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Empathy gap


A hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which people underestimate the influences of visceral drives on their own attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.

The most important aspect of this idea is that human understanding is "state-dependent". For example, when one is angry, it is difficult to understand what it is like for one to be calm, and vice versa; when one is blindly in love with someone, it is difficult to understand what it is like for one not to be, (or to imagine the possibility of not being blindly in love in the future). Importantly, an inability to minimize one's gap in empathy can lead to negative outcomes in medical settings (e.g., when a doctor needs to accurately diagnose the physical pain of a patient), in workplace settings (e.g., when an employer needs to assess the need for an employee's bereavement leave) and in juridical settings (e.g., when a judge decides what is an appropriate penalty for a given crime).

Hot-cold empathy gaps can be analyzed according to their direction:

They can also be classified in regards to their relation with time (past or future) and whether they occur intra- or inter-personally:

The term hot-cold empathy gap was coined by Carnegie Mellon University psychologist, George Loewenstein. Hot-cold empathy gaps are one of Loewenstein's major contributions to behavioral economics.

Visceral factors are an array of influences which include hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, drug cravings for the drugs one is addicted to, physical pain, and strong emotions. These drives have a disproportionate effect on decision making and behavior: the mind, when affected (i.e., in a hot state), tends to ignore all other goals in an effort to placate these influences. These states can lead a person to feel "out of control" and act impulsively.

Hot-cold empathy gap is also dependent on the person’s memory of visceral experience. As such, it is very common to underestimate visceral state due to restrictive memory. In general, people are more likely to underestimate the effect of pain in a cold state as compared to those in the hot state.

Nordgren, van der Pligt and van Harreveld (2006) assessed the impact of pain on the subjects performance on a memory test. In the assessment process, participants were questioned how pain and other factors affected their performance.

The results revealed that those participants in the pain free or cold state undervalued the impact of pain on their performance. Whereas, participants undergoing pain, accurately measured the effect of pain on performance.

Implications of the empathy gap were explored in the realm of sexual decision-making, where young men in an unaroused "cold state" failed to predict that in an aroused "hot state" they will be more likely to make risky sexual decisions, (e.g., not using a condom).


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