Today's Friday • 11 mins read
— By Dr. Sandip Roy.
Empathy lets us understand another person’s struggles from their own standpoint. Find out what five scientists say about why it matters, and what recent research confirms. Especially, what did Stephen Hawking say about it?
Do you sometimes wish someone would just listen, without interrupting, advising, or making it about themselves?
That wish points to something fundamental. Feeling heard is a human need. So is the capacity to make others feel heard. Empathy is what makes both possible.
Narcissists, because they lack empathy, cannot meet this need, whether in others or in themselves.
Empathy is the ability to understand and feel another person’s experience from their standpoint. It is a genuine attempt to grasp what another person is going through from the inside.
It is not sympathy, which keeps an emotional distance. And it’s not pity, which involves regret or disappointment.
The beauty of empathy lies here: While we yearn to receive it from others, we also feel the urge to give it out to others.
A 2025 review in Frontiers in Psychology calls empathy “a pivotal capacity essential for human interaction,” covering how situational factors like stress, attention, and motivation shift empathic responses in real time (Heyers & Schrödter, 2025).
A separate meta-analysis within the same paper found that affective empathy tends to increase with age, while cognitive empathy stays relatively stable until around 65 (Jarvis & Wong, 2024).
And a 2024 update to Sara Konrath’s landmark empathy study found that empathy among young Americans has been rising since 2008, nearly returning to the highs of the 1970s (Konrath, Indiana University, 2024). The earlier narrative about a “collapse of empathy” may have been premature.
Here is what five prominent scientists have said about why empathy is important. And why their insights still hold.
Why Is Empathy Important In Society: Stephen Hawking And Four Other Scientists
- Empathy in society is a key part of social intelligence and social groups.
- It allows us to connect with others at a meaningful level and build a humane society.
- Research shows we are more helpful to others (prosocial) when we have greater empathy.
These are 5 incredible insights by five outstanding scientists on empathy to understand why empathy is so important today.
1. Stephen Hawking: “The quality I would most like to magnify is empathy.”
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018), the cosmologist best known for A Brief History of Time, was not a psychologist. That is part of what makes his answer so striking.
One amusing remark he made about being one of the world’s most popular scientists,
“The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.”
Hawking strongly believed in love and family. He famously said, “It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.”
Once, a 24-year-old student won a prize to tour the London Science Museum with Professor Stephen Hawking. The student asked Hawking what human trait he would most like to change, and he replied:
“The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had a survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or a partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.”
The student also asked the professor which human trait he would like to see more often. Hawking said empathy.
The quality I would most like to magnify is empathy. It brings us together in a peaceful, loving state.
— Stephen Hawking
In a cosmic coincidence, Hawking died on 14th March 2018, Einstein’s birthday. He never received a Nobel.
2. V. S. Ramachandran: “Mirror Neurons Allow Us To Empathize With Others’ Pain.”
V. S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and former director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, has long argued that empathy has a neural basis, specifically, mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons were first identified in the 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti’s group in Italy. They found that certain neurons in macaque monkeys fired both when the monkey performed an action and when it watched another monkey perform the same action.
Later research confirmed similar systems in humans, with more flexibility and reach. Ramachandran described their role in empathy:
“These (mirror) neurons are probably involved in empathy for pain. If I really and truly empathize with your pain, I need to experience it myself. That’s what the mirror neurons are doing, allowing me to empathize with your pain.”
fMRI studies on empathy for pain have consistently found activation in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, brain regions that respond both to felt pain and witnessed pain.
His NYT bestseller, The Tell-Tale Brain, shows us how mirror neurons may have helped humans make the leap beyond apes in developing self-awareness, humor, and complex thinking.
These (mirror) neurons are probably involved in empathy for pain. If I really and truly empathize with your pain, I need to experience it myself. That’s what the mirror neurons are doing, allowing me to empathize with your pain—saying, in effect, that person is experiencing the same agony and excruciating pain as you would if somebody were to poke you with a needle directly. That’s the basis of all empathy.
He famously said, “… mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology,” but later admitted that this comment had been overapplied. The science on mirror neurons is real, but the popular speculations sometimes outrun what the evidence supports.
3. Brené Brown: “Empathy communicates that incredibly healing message, ‘You’re not alone.'”
Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston, is best known for her work on vulnerability and shame. Her books include Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection.
Her framing of empathy is behavioral and relational, not neurological. She’s fond of saying,
“Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”
She identifies four components of empathy:
- Perspective-taking. The willingness and ability to see and feel the world from another person’s point of view (“walking in their shoes”). It requires setting aside your own issues and truly listening to what the other person is facing.
- Staying non-judgmental. The ability to avoid judging another person. Judgment can spare us from discomfort but make the other person avoid sharing their authentic grief and hardship experiences. In contrast, a nonjudgmental stand offers them enough psychological safety so they no longer fear rejection or shaming.
- Recognizing emotions. The capacity to search inward to grasp what the other person is feeling and aptly name that emotion. We can do so by asking a confirming question, say, “It seems like you’re feeling sad about that.”
