Empathic accuracy
Ενσυναισθητική ακρίβεια
How close your reading of what another person feels comes to what they actually feel. Confidence in the reading and accuracy of the reading are two separate quantities, and only the first one is visible from inside your own head.
How to spot it
Find a second explanation that fits the same evidence just as well: if you cannot, you are holding a conclusion and not a reading.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Singer, T., & Lamm, C. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy — doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04418.x
What it found
- Empathy consists in the ability to share another person's emotional experience.
- The structures activated when we share someone's emotion are to a large extent the same ones activated when we experience it ourselves.
- Part of this shared activation appears to occur relatively automatically.
- Empathy is nevertheless highly flexible: the response is modulated by appraisal of the context, by the relationship with the other person and by the perspective adopted while observing.
How it found it
A critical review of findings from social neuroscience on the mechanisms that allow one person to feel what another feels.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
You Read It Wrong
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Singer, T., & Lamm, C. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy — doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04418.x