Empathy is the ability to recognize thoughts and feelings within another conscious being. It is a mental capacity in which we can understand the inner world of others – their beliefs, emotions, intentions, values, goals, and personal experience.

With empathy not only comes the understanding that other beings have thoughts and emotions, but also that these thoughts and emotions may differ greatly from our own. This makes empathy a crucial tool for understanding other people and getting along with them.

Psychologists distinguish two main components of empathy: cognitive empathy (knowing another person’s thoughts and beliefs) and affective empathy (knowing another person’s feelings and emotions).

The degree of empathy we have for others can be found on a spectrum. At lower ends, empathy only requires that we are aware of other people’s thoughts and feelings. But at higher ends of the spectrum, empathy may include actually experiencing one’s situation as if it was our own.

Some experts on empathy, such as emotion researcher Paul Ekman, say that these higher levels of empathy lead to a third kind of empathy: compassionate empathy, where we are so attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others that we are driven to alleviate their pain and suffering through kindness and charity.

Maybe you once saw a commercial for starving kids in Africa and it tore your heart out. You saw how much the people over there were suffering, and you felt an immediate drive to donate some money to the cause. This is just one common example of how empathy can drive us to be more compassionate and altruistic.

Testing Kids for Empathy: The “False Belief” Test

At a young age, we’re not very good at empathizing with other people’s point-of-view. Instead, we tend to think that everyone perceives the world in the exact same way that we do. Developmental psychologists often use this “False Belief” test to determine whether a child is capable of empathic thinking or not:

In this particular test, a child is shown a box of crayons and asked what is inside the box. Naturally, they answer with “crayons,” but the experimenter then reveals that there are in fact candles inside the box.

After this short demonstration, the experimenter introduces “Snoopy” into the conversation. She reminds the child that Snoopy didn’t hear any of their discussion that they just had, and then asks the child, “If I were to ask Snoopy what is inside the crayon box, what do you think he’d answer?”

The average 2-3 year old, lacking the ability to put themselves in Snoopy’s shoes, will answer with “candles.” But someone who has the ability to empathize would more likely answer that Snoopy would think the crayon box had crayons in it – because we know that Snoopy was unaware that the crayon box was filled with candles.

In order for the child to successful pass the test, they would need to put themselves in Snoopy’s place and understand that he has different knowledge about the situation then we do.

Within a couple of years, most kids will develop the empathic ability to see the world through Snoopy’s eyes. And as a child interacts with more and more individuals throughout their cognitive development, they will become more attuned to the fact that each person has their unique differences in perception, knowledge, and experience.

Children grow to understand that how they view the world is not necessarily the same as how someone else may view it. This is often the first step toward developing empathy.

Children who fail to pass the “False Belief” test after the ages of 4-5 have a greater probability of being autistic. Psychologists and parents often use this test on children to catch autism early, so preventive measures can begin to be taken. A lack of empathy is one reason autistic individuals are usually not able to function effectively in social situations.

Empathy and Evolution

Humans have evolved as social animals, who throughout history have depended on cooperation and strong relationships in order to adapt and survive in their environment.

Back when we were hunters and gatherers, we had to work together to find food and provide security for one another. Our ability to survive was directly related to our ability to empathize with others, respond to their needs, and thereby build trustful connections.

If someone lacked empathy, and thus an inability to build these effective relationships, then they would quickly be seen as a social outcast, and thus be ostracized from the group

Naturally, empathy also played a large role in the development of our parenting habits. Parents who better recognized the needs of their children, and how to respond to those needs, were much more likely to raise successful and adaptive offspring.

These are just some examples of the early evolutionary origins of empathy. Over time, our capacity and ability to empathize has grown more and more complex.

Jeremy Rifkin explains in the video The Empathic Civilization that as communication technologies developed more and more – from the printing press to the telephone to the world wide web – our capacity to empathize with others similarly expanded. He believes one day we might develop empathy toward the complete “biosphere” of our existence.

