation, in relative
independence of what she feels about it. Sympathy is often thought
to be the most sophisticated of the empathic emotions because it
moves beyond the feelings of the subject and considers her wellbeing
(Hoffman2000, Darwall 1998). Sympathy is typically thought of as
sympathy with someone in a bad situation, and consequently as a sad
emotion. Sympathy expresses concern for the other; hence it is often
called “empathic concern” (Batson 1991 & 2011, Davis 1983b). This
concern can presumably also express itself in happier ways, for
instance as happiness when good things happen to someone.
I have talked about sadness and happiness as affective descriptors of
sympathy, but it is not quite clear how to think of the affective
quality of sympathy. Daniel Batson describes what we call sympathy
here and he calls empathic concern as feeling “sympathetic, kind,
compassionate, warm, softhearted, tender, empathetic, concerned,
moved, and touched” (Batson 2011, 103). The affective quality here is
significantly softer than that of personal distress, which is described
as “alarmed, bothered, disturbed, upset, troubled, worried, anxious,
uneasy, grieved, and distressed” (Batson 2011, 103). However, if
personal distress differs from empathetic distress only in its object—
the self as opposed to the other—and not in the emotion that is felt,
then empathy and sympathy typically differ in their affective quality
when the target person is in a distressing situation. Empathic
distress will be unpleasant and strongly negative whereas sympathy
(empathic concern) is less aversive and has a more tender tone. It is
unclear, however, whether researchers generally agree with Batson
on the description of the affective quality of sympathy. David Sloan
Wilson and Elliott Sober, for instance, think of sympathy as sadness,
which expresses something more negative than Batson’s list, yet is
not as aversive as the distressed reaction (Sober & Wilson 1998).
What to think of personal distress is a very interesting question in
this literature. People rarely talk of distress, but contrast the
concerned sympathetic orientation with the self-oriented one typical
of personal distress. However, in an intriguing study, Batson and
colleagues (Batson, Early, & Salvarini 1997) (p.7) found that all
subjects experience a mix of sympathy and distress for the self and
for the other when confronted with a subject in need.2 These
reactions can be manipulated by instructions—instructions
concerning what perspective to take on the situation—so that the
subject feels more or less of each of them. Personal distress,
therefore, is rarely felt in isolation from other empathy-related
emotions. Furthermore, most subjects describe their reaction to
others in need as involving distress for the other in addition to
feeling distress directly (or: for themselves). This confluence of
emotional reactions, at least on self-report measures, is the cause of
some concern when it comes to conceptualizing empathic emotions
in neatly separate categories. Such concern may be allayed somewhat
by noting that many emotions are seldom felt in isolation,
particularly in isolation from related emotions. For instance, people
rarely feel just shame or just guilt. People tend to feel both shame
and guilt (Tangney & Dearing2002; Deonna, Rodogno, & Terroni
2012). Yet, theories of shame and guilt are built on such evidence;
the emotion that subjects report feeling more of is typically assumed
to be the relevant one in such systematizations. This tendency may
be little more than a continuation of common practice where we tend
to describe ourselves and others as experiencing one emotion at a
time, despite the fact that we often experience several at the same
time. Having said that, I think it is possible that our common
practice leads to seriously distorted theories of individual emotions.
But this points to larger methodological concerns about the study of
emotions that cannot be dealt with here.
Although the directionality or focus of personal distress is important
to distinguish it from empathic distress (self vs. other), its
motivational aspect is what most interests theorists. Batson famously
claims that sympathy (his “empathic concern”) leads to altruistic
motivation and personal distress leads to egoistic motivation. In
other words, people who feel sympathy for others will help these
people out of an ultimate concern for their wellbeing, whereas people
who feel personally distressed by the distress of others will help
ultimately to reduce their own distress. Less abstractly, people who
are personally distressed are more likely to leave the distressing
situation without helping the person in need than people who feel
sympathy if escape is easy and if helping the other is not very costly.