- Communicating correctly. The capacity to resist the urge to say things like “I understand,” “I can relate,” or “I know (exactly) how you feel.” Or to offer solutions or lectures. Empathic communication is about validating their experience without inserting your own experiences as being the same. A better response is to invite them to say more, e.g., “It sounds like you’re in a tough spot; tell me more.”
Brown also makes a point worth remembering: empathy is a skill. It improves with deliberate practice. People who think of it as a fixed trait they either have or lack tend to under-invest in developing it.
4. Bruce Perry: “Empathy is what makes us human.”
Are we losing our ability to empathize?
Bruce Perry, brain scientist and trauma expert, co-authored What Happened To You with Oprah Winfrey. His argument for empathy is evolutionary: human beings survived not through physical advantage but through forming collaborative social groups. He says, “Empathy is what makes us human.”
“Human beings are ‘meat on feet’ to the natural world. The only way we survive is by forming collaborative groups, by sharing what we hunted and what we gathered with everybody else in our group.”
His concern is that modern digital life is eroding the conditions that make empathy possible. The average American, he notes, spends 11 hours a day interacting with screens.
“It breaks the rhythm of social contact, of empathic engagement — and the truth is: those things are physiologically meaningful.”
This is not technophobia. Perry’s point is neurological: sustained empathic engagement requires in-person, face-to-face contact in ways that screen interaction cannot fully replicate. The rhythms of eye contact, voice tone, and physical presence matter.
Perry outlines the 4 qualities of empathy:
- to be able to see the world as others see it
- to be nonjudgmental
- to understand another’s feelings
- to communicate our understanding of that person’s feelings
- Did you know, people with a positive mindset have these 6 traits: MOGRAH: 1. Mindfulness 2. Optimism 3. Gratitude 4. Resilience 5. Acceptance 6. Honesty?
5. Izabela Zych: “Bullies and Victims, Both Score Low on Empathy.”
Are the victims of bullying low on empathy? Read that again: bully victims, not bully perpetrators.
Izabela Zych, Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Córdoba, studies bullying and cyberbullying. Her research on empathy produces one genuinely counterintuitive finding.
Most people assume bullies are low on empathy, and they are. Zych and colleagues (Zych et al., 2016) found that school bullies scored low on both cognitive and affective empathy compared to non-bullies, and scored high on callous-unemotional traits (a childhood marker associated with psychopathy).
The unexpected result: victims also scored lower on empathy than non-involved students, and also higher on callous-unemotional traits than non-victims.
Read that again: they found the victims to be more emotionally “cold” than non-victims.
Low empathy, in other words, shows up on both sides of bullying dynamics, not only in perpetrators.
Zych’s work points to something practical: empathy education in schools is not just about training bystanders to intervene. It may also reduce vulnerability to victimization.
Bullying involves three parties:
- the victim
- the perpetrator
- the bystander audience
Most bullies have dark personality traits. Sadistic bullies are willing to spend time and energy hurting an innocent person, increasing the intensity of their attack once they realize that the innocent target will not fight back (Buckels, Jones, & Paulhus, 2013).
Izabela Zych has co-authored the book Protecting Children Against Bullying and Its Consequences.
Cyberbullying or trolling is aggressive behavior toward others on the internet using electronic devices. Learn how to handle the trolls most effectively, according to an expert.
Empathy vs. Sympathy
These two are often conflated. The difference is meaningful.
Empathy means entering another person’s emotional experience from their frame of reference. You feel with them. Empathy centers on the other person’s experience.
Sympathy means acknowledging their experience from your own frame of reference. You feel for them. Sympathy can inadvertently center the observer’s discomfort.
| Aspect | Empathy | Sympathy |
|---|---|---|
| Emotional response | Feeling with the person | Feeling for the person |
| Perspective | Their viewpoint | Your viewpoint |
| Typical action | Validates, listens, asks more | Offers comfort or solutions |
| Connection | Builds closeness | Maintains emotional distance |
Can Empathy Increase Risk-Taking
One less-discussed finding from Spanish researchers (Cabello et al., Aggressive Behavior, 2018) found that high emotional intelligence (of which empathy is a central component) affects risk-taking in domain-specific ways.
Higher EI reduced risky health and ethical behavior (substance use, unsafe intimacy, reckless driving). But in social and recreational contexts, it increased adventurousness. No consistent link emerged between EI and financial or gambling risk.
Men were generally more risk-prone except in social situations. Risk-taking declined with age across genders.
Final Words
Empathy research has grown more precise in recent years. The broad claim that “empathy is good” has given way to more specific findings. We now believe that the protective effects of empathy depend on the type of empathy. And that personal distress (the form where you absorb others’ pain rather than witness it) can backfire.
Clinicians working with people high in affective empathy, including many with anxiety or depression, are beginning to draw this distinction more carefully. Developing empathy is not the same as developing the capacity to take on others’ suffering. The goal is connection, not emotional fusion.
So, empathy means understanding another person’s emotions, but not taking responsibility for them.
Maya Angelou wrote what captures empathy’s power: feelings linger long after words and actions fade:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
√ Also Read: The 5 Dangers of Empathy
√ Please share this with someone.
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