So at the beginning of our evolution we may have only empathized with close family ties and those within our community or tribe, but we now have the capacity to empathize with people all over the world through various communication technology (print publications, radio, TV, the internet, etc.) and also travel technology (cars, airplanes, etc.), which allows people to visit and experience more types of cultures and connect with more people than was ever possible before.

Why is Empathy Still Important Today?

The ability to empathize with others is still a very important aspect of our cognitive development. One reason is because we still greatly depend on healthy relationships with others in order to live happy and successful lives.

Most of us need to cooperate with people at school, at work, at home, or in public. And most of us crave a sense of belonging, as well as affectionate relationships with family, friends, and significant others. These things would be incredibly difficult to accomplish without empathy. How can we be expected to treat others with dignity and respect if we can’t put ourselves in their shoes?

In a very real way, we all still operate in “tribes,” they are just much greater in size and complexity than they were thousands of years ago (and they encompass both off-line and online relationships now). The need for empathy is still alive and well wherever there is social interaction taking place.

More broadly, empathy isn’t only relevant to building relationships, but also problem-solving and creativity. Being able to take on another person’s perspective can very often lead to answers and insight that we wouldn’t discover if we limited ourselves to our own personal, narrow world-view.

When we find ourselves experiencing difficulty in a situation, we can draw on others experiences for inspiration and motivation. In magnetic self-esteem, I show how putting ourselves in the shoes of role models like Bruce Lee or Michael Jordan can encourage us to pursue our own goals.

In the same way, a devout Christian may ask, “What would Jesus do?” in order to find insight on how to act in a certain situation. This, again, is playing on the skills of empathy – because by asking questions like this we are actively putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes in order to learn from their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

We can similarly apply this model to other people. An aspiring baseball player may ask, “What would Cal Ripkin Jr. do?” Or someone aspiring to be a movie filmmaker may ask, “What would Charlie Kaufman do?” The point is we can put ourselves in the shoes of any kind of role model to help guide us toward certain goals. This is all a product of empathy.

This article only begins to scratch the surface of how empathy will continue to be one of the most useful skills in the 21st century. It aids everything from our relationships with others to our individual goals and motivation.

I hope this article helped demonstrate to you why this is such a powerful skill. In the future, I plan to write many more articles on empathy and how we can develop it further. To stay updated on these articles, feel free to sign up to my psychology newsletter.

According to Chi-Yue Chiu, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore:

“Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement.”

Researchers discovered this effect in students from both the U.S. and Hong Kong, suggesting that it may be cross-cultural. However, they found that students from Hong Kong tended to be more humble in their self evaluations overall, which was consistent with previous research supporting the trend of Asian cultures being more modest than Western cultures.

This finding shouldn’t be that shocking to readers of The Emotion Machine. I have long advocated that we take an honest and reasonable approach to how we view ourselves.

I like positive psychology and I think it offers many useful theories and practices for how we can benefit our lives. But this shouldn’t be confused with the “positive thinking movement.” The former is a scientific discipline, while the latter is a heavily commercialized and distorted industry with little scientific backing.

I’ve experienced the heartache of believing things like The Law of Attraction and The Secret first hand, and I’ve later warned about these dangerous trends in personal development – which often emphasize the importance of excessive self-praise and over-confidence, even when it is irrational and potentially very harmful.

When the self-help “guru” James Arthur Ray had participants go on a physically demanding “Spiritual Warrior” retreat that consisted of several days of fasting, and then spending hours locked in a sweat lodge, several people needed to be hospitalized after – and some even died. Ray believed that through excessive confidence and self-belief, they could overcome any physical limitations. His excessive confidence was wrong, and it had dire consequences for those who fell prey to it.

Of course, some level of self-praise and confidence is essential to our evolution. Because without any confidence, we can never be motivated to take the risks required to successfully adapt to our environment.