By and large, personal distress is regarded as an (p.8) unhelpful
emotion. Yet some think it is a normal reaction to situations that are
very distressing (Eisenberg & Fabes 1990). If the other is in great
distress, the typical response is personal distress. Hoffman and
Eisenberg talk of empathic over-arousal (Eisenberg & Fabes 1992,
Hoffman 2000). Most people agree that sympathy either involves or
causes altruistic or prosocial motivation. There is more disagreement
about empathy. Some think that an empathic emotion involves the
motivational aspect of that emotion itself, only directed at the other
(Maibom 2007). So, for instance, if anger involves being motivated
to aggress against the person who angered one, empathic anger
involves the motivation to aggress against the person who angered
the person we empathize with. But, as Giuseppe Ugazio, Jasminka
Majdandzic, and Claus Lamm point out in their contribution to this
volume, there has been precious little research on whether empathy
proper involves or causes prosocial motivation.
Distress at others’ distress is not well researched. The focus is
typically on whether the subject feels sympathy or personal distress
for the person in need or in distress. But this leaves out a truly
empathetic feeling, where the person feels distress for the other
person. Most of Batson’s experiments do not distinguish between
personal and empathic distress, since self-report scales measure only
the subjective feelings related to distress, no matter what its
directionality. Most of the psychology literature is the same; it
focuses on the type of emotion and assumes that if there is much
distress, it is of the personal kind. One reason may be that some
theorists think that empathic distress, when strong enough, becomes
overwhelming and turns into personal distress (Hoffman 2000,
Eisenberg & Fabes 1992). Perhaps personal distress is a pretty
normal reaction to dramatic situations, e.g. accident victims, but for
ethical reasons, people’s reactions to very dramatic situations are not
well researched. Elsewhere, I have suggested that we think of
empathic distress and personal distress as two sides of the same coin
(Maibom 2012). One cannot be distressed for the other without
being distressed oneself. There is nothing about this that implies,
strictly speaking, that this distress should be thought of as direct or
personal. However, because I actually feel distress in addition to
being aware that the other person is distressed, I do think of
myselfas feeling distress too. This is why some people avoid others in
distress. This fits with Batson and colleagues’ observation that most
people describe themselves as feeling distressed both for themselves
and for the victim. What makes the difference is how the two are
balanced. Thus, it seems quite plausible that the cognitive focus of
the individual makes a substantial difference to how she
conceptualizes her distress. We may say that someone who feels
more distress for the victim than for herself is experiencing empathic
distress, but it is worth keeping in mind that such distress is
accompanied by a degree of personal distress.
(p.9) It is clear from the foregoing discussion that the literature on
empathy and empathy-related emotions is heavily slanted toward the
feelings of those in need: pain, distress, sadness, and so on. These are
typically thought to be the emotions most relevant to generating
moral thought and action in others. However, despite the dearth of
research on other types of empathy, most people assume that
empathy is not an emotion in its own right but a way of feeling
emotions (Batson 2012, Decety & Svetlova 2012, Haidt 2012,
Maibom 2007, Prinz 2011a,b). Recently, there has been an increase
in the study of other empathic emotions. Neuroscience studies
famously found that empathic pain or distress activates brain areas
that overlap with the areas that are activated when the person feels
pain or distress for herself (Singer et al. 2004, Cheng et al. 2007). It
has now been found that disgust (Wicker et al. 2003; Jabbi,
Bastiaansen, & Keysers 2008), fear (Gelder, Synder, Greve, Gerard,
& Hadjikhani. 2004), anger (de Greck et al. 2012), anxiety (Prehn-
Christensen, Wiesner, Bergman, Wolf, & Jansen2009), pleasure
(Jabbi, Swart, & Keysers 2007), embarrassment (Krach, Cohrs, de
Echeverria Loebell, Kircher, & Sommer 2011), and sadness (Harrison
et al. 2006) activate overlapping brain areas when the person is
feeling the emotion directly (or for themselves) and when they feel it
for others (for a review, see Bernhardt & Singer2012).3 In social
psychology, there are now a handful of studies on empathic
embarrassment (Miller 1987; Stocks, Lishner, Waits, & Downum
2011). Whether this is evidence of empathy or emotional contagion is
not always clear. Studies of so-called empathic fear (Gelder, Snyder,
Greve, Gerard, & Hadjikhani 2004) may be better interpreted as
finding fear contagion. It is associated with strong activation of
action-oriented areas, suggesting a defensive orientation that one
would not expect from a truly empathic emotion. It stands to reason
that the primary function of fear contagion would be defensive and
that, therefore, it should be hard to transform contagious fear into
empathic fear. It is, in fact, not at all clear that just any emotion can
be felt empathically, nor is it obvious that a contagious emotion has
the same probability of being transformed into an empathic one no
matter how it is “caught,” even if the subject is aware of its source.
