The Empathy Gap: Why We Misjudge Feelings We Are Not Feeling

Have you ever promised yourself, after a large meal, that you will never eat that much again, only to find the promise forgotten by the following evening? Or decided, on a calm Sunday afternoon, that you will remain perfectly composed in a difficult meeting, and then felt your composure vanish the moment the meeting began? These everyday experiences point to a powerful and widely studied bias known as the empathy gap. In simple terms, it is our tendency to underestimate how strongly emotions and physical states shape behaviour whenever we are not experiencing those states ourselves.

The idea is most closely associated with George Loewenstein, an economist and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, who distinguished between what he called hot and cold states. A hot state is one in which we are hungry, tired, angry, frightened, in pain or strongly drawn towards something. A cold state is one of calm and comfort. The hot to cold empathy gap describes how, when we are calm, we struggle to appreciate how differently we will think and act when we are aroused. The cold to hot gap works in the other direction: when we are in the grip of a feeling, we find it hard to imagine that it will ever pass.

A memorable demonstration came from a study by Leaf Van Boven and George Loewenstein, published in 2003. Some participants had just finished exercising and were thirsty, while others had not. Both groups read about hikers who were lost without food or water and were asked to predict what the hikers would find most distressing. The thirsty participants were far more likely to say that thirst would be the worst part of the ordeal. Their own temporary state coloured their judgement of a situation that had nothing to do with them. If a few minutes of exercise can do that, what might hunger, exhaustion or grief do to our understanding of others?

The bias also affects how we plan for ourselves. In a study by Daniel Read and Barbara van Leeuwen, published in 1998, office workers were asked to choose a snack that they would receive a week later, either a healthy option or an unhealthy one. Those who made the choice while hungry were considerably more likely to pick the unhealthy snack than those who chose after eating. Their present state leaked into a decision about a future self whose hunger they could not actually predict. Many failed diets, unkept savings plans and abandoned resolutions share the same root. The calm planner simply does not believe in the strength of the tempted self.

Perhaps the most serious consequences, however, are social. In research published in 2011, Loran Nordgren, Kasia Banas and Geoff MacDonald examined how people judge the pain of social exclusion. Participants who had just been left out of a simple online ball tossing game rated the pain of exclusion as considerably more severe than those who had not. In one part of the research, teachers who had recently experienced a brief taste of exclusion themselves recommended firmer action against bullying than teachers who had not. The lesson is uncomfortable. Those who are not suffering at a given moment, including those with the power to help, may consistently underestimate the suffering of others.

Once we know to look for it, the empathy gap appears in many places. A manager who has never worked a night shift may wonder why tired staff make mistakes. A comfortable politician may struggle to grasp what it means to choose between heating and eating. A person who has never experienced addiction may conclude that it is simply a matter of willpower. In each case the judgement is not necessarily cruel. It is often sincere. But it rests on a failure of imagination that feels, from the inside, like common sense.

Why is the gap so persistent? One reason is that emotions are difficult to store as memories. We can remember that we were frightened, but we rarely remember the full force of the fear itself. Knowledge of a feeling is not the same as the feeling, in much the same way that reading a description of a melody is not the same as hearing it. Another reason is that our current state feels like the natural, reasonable baseline against which everything else should be measured. When we are calm, calmness seems normal, and the behaviour of the frightened or the desperate seems excessive.

What can a critical thinker do about a bias that operates so quietly? The first step is humility. When we judge someone else's behaviour, especially behaviour under pressure, we might ask what state that person was in, and whether we have ever been in a state like it. If we have not, we should hold our conclusions more loosely. If we have, we should try to recall not only the facts of that experience but also how it felt at the time.

A second step is to plan for our hot selves while we are cold. Rather than relying on willpower in the moment, we can make decisions in advance that protect us from predictable pressures. Keeping tempting food out of the house, agreeing on a pause before replying to an angry message, or deciding before a negotiation what we will not accept are all ways of respecting the power of future feelings. Such strategies work precisely because they do not trust the calm planner to imagine the heat correctly.

A third step is to listen. If we cannot fully imagine what another person feels, we can at least ask them, and take their answer seriously. People who live with chronic pain, poverty or grief are often told, in effect, that their experience is exaggerated. The empathy gap suggests that the error may lie with the listener rather than the speaker.

So what can we conclude? The empathy gap reminds us that our judgement is never made from nowhere. It is made from within a body and a mood, and those conditions shape what seems reasonable. This does not mean that we can never understand one another, but it does mean that understanding requires effort, curiosity and a willingness to doubt our own sense of what is obvious.

Perhaps the most useful questions are the ones we ask before we judge. When did I last criticise someone for a reaction I have never had to manage? What feeling am I in right now, and how might it be colouring my view? And if I were hungry, frightened or exhausted, would I still find my own conclusion so easy to defend?