Self and other distinction
Διάκριση εαυτού και άλλου
Experiencing something of another person's state while still keeping track of whose state it is. Full identification is not a stronger form of empathy in this account; it is the way empathy stops working, because it leaves nobody in the room with capacity left.
How to spot it
Before you answer, work out which part of what you are feeling is theirs and which part is your own week. If you cannot separate them, the answer you give will be aimed at both and will land on neither.
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.
Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy — doi:10.1177/1534582304267187
What it found
- Empathy requires experiencing something of another person's emotion without losing track of whose emotion it is.
- It rests on shared neural representations, self-awareness, mental flexibility and emotion regulation, which operate in parallel and in a distributed manner.
- Breaking it down into component mechanisms allows specific predictions about how different disorders damage different parts of empathy.
How it found it
A theoretical model synthesised from findings in developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology.
What it means for empathy
Maintaining the self-other distinction is a constituent of empathy, not a failure of it: identifying completely with the other person does not help more, it helps less.
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.
The Third Call This Month
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy — doi:10.1177/1534582304267187