2. Routes to Empathy
So far I have considered (affective) empathy as a reaction to either
the distressing situation or the distressed subject regardless of how
the situation or the (p.10) subject is represented. But the way in
which the person accesses the other’s situation or emotional state is
hardly irrelevant to the subsequent empathic reaction. For instance,
evidence from neuroscience indicates that when we imagine
someone experiencing an emotion, we activate fewer brain networks
that overlap with the activation when we experience that emotion for
ourselves, than when we observe someone experience that emotion
(Lamm, Decety, & Singer 2011).
There are 3 main routes to affective empathy: witnessing the person
in the situation (perceptual route), believing that the person is in a
certain situation or is experiencing a certain emotion (inferential
route), or imaginatively engaging with her point of view (imaginative
route) (Maibom 2007). The latter is often known as “perspective
taking.” Hoffman talks of more routes, but from a conceptual
standpoint, these three are the most important ones. The first route
is often thought to be the most basic one. It is the oldest
phylogenetically and ontogenetically, and the one most widely
shared with nonhuman animals according to Preston and de Waal.
The perception-action model of empathy is the one most compatible
with this route. Preston and de Waal say that: (2002, 4):
A Perception-Action Model of empathy specifically states that
attended perception of the object’s state automatically activates
the subject’s representations of the state, situation, and object,
and that activation of these representations automatically
primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic
responses, unless inhibited.
Alvin Goldman has something similar in mind when he talks of low-
level mindreading, and some neuroscientists conceptualize this
process as subserved by mirror neurons (e.g., Iacoboni 2008). What
is essential to this route to empathy is that the empathizer has
perceptual access to information about the subject’s welfare or
emotional state. This form of empathic relating to others has an
immediacy to it and is not well understood as essentially involving
complex inferences. Instead, it is thought that automatic imitation
with afferent feedback is responsible for this type of empathy or that
mirror neurons are directly responsible (e.g., Goldman 2006).
The role of mirror neurons in understanding other minds is heavily
debated. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when the agent
performs an action, such as grasping, and when she sees another
person performing the same action, that is, grasping. It might
therefore be thought that mirror neurons contribute to seeing actions
as being actions, not just meaningless gestures, and actions of
particular kinds. Action individuation, however, recruits areas of the
brain that do not contain mirror neurons as such, but (p.11) whose
activation are probabilistically related to the firing of such neurons
(Umilità et al. 2001). As a result, people often talk of the mirror
neuron system as including not only mirror neurons but also
neurons whose firing is probabilistically related to that of mirror
neurons. More expansively, people talk of mirroring processes if the
same brain areas are activated when observing someone
experiencing an emotion and when experiencing the emotion oneself
(e.g. Iacoboni 2008).4
Some argue that mirroring gives us “a direct experiential grasp of the
minds of others” (Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti 2004), others that it
causes certain types of mindreading (Goldman 2009), and yet others
that the best mirroring can possibly do is create representations of
an agent’s motor-intentions but not her intentions for performing
the action (Jacob 2008). Goldman thinks mirroring contributes to
ascribing emotions to others (cognitive empathy). Others, such as
Iacoboni (2008), believe mirroring plays an essential role in truly
understanding how others feel. As we have seen, a number of
affective empathic emotions—for instance pain, disgust, fear, anger,
and sadness—engage areas of the brain similar to those that are
activated when the subject experiences these emotion
nonempathically, that is, directly or personally. It is important to
keep in mind, however, if human mirror neurons are localized
mainly in similar parts of the brain to those of the macaque, namely,
those concerned with visual processing, then they are unlikely to play
a significant role in most empathic reactions. So-called mirroring
does not imply the operation of mirror neurons.