If a fish gets thrown into a new pond, but it is too fearful and avoiding of it’s surroundings, it will have greater difficulty finding food to survive. But if it has the confidence to explore its new territory and take calculated risks, it will often have a greater probability of discovering new means of survival, without being crippled by fear.

Self-praise is one of the biggest ways humans can build a more confident demeanor and be more motivated to take action, but it needs to be balanced.

Sports psychologists have demonstrated how athletes can use positive self-talk to improve their performance. But clearly overestimating our abilities can at times lead to some destructive outcomes.

Another study showed how overly optimistic people are susceptible to underestimating the risks that bad things will happen to them, such as getting cancer or getting into a bad car accident. This optimistic attitude can motivate people toward more reckless behaviors because they mis-attribute the risks of their actions.

Again, it’s about balance. Self-praise and confidence are good, but only when they are deserved and when they are grounded in reality. Trying to fool ourselves into thinking we are more than we are can only backfire in the end.

According to the research, confidence motivates us to take action in the face of uncertainty. The more confident we are, the more likely we are to fight for the resources we need to survive.

The truth is life is filled with uncertainty. We never really know how the future is going to turn out. And sometimes due to this uncertainty we fear rejection or failure.

We might be deathly afraid of being rejected by at a girl at a bar. So instead of taking the risk and starting a conversation, we just hang with our friends and never approach her.

Or maybe we are afraid of starting a new career because we don’t think we will be any good at it. So instead we stick with our old job, even though we hate it and get paid half the salary.

Lack of confidence can cause us to sabotage ourselves in all sorts of ways.

Let me ask you a question. Do you think guys like Michael Jordan, Bruce Lee, and Tiger Woods got to where they are without believing in themselves? Of course not! They believed they were capable of great things, and that belief motivated them to work hard and make it happen.

In the same way confidence can directly impact your life in a positive way.

However — sometimes due to years and years of being down on ourselves, it’s hard to find confidence. So here are some tips to help build more of it in your life:

• Reflect on your strengths.
• View obstacles as learning experiences.
• Find a supportive social circle.
• Repeat positive affirmations about yourself.
• Exercise and stay healthy.

Most of these are commonsense. But if you actually practice them, you will see more confidence in your life.

I’ve been studying psychology for 5 years now. Throughout those years I’ve discovered that there is nothing more important to our success than what we think about ourselves.

This is because confidence can be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we have positive beliefs, that causes us to act in ways that bring us the results we want.

Evolutionarily, this is probably why confidence became a desirable trait.

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David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University, did a couple interesting experiments with sitters and rovers. In one study, he put metal traps in a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The rovers, being more active, were the first to check out the traps. Consequently, they were also the first ones to be caught. The sitters, because they were more likely to sit on the sidelines, were impossible to capture using these traps.

However, in another experiment, Wilson transported all the fish to a new environment. He found that the rovers were most likely to begin investigating their new surroundings and finding food. Due to this, the rovers began eating five days before the sitters started. In this example, it was the rovers who were most likely to survive.

In some cases, the sitters’ passiveness directly led to their survival (especially when their passiveness helped to avoid a dangerous situation). But during other times this passiveness actually hurt their ability to adapt to new surroundings when necessary.

“Just Do It” vs. “Look Before You Leap.”

In a lot of personal development literature we hear the mantra, “Just do it!” Take the common example of diving into a cold pool. Often, when we try to go step-by-step, the coldness becomes that much more unbearable. This can actually inhibit us from adapting to the temperature fast enough to act and fully immerse ourselves into the water. Sometimes it’s easier to just “jump in” and get it over with. This is when the common attitude of a rover becomes most beneficial.

A less popular phrase in personal development is “Look before you leap.” This strategy is different than “Just do it.” It means we take a step back and evaluate our situation more carefully before diving in. Take for example addictive behaviors like gambling or sex. If we always act impulsively (automatically, without thinking) then we tend to engage in these risky behaviors without inhibition. Then we are more likely to end up with an empty bank account or an STD.

Thinking and doing need to be balanced.

