You will be able to explain cognitive and emotional empathy and when each one helps or gets in the way.
Siew Ling is a product manager at a fintech company in one-north. In Tuesday's sprint review, in front of her director, the engineering lead, Ravi, said the launch date she had promised a client "was never realistic" and that the product team "keeps changing the scope", and Siew Ling left the room furious. That evening a friend told her, kindly, that she should try to empathise with Ravi.
Siew Ling found the advice unhelpful. She did not want to feel what Ravi felt. She was barely managing her own feelings. But her friend was using one word for two different things, and once you separate them, the advice makes more sense.
Psychologists commonly distinguish two kinds of empathy. Cognitive empathy is understanding what another person thinks and feels: building an accurate picture of their view from the inside. Emotional empathy is feeling it alongside them: their stress becoming your stress, their frustration making your own chest tight.
The two often travel together, but they can come apart. A good negotiator may understand the other side's fears in detail without feeling them at all. A friend can cry at your bad news without fully grasping why it hit you so hard.
When people at work say you should "show more empathy", they usually mean the first kind. They want you to understand the other person accurately. Very few of them actually mean you should take on everyone's distress.
Emotional empathy has real value. It is part of what makes people kind, and it helps you notice when someone is struggling. But it has costs, and the psychologist Paul Bloom made a strong case about them in his 2016 book Against Empathy.
Bloom's first point is that feeling others' distress repeatedly is exhausting. People in caring and service jobs often describe this: after a day of absorbing other people's anxiety, there is nothing left. You may have felt a smaller version after a week of handling angry customers, or supporting a colleague through a bad patch while doing your own job.
His second point is about bias. We feel emotional empathy most easily for people who are like us, close to us, or right in front of us. That makes it a poor guide to fairness. At work, it can mean you side with the colleague you get on with, or the one who looks most upset, rather than the one whose case is stronger. In a multicultural team, it can quietly favour people who share your background, language or sense of humour.
Bloom's argument is contested, and many psychologists think he overstates it. You do not need to accept all of it. The useful part for this course is the warning: feeling what someone feels is not the same as judging their situation well.
In most work conflicts, the thing that moves matters forward is an accurate grasp of how the other person sees it. Siew Ling had no need to feel Ravi's frustration herself, but she did need to understand why he said what he said, in that meeting and in that way.
When she sat down to think about it from his side, a few things came up. Ravi's team had worked two weekends that month. The scope of the launch had changed twice since the date was set, both times after requests from the client that she had agreed to. And Ravi had first heard about the promised date from the client, because she had forgotten to tell him. None of this excused saying it in front of the director. All of it made his reaction easier to understand.
That understanding changed what Siew Ling could do next. Instead of preparing to defend herself, she could prepare to talk about how dates get set and how scope changes get agreed. Lesson 4.2, Take the other person's view on purpose, gives you a set of questions for doing this deliberately.
There is a third stance worth naming. Compassion means caring about someone's wellbeing and wanting things to go well for them, without absorbing their distress as your own. Bloom and others argue that it is more sustainable than emotional empathy, because it does not drain you in the same way and it points towards helping rather than suffering alongside.
In practice, compassion sounds like: "That sounds like a really hard month. What would help?" It is warm, but it keeps you steady enough to be useful. Emotional empathy, by contrast, can leave both of you upset and neither of you closer to a solution.
For Siew Ling, a compassionate stance meant accepting that Ravi's team was stretched and that he had a reason to be angry, while still planning to tell him that the sprint review was the wrong place to say it. She did not have to choose between the two.
These distinctions are easiest to practise on someone who irritates you, because that is where understanding is hardest and most needed. The aim is not to like them more. It is to see their side clearly enough that your next conversation with them is based on what is really going on.
In the activity below you pick a colleague who frustrates you and describe a recent situation the way they would describe it, in their own words, as Siew Ling did for Ravi.
Think of a colleague who frustrates you and write one paragraph describing a recent situation as they would describe it, in their words.
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