The relationship between what empathy is and empathic accuracy

empathic accuracy

Empathy accounts differ in what they take empathy to be. And this affects when they take empathy to occur. Generally, when a person experiences empathy the process can be divided into three parts: 1) the moment it gets started; 2) the activity of processes that instantiate it; and 3) the moment it stops. Each account type of empathy differs with regard to the criteria that specify when empathy stops. And the output or state of an agent at that moment can be evaluated in terms of whether accurate or inaccurate empathy has occurred. These criteria for when empathy stops and an agent is truly empathizing (when an agent “gets it right”) are criteria of empathic accuracy. There is a long tradition of explicit discussion of theories of empathic accuracy in the context of professional counselling and therapy (Fiedler 1950; Rogers 1957; Ickes et al. 1997). In this context, psychologists and psychiatrists have developed many empathic accuracy scales for measuring a therapist’ (or counselor’s) empathic accuracy when interacting with a client, and other empathic accuracy scales for various measurements such as “closeness”

between married couples (Feldstein and Gladstein 1980; Ickes et al. 1997). It is important to note that all accounts of empathy have a theory of empathic accuracy (although it is often left implicit).

There is a significant conceptual problem in understanding the relationship between what empathy is and when accurate empathy occurs. The problem is that there is no principled relationship between which process an account focuses on and its theory of empathic accuracy. For example, an account may focus on neural mimicry as the main process of

empathy, and its theory of empathic accuracy may specify that an agent empathizes accurately with a target when the agent matches the target’s internal state. Alternatively, an account may focus on perspective taking, and its theory of empathic accuracy may specify that an agent accurately empathizes with a target when the agent becomes aware of the target’s needs or concerns. This problem is compounded when we notice that even accounts of empathy that focus on the same processes (e.g. perspective taking) can have different criteria of empathic accuracy. Any two accounts of empathy may focus on the same psychological processes of empathy but differ in terms of when those processes end and provide an end state to be evaluated in terms of accuracy. To take another example, Ickes’s account of empathy focuses on perspective taking (Ickes 1993). And his theory of empathic accuracy states that empathy occurs when an agent accurately infers “the specific content of another’s person’s thoughts and feelings.” (Ickes 1993, p 591) On Ickes’s account, the criterion for accurate empathy is that the agent has knowledge of the target’s thoughts and feelings (Ickes 1993, p 590-591). Compare this to Batson’s account of empathy which also focuses on perspective taking. His theory of empathic accuracy requires that an agent experience an emotional state that is similar to that of the target.12 The relationship between which processes an account empathy focuses on and its criteria for evaluating when accurate empathy occurs is problematically arbitrary because

theorists have not agreed on what empathy is.

While some researchers have begun to discuss the conceptual difficulty resulting from the various uses of the term ‘empathy’ (and their associated theories of empathic accuracy) (Batson 2009), most seem to regard this divergent usage as merely terminological, and therefore unimportant. But indeed this variation is in fact of great importance because an account’s theory of empathic accuracy will have consequences for what it counts as empathy. The question of how empathy works is premature because the question of what empathy is has not been satisfactorily answered (as is apparent in the diverse ways that empathic accuracy is used). As mentioned, I organize accounts of empathy into two types (matching accounts and concern accounts) according to their criteria of empathic

12 _{I will describe Batson’s account in more details after having presented my two-fold distinction between} types of empathy accounts.

accuracy. Rather than attempting to identify what empathy is according to the different component processes that instantiate it, I tether what empathy is to two sets of criteria for what counts as accurate empathy. This allows me to consistently identify what empathy is across research that focuses mostly on its component processes. This way of specifying what empathy is will in turn allow me to return to the component psychological processes posited in different accounts and examine how they operate in relation to what counts as accurate empathy.

It may seem strange to speak of empathy in terms of a process with parts or stages because many philosophical analyses of phenomena take the form of specifying the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for them to occur. But this shall not be the form of my analysis of empathy. I do not think that only providing a list of the conditions that specify when empathy occurs is the best way to understand it. My goal is not to provide a conceptual analysis of empathy whereby one uncovers the conception of empathy that all researchers share. Nor is it to provide a definition of empathy that will mitigate the inconsistent uses of the term. Researchers that provide an account of empathy do use the term consistently. Rather, my goal is to provide an analysis of empathy as a process and subsequently an account of empathy that takes into

consideration certain neglected aspects of it such as values, environmental contexts, and motivations. I believe that analyzing empathy as a process will help us to better

understand it by making explicit the causal connections between the antecedents and the effects of the psychological states it involves. If we only specify empathy as state, like Ickes (1993), whereby an agent infers “the specific content of another’s person’s thoughts and feelings”, this does not tell us what causes an agent to attempt such an inference (Ickes p 591). Hence, it does not tell us when empathy starts. Similarly it does not tell us about the possible effects of empathy beyond the purported inference because there is no way of telling immediately when such an inference has occurred. But if we treat empathy as a process, we can better account for when it occurs and better explain the relationship between its causes and its effects. Let us take sex between humans as an analogical example. Sex can be treated as either a state with necessary and sufficient conditions or it can be treated as a process with a beginning, middle, and end. On the former analysis, we

may say for the state sex to occur it is sufficient that a penis is inserted into a vagina. On the latter analysis, we may say sex is the process of inserting a penis into a vagina. This analysis has certain advantages. We can take sex to be a goal-directed activity; we can explain it in terms of antecedent sexual arousal which often continues during the process of sex; and we understand the connection between its ending and its effects such as pregnancy. This is not the say that this is impossible when analyzing sex as a state. But merely specifying the conditions for the occurrence of state does not make explicit the relationship between the antecedent states that may be important components of the state or the relationship between its occurrence and its effects.

There are vast metaphysical assumptions that come with one’s choice of analyzing a given phenomenon as either a state or a process.13 _{But in the case of empathy as a}

construct, I believe that its use in scientific contexts (e.g. in empathy tests), lends some credence to treating it as a goal-directed process. Further, doing so will allow us to account for the causal connections that explain why an agent attempts to empathize with a target, and it will allow us to better predict when an agent is more or less likely to attempt to empathize with a target. Also, treating empathy as a process will be conducive to an evolutionary explanation that takes these explanatory and predictive goals into account. In my third paper, I show how understanding the causal connections between the psychological states involved in the process of empathy as it occurs in various

environmental contexts allows us to better explain how it evolved.