Sometimes “thinking” gets a bad rep. We hear of people planning and contemplating ideas all day, but never doing anything productive about them. Maybe we want to approach a girl at a bar, thinking of all the things we want to say, but then we over-analyze the situation and cripple ourselves from ever approaching. In these kinds of cases, too much thinking can turn out to be a bad thing. For some people it is very easy to get “stuck in their heads” and never step into their bodies.

On the other end of the spectrum, too little thinking can often cause us to be foolish or reckless. If we never think about the consequences of our actions, then we may neglect something important and pay the costs later. People who live impulsively (with no projection of the future) tend to not have very positive futures, because they fall into mistakes that they could’ve avoided by being a little more thoughtful and cautious.

Smart and healthy risk-taking.

The balance between thinking and doing is going to largely depend on what you are trying to achieve.

As I mentioned earlier, approaching a girl at a bar may be something that is easier to “just do.” What is the worst that can happen? You’ll say something stupid and embarrass yourself? You’ll get rejected? Maybe worst-case-scenario you get slapped?

The risks and costs are relatively minimal, so there is little sense in worrying about it. Yet, some people never face this anxiety because they convince themselves that this minor embarrassment is the worst thing in the world. That’s not smart risk-taking – that’s dumb risk-avoidance. You’ll probably never see the girl again and she’ll forget about the experience by the end of the week. Don’t make a big deal out of nothing.

The same goes for jumping into cold pools.

Of course, there are other situations we may find ourselves in where the potential risks and costs are much greater. Like investing your retirement funds. That is something that is worth deliberately thinking about and making sure you go over every detail before making your decision. Making a mistake here could cost you all the money you’ve saved over the years – that’s a biggie. That’s when you need to act smarter, minimize the loss of risk, and try to play it more safe. Acting impulsively with your savings is a disaster waiting to happen.

Anxiety and uncertainty.

All risk is a result of uncertainty. The future can be somewhat predictable, but we can never quite know what will happen. It is often this uncertainty that causes us to experience anxiety before choosing a course of action.

Anxiety is a type of forward-thinking – it looks into the future and sees where things may go wrong. We feel anxious before giving a public speech because we don’t know if it will go over well or if we might embarrass ourselves.

The same is true for any other kind of social anxiety or performance anxiety.

Of course, some anxiety is good. Distinguishing “good anxiety” from “bad anxiety” is an important part of smart decision-making and risk-taking. Sometimes anxiety is an important signal that we should not follow a particular course of action because the potential consequences are too great. Sky diving is going to typically make us more anxious than petting a bunny because the risks of sky-diving are much higher. When people develop “irrational” fears about bunnies, that is usually a sign of an unhealthy phobia – because the fear doesn’t necessarily match the risks.

Mundane activities (like tying your shoes or taking a shower) don’t usually elicit much anxiety because they are more familiar, and therefore you go in with greater certainty of how the event will unfold. Only if someone has a bad experience in a shower will they develop that anxiety and uncertainty that the bad event may repeat itself.

Does your anxiety match the risks?

As I mentioned before, anxiety is often deemed “irrational” if it doesn’t match the potential risks. Some people are afraid of being in the same room as mustard, even when they understand that it poses no real threat. Anxiety may mismatch with risks depending on a number of things: unfamiliarity of an experience, a faulty belief system, or a traumatic experience.

Some unhealthy anxiety can be overcome by trying to change our thoughts (like in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy). We can reframe our perspective by looking at a situation from a different angle.

Sometimes we put too much importance on the present moment, but miss the bigger picture.

Let’s go back to the approaching a girl at a bar example. In the moment, you may know that it will completely SUCK if the girl rejects you and embarrasses you in front of your friends. You’ll be the laughing stock for the rest of the night.

But if you zoom out and see the bigger picture, you often realize that this event isn’t as important as you were making it out to be.

