If you believe that you can harness empathy and make choices about when to experience it versus when not to, it adds a layer of responsibility to how you engage with other people. If you feel like you’re powerless to control your empathy, you might be satisfied with whatever biases and limits you have on it. You might be okay with not caring about someone just because they’re different from you. I want people to not feel safe empathizing in the way that they always have. I want them to understand that they’re doing something deliberate when they connect with someone, and I want them to own that responsibility.

JAMIL ZAKI is an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.

CHOOSING EMPATHY

I’ve been thinking an enormous amount about a puzzle concerning how empathy works. Before describing it, I should make sure that we’re on the same page about what empathy is. To me, empathy is a useful umbrella term that captures at least three distinct but related processes through which one person responds to another person’s emotions.

Let’s say that I run into you and you are highly distressed. A bunch of things might happen to me. One, I might “catch” your emotion and vicariously take on the same state that I see in you; that’s what I would call experience sharing. Two, I might think about how you feel and why you feel the way you do. That type of explicit consideration of the world as someone else sees it is what I would call mentalizing. Three, I might develop concern for your state, and feel motivated to help you feel better; that is what people these days call compassion, also known as empathic concern.

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