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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a non-standard interpretation of the word 'empathy' in the article there. The word means understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling. As a manager, that shouldn't be conditional; managers should always spare a little attention to tracking how the people around them feel and what they think.

You don't want empathy to be a blocker to telling the truth, fair enough. But one of the lessons high empathy people have to learn is that having empathy for someone and controlling how they feel are two completely different things. One is possible, the other is not. And usually there is a simple way to tell the truth that doesn't hurt anyone beyond what they do to themselves.

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Empathy implies not only the knowledge of the feeling, but also some level of share in that feeling.

Mirroring someone's feelings can certainly help, but isn't that critical. Especially since "sharing feelings" is technically impossible unless the Neuralink people have announced something I haven't heard about - fully comprehending how someone else feels about something is a to-be-solved problem.

Eg, if someone is paralysed with grief and someone else comes up to give them a hug, the hugger is probably acting empathetically even though they aren't mirroring the emotion. It is more about identification and choosing an appropriate response. It is a common tactic of high empathy people to respond to negative emotions by embodying positive ones rather than mirroring the painful ones.

Acting emphatically without invoked feeling, sounds “dry”or high-functioning-sociopath-like (not a killer, but as “doing it only because you know it’s expected/required”).

I did invoke feelings - the example was someone paralysed with grief and another person coming over to console them. Which of those do you think is the sociopath?

Managers shouldn't be making empathy conditional in the usual sense of the word, it is necessary in all settings to maintain an orderly, pleasant and respectful workplace. The article probably means something similar to but ultimately not exactly empathy. Probably sympathy, which gets used in the same paragraph. High empathy, low sympathy is par for the course for a good manager in a hard conversation.

One of the things I learned in Therapy is that other people’s emotions are their own. I can recognize them without living them myself and that’s okay. And I can be present for someone else by acknowledging how they feel without trying to change it. And it’s also okay to let other people know when you think they’re not seeing something that might change how they feel.

Empathy vs sympathy?

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