What Is Empathetic Thinking?
Picture a friend telling you about a rough week. Their manager blindsided them in a meeting, they’re behind on a project, and they’re starting to wonder if they’re cut out for the job. You could respond in two very different ways. You could feel a rush of secondhand stress, your stomach tightening as if the meeting had happened to you. Or you could pause and actually think it through: what would it feel like to be blindsided in front of your team, to already be running behind, to have your competence questioned by someone whose opinion matters to your career? That second response, the deliberate act of reconstructing someone else’s experience in your mind, is what psychologists call empathetic thinking.
It’s easy to assume empathy is just one thing, a warm feeling you either have or don’t. But researchers who study it closely have found that it’s really made up of separate ingredients that don’t always show up together. Empathetic thinking is one of those ingredients, and understanding it on its own turns out to matter more than most people realize, especially now.
The Thinking Half of Empathy
In the research literature, empathetic thinking usually goes by a more clinical name: cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective-taking. It’s defined as the ability to understand what someone else is thinking or feeling without necessarily feeling it yourself. That “without necessarily feeling it” part is the key distinction. It’s what separates empathetic thinking from its counterpart, affective or emotional empathy, which is the actual experience of catching someone else’s feelings the way you might catch a yawn.
A 2022 editorial in Frontiers in Psychiatry, co-authored by researchers from the University of Birmingham, the University of Lausanne, and the University of Haifa, described cognitive empathy as the process of building a working model of another person’s emotional state, something you construct actively, almost like solving a small puzzle, rather than something that simply washes over you. That framing matters. It means empathetic thinking is a mental skill you’re exercising, not a mood you’re waiting to arrive.
Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki has gone a step further, using brain imaging to show that cognitive and emotional empathy rely on almost entirely separate neural systems. In his words, they’re independent “pieces” of empathy, which is why you’ll meet people who are highly attuned to others’ emotional states but slow to intellectually grasp their situation, and just as many people who can reason clearly about what someone else must be going through without feeling much of anything themselves.
Where This Distinction Came From
The idea that empathy splits into thinking and feeling components isn’t new. Psychologist C. Daniel Batson spent decades studying the difference between what he called “imagine-self” perspective-taking, picturing how you would feel in someone else’s position, and “imagine-other” perspective-taking, trying to picture how they actually feel, which isn’t always the same thing. Around the same period, psychologist Mark Davis built the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a widely used empathy questionnaire that treats perspective-taking and empathic concern as separate, measurable traits rather than a single score. Decades later, that separation still holds up in brain imaging studies, which is a reasonably rare thing in psychology, where a lot of mid-century theories haven’t aged as well.
Why the Distinction Actually Matters
It would be easy to treat this as an academic technicality, but the split between thinking and feeling empathy shows up in some genuinely consequential places. Nurses, therapists, and other caregivers are frequently taught to lean more heavily on empathetic thinking than on emotional empathy, precisely because absorbing every patient’s distress as your own is a fast route to burnout. Understanding what someone is going through, clearly and accurately, without taking on their emotional state as your own, turns out to be more sustainable and, often, more genuinely useful to the person in front of you.
There’s a less comfortable side to this too. Because empathetic thinking is a cognitive skill rather than a felt emotional pull, it can, in rare cases, be used without any accompanying care for the other person at all. Someone can accurately model what you’re feeling and use that understanding to manipulate rather than help. Researchers studying manipulation and some personality disorders have noted that cognitive empathy can remain intact, or even be unusually sharp, in people who show little affective empathy or concern for others’ wellbeing. It’s a good reminder that empathetic thinking on its own isn’t automatically a virtue. What you do with that understanding is what determines whether it becomes compassion or something else entirely.
Why This Conversation Feels More Urgent Right Now
There’s a reason this distinction has been showing up in business and technology conversations well beyond psychology departments lately. In September 2025, Zurich Insurance Group published a global study conducted with YouGov and Jamil Zaki, surveying more than 11,500 consumers across eleven countries about empathy in business. The findings were stark: 60% of respondents said they only use companies that genuinely care about their needs, and 73% said they’d avoid a company that seemed to lack empathy. At the same time, 71% said they don’t believe AI can create genuine human connection, even as AI tools handle more and more customer-facing interactions.
Zaki has a phrase for what’s happening when AI attempts empathy: “LLMpathy,” his term for the way a language model can accurately describe what you’re likely feeling without any of the felt experience behind it. As he put it in the Zurich study, an AI system can understand you, but it can’t feel with you. That’s the cognitive and affective split, playing out in real time, at a moment when a huge number of people’s daily interactions run through systems that are, in a sense, all empathetic thinking and no emotional empathy at all. It’s a strange, useful mirror: it turns out AI has made it much easier to see, concretely, what cognitive empathy looks like when it’s operating entirely on its own.
Can You Actually Get Better at It?
Here’s the more hopeful part. Because empathetic thinking is a cognitive process rather than a fixed emotional temperament, it responds to practice in a way that’s easier to build deliberately than, say, trying to simply feel more. Zaki’s research, laid out in his book The War for Kindness, includes fMRI evidence that the brain regions associated with empathy physically change after structured practice, what he calls kindness training. The interventions that show up again and again in this research aren’t exotic: reading fiction that puts you inside an unfamiliar perspective, deliberately talking with people whose experiences differ from your own, and simply being told, and coming to believe, that empathy is a skill you can grow rather than a trait you’re stuck with. That belief alone changes how much effort people put in, which then compounds.
This is really the whole premise behind treating empathy as trainable in a professional setting rather than something you hope people already arrive with. Perspective-taking gets sharper the more often someone practices actually reconstructing another person’s specific situation, rather than reaching for a generic, one-size-fits-all response. That’s a skill you can design practice around, which is a very different proposition than trying to instill a feeling on command.
Where Empathable Fits Into This
Empathetic thinking is the part of empathy most within your control day to day. You can’t always control whether you feel a rush of shared emotion with a coworker or a student, but you can practice the deliberate work of actually reasoning through their situation, and that practice compounds over time. That’s the approach Empathable takes with the people and organizations it works with: treating perspective-taking as a skill to be built through realistic, repeated practice rather than a personality trait people are simply expected to have.
See how Empathable is different
References
- Reniers, R. L. E. P., Abu-Akel, A., & Seara-Cardoso, A. (2022). Editorial: Cognitive Empathy and Perspective Taking: Understanding the Mechanisms of Normal and Abnormal Experiences and Abilities. Frontiers in Psychiatry.
- Zaki, J. (2019). The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Crown.
- Zurich Insurance Group. (2025). Addressing the Empathy Gap: How Human Connection Can Give Businesses a New Competitive Edge (with Jamil Zaki and YouGov).
- Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.