What Are the Four Types of Empathy? (Plus Why Some Experts Say Three)
Search this question and you’ll get two different answers depending on where you look. Some sources say there are three types of empathy. Others say four. Neither is wrong, they’re actually describing two different things, and knowing the difference will help you understand your own empathy far better than either list alone.
Quick answer: The four-type model, developed by psychiatrist Judith Orloff, M.D., describes four empathy styles: cognitive, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual. The more commonly cited three-type model, popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman, describes cognitive, emotional, and compassionate empathy as functional components of the empathy process itself. Both are covered below.
The Four Types of Empathy
This framework comes from Judith Orloff, M.D., a UCLA psychiatrist and New York Times bestselling author, laid out in her book The Genius of Empathy. Orloff frames these as empathy styles, meaning most people have one that comes most naturally to them, though everyone can access all four to some degree.
1. Cognitive Empathy (The Thinker) Understanding what someone else is feeling using logic and reasoning rather than feeling it yourself. People with this as their primary style tend to be solution-oriented, wanting to help by understanding and addressing the problem.
2. Emotional Empathy (The Feeler) Actually absorbing and feeling what another person feels. People with this style are highly responsive to others’ emotional states, sometimes to the point of taking on others’ stress as their own.
3. Intuitive Empathy (The Subtle Senser) Picking up on someone’s emotional state through nonverbal cues, tone, and gut instinct, often before anything is said directly. People with this style tend to notice when something feels “off” with someone else quickly.
4. Spiritual Empathy (The Mystic) Connecting with others through a sense of shared meaning or interconnectedness that goes beyond logic or emotion. This style shows up as a felt sense of unity with another person’s experience.
Where the “Three Types” Model Comes From
The three-type model is the one you’ll find most often in emotional intelligence and leadership research, developed by psychologist Daniel Goleman in collaboration with Paul Ekman. It breaks empathy down into three functional components rather than personality styles:
- Cognitive empathy: understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling
- Emotional empathy: feeling what someone else feels
- Compassionate empathy: being moved to actually help based on that understanding and feeling
This is the model most commonly used in workplace and leadership training, since it maps directly onto observable behavior, understanding, feeling, and acting, rather than personality type.
So Which One Is Right?
Both, because they’re answering different questions. Orloff’s four styles describe how different people naturally lean when they empathize, which is useful for self-understanding. Goleman’s three components describe what has to happen, cognitively and emotionally, for empathy to translate into action, which is more useful for building empathy as a skill rather than just recognizing your own style.
If you’re trying to understand your own tendencies, the four-style model is a useful lens. If you’re trying to build empathy in a team, a classroom, or a leadership pipeline, the three-component model is the one with a stronger track record in applied training and research.
Why This Matters Beyond Semantics
Whichever framework you start with, the research underlying both agrees on something important: empathy isn’t fixed. Cognitive empathy can be practiced through perspective-taking exercises. Emotional attunement builds with active listening. Compassionate follow-through strengthens with repetition, the same way any behavior does. That’s the premise Empathable is built on: treating empathy as a skill people can measurably build, not a trait some people simply have and others don’t.