The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World

by Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

Instinctive empathy involved an uncontrollable emotional reaction to someone else’s experience—crying when someone else cries, for example, or blushing with secondhand embarrassment. Intellectual empathy was more distant: recognizing someone else’s emotion but not feeling it yourself. These two terms eventually morphed into the two that are most commonly accepted today: cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s mental state) and affective empathy (responding emotionally to the other person’s mental state—i.e., sharing their feelings).

we can’t ever really know what it’s like to be someone else. We can only know what it’s like to imagine being someone else.

We used to think you were either empathetic or you weren’t, but the truth is you can increase your empathy, and one of the best and most effective ways is by hearing other people’s perspectives and experiences.”

There’s an extra layer of vulnerability when people are responding not just to your words and ideas but to your face, your voice, and often your body all at once (even if the video has nothing to do with how you look).

when the first comment in an exchange used direct questions or started sentences with “you,” the conversation was significantly more likely to go awry. Comments that started with gratitude, greetings, or attempts at coordination were correlated with conversations staying on track. It wasn’t that only people who agreed were nice to one another; disagreeing seemed to be OK as long as it was done using “hedges” and prompts for opinion. The research also supported the long-held idea that using “I/we” sentences tends to keep people from getting too defensive.