The second route to empathy is through belief or knowledge. The
prototype of such situations are ones in which we have no direct
perceptual access to what the person is feeling or their situation. This
knowledge might be acquired by the testimony of others or by simple
inference. If we know Bill has lost his job, we infer that he is upset
about it. It is quite plausible that this route is less potent than the
other two. That is, it may be less likely to lead people to experience
empathy or it may invoke less strong a reaction. That is not to say
that knowing that someone is in pain, say, does not typically make
people feel bad for that person. In perspective-taking studies of
empathy, the group that is given no instructions to relate one way or
another to the story of a person in need still experiences empathy or
sympathy for that person (Batson 2011).
(p.12) The third route is what is sometimes known as perspective
taking. Perspective taking involves the imagination. When we take
someone’s perspective, we imagine what it is like for her or what we
would feel were we in her situation. This is also known as simulation
or high-level mindreading. In Goldman’s offline simulation account,
we imagine being in someone else’s situation—adjusting for
differences in beliefs, desires, and so on when needed—“see” what we
would think, feel, want, or intend to do, then ascribe those
psychological states to the person we are trying to understand
(Goldman 1989). The “seeing” part of this operation is the interesting
one, and is central to offline accounts of simulation. The idea is that
our psychological system is a machine of sorts that can operate on
actual stimuli or on pretend stimuli. Our imagination feeds this
system with pretend stimuli, and then the system processes these
stimuli as it would actual stimuli and produces the same results, only
in pretend mode, as it would were it operating on actual stimuli. For
instance, if I imagine missing my flight by 5 minutes, I imagine being
more annoyed than if I imagine missing it by 20 minutes, just as I
would be in real life. Other accounts of simulation don’t have the
same interpretation of decision making as an almost automated
system and rely more on the idea of effortful reasoning. In all cases,
however, the idea is that we use the same system to make decisions
ourselves and to predict others’ decisions, thoughts, and so on.
There are reasons to be hesitant about offline accounts. The first is
the concern that this type of simulation is merely a glorified form of
projection. We see the other as a fragment, or “reduplication,” of
ourselves (per Lipps1903a). The often voiced concerns that we are
bad at adjusting our psychological interior so as to be able to produce
accurate simulations are extensions of this consideration. There is a
fair amount of evidence that we can, in fact, empathize with and
understand others going through experiences that we have not gone
through, and who are significantly different from us (Buccino et al.
2004; Lamm, Meltzoff, & Decety 2009). Some people take this to be
reason to reject the idea that mirror neurons are responsible for us
understanding others’ intentions (Goldman 2006). The second worry
concerns our ability to engage our psychological system by means of
the imagination to create the desired results. There is much evidence
that we are not very good at forecasting our reactions to
counterfactual scenarios (Maibom forthcoming). This is particularly
true when those reactions involve, or are strongly influenced by,
visceral and affective states. We underestimate the effects of hunger
and thirst on our preferences (Read & van Leeuwen 1998, Van Boven
& Loewenstein 2003), overestimate our ability to withstand pain
(e.g., Christensen-Szalanski 1984), ignore the effects of
embarrassment on our actions (Van Boven, Loewenstein, Welch, &
Dunning 2012), and generally imagine being more morally (p.13)
upright (Latané & Darley 1970, Milgram 1963) and braver than we
actually are (Woodzicka & LaFrance 2001).5 This suggests that the
imagination cannot recreate the situation in the sort of detail that is
required for us to have similar reactions to such representations as
we do to the perceptual representations of the situation. Most likely,
the imagination works with more abstract, naked representations of
events, which are highly useful for a variety of purposes. But it
cannot recreate the situation in such a way as to simply recreate in us
reactions that we would have to actually being in the situation. Our
perceptions trigger implicit memories about such situations and
create visceral and affective reactions, which are hard to predict on
the basis of more naked and sparse cognitive representations of the
situation. This suggests that there is an important difference between
empathizing in the situation and empathizing in the imagination
(Maibom forthcoming).
It is in general a mistake to think of empathic reactions as being
largely rote and the result of an automatic process. There is a rapidly
expanding literature on empathy modulation by cognitions, in part