Imagine yourself 90 years old looking back on your college experiences at the bar: are you really going to care that 70 years ago some girl poured beer on you, or slapped you in the face, or told her friends your cheesy pick-up line? Probably not. In fact, you’d probably have more regret if you never took those little risks in the first place. Those little mistakes are what make your life richer (and besides, you now have good stories to tell your grandchildren!)

This is one simple example of how reframing your perspective can give you the freedom to take these little risks. Because they’re just that – little risks. And although in the moment you may experience a little pain and discomfort, in the end these short-term costs can often lead to long-term gratification.

Too risk-avoidant.

When individuals become too risk-avoidant, they are chronic “sitters” – always sitting on the sidelines, never doing anything, and never taking any chances with their life. As we know, sometimes this temperament can be quite beneficial, but other times it inhibits us from adapting to life in a more effective way. It inhibits us from personal growth.

Even when we try to avoid risk-taking altogether, it is something that we can’t completely avoid. Every time we don’t act, we risk losing opportunities to improve our lives. On your death bed, you may find that you regret all those times you didn’t take risks. “What ifs” can haunt you, and sometimes it is better to try something and fail (and fail) than to never try at all.

In the end, healthy risk-taking is about balance.

By the end of the day, I think it is clear that we need to find a balance between risk-seeking and risk-avoidance. We should try to identify times where we should be more cautious and safe in our decision-making, but also identify other times where the risks may be worth taking.

Check out this online course by Sean Cooper designed to help you face your social anxiety and shyness.

But because of guilt’s power to influence people’s behavior, it can also be used as a tool for social manipulation. Many people may try guilt tripping others to behave a certain way. And if the person doesn’t conform, the social manipulator will reprimand that person or ostracize them.

It’s important when dealing with guilt to keep a few things in mind:

• Acknowledge guilt when it arises, don’t suppress it or ignore it.
• Try your best to identify the causes and triggers of your guilt.
• Is your guilt irrational or justified?


• If irrational, try to think of the situation in a more sensible way.
• If justified, determine some things you can do to fix the situation (even just an apology can be really effective).
• If you can’t fix the situation, forgive yourself. We are all susceptible to making mistakes under certain conditions. Everyone.
• Know when someone is just trying to guilt trip you in order to manipulate your behavior or get something out of you.
• Your values will not always align with other people, it’s unrealistic to try to please everyone in all situations. Don’t feel guilty about that.

Some people are emotional abusers, and they may try to constantly make you feel guilty in order to mold you to their will. Beware of these people. As hard as it may be, you have to be willing to cut off relationships like this; you can’t find happiness with someone whose objective requires making you feel bad about yourself. There are points in relationships where your internal values are sometimes more important than others. You were not born on this planet to be someone’s puppet or slave.

At the same time, sometimes it’s important to feel some temporary pain from your mistakes. Only people without any sense of empathy never feel any kind of guilt. But some guilt every now and then is actually a sign of mental health, because it shows you acknowledge other people’s feelings when you make a mistake (and, as I mentioned earlier, we all make mistakes every now and again).

I believe the big idea here is that guilt, like most (if not all) emotions, is a valuable signal informing us on how we should respond to our relationships in the future. If we acknowledge that we’ve done something wrong, we should be willing to express genuine guilt over what we did. And often by feeling free to express our emotions, we have an easier time finally letting go of them. On the other hand, when we deny our guilt, run away from it, or suppress it, then not only do we fail to learn from our experience, but we also set ourselves up to continue the same mistakes (which may lead to an explosion of even MORE guilt in the long-term).

From a general standpoint, processing any emotion is like digesting food. It starts with consumption of the raw material that we take into our body or mind. Then comes a digestion process where the material gets passed through our system and nutrients get extracted. Finally, once all the beneficial elements of the material have been extracted, it’s time for the waste material to be released. In the same way, sometimes an emotion like guilt needs to be digested (rumination literally means “to chew over”) before it can be released. But if we try to skip the digestion process, if we don’t reflect on our emotions from time to time, we become emotionally constipated.