Social Empathy

Have you ever wondered why some people seem naturally able to connect across differences, while others struggle to look beyond their personal experiences? In Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others, Elizabeth Segal argues that empathy is not just a private emotional skill but a powerful social tool—one that, if expanded beyond the individual, can reshape politics, policy, religion, and even technology. She contends that developing social empathy—the ability to understand people and social groups by perceiving their historical and contextual realities—can make the world more just, compassionate, and cooperative.

Segal distinguishes between two levels of empathy: interpersonal empathy, the ability to connect with others individually, and social empathy, which transcends the personal to grasp the societal conditions shaping entire communities. For Segal, empathy is both physiological and cognitive—it begins in the body with mirroring and feeling and expands through thought, perspective-taking, and understanding context. Learning empathy, she suggests, can influence everything from public policy to personal ethics.

Why Social Empathy Matters

Segal’s central argument connects empathy to social survival. Early human development depended on empathy within tribes—mirroring danger, helping offspring, and cooperating for safety. But modern society demands the expansion of this tribal empathy to a wider circle, she argues. We must extend empathy beyond kinship or similarity to those of different races, religions, and social classes. In her view, empathy is what prevents dehumanization and drives moral progress. Without empathy, societies fracture along tribal lines, breeding fear, prejudice, and violence.

She illustrates this evolution with examples throughout U.S. history: the empathy driving civil rights movements, the lack of empathy behind slavery and segregation, and the social empathy necessary to craft effective welfare programs. For Segal, empathy is not sentimentalism—it is a rigorous tool for understanding others and designing policies that reflect reality, not stereotype.

From Personal Feeling to Societal Insight

Empathy starts as a physical mirroring process, triggered by shared feelings, but developing social empathy requires bridging that instinct through perspective-taking, emotion regulation, and awareness of history. Segal explains that empathy consists of seven components: affective response, affective mentalizing, self-other awareness, perspective-taking, emotion regulation, contextual understanding, and macro perspective-taking. The first five foster personal connection; the last two enable social awareness.

Her core message is that empathy can be taught and strengthened. It’s not merely an inherited trait; it’s a practice. Teachers, policymakers, and leaders can learn to see beyond their personal experience by understanding the structural context—the larger systems shaping inequalities and social experiences.

A Journey Through Power, Politics, Religion, and History

Throughout the book, Segal dives into how empathy interacts with power, politics, and religion. She asks whether people in positions of authority can remain empathic when power tends to isolate and dehumanize. She analyzes how rigid religious fundamentalism distorts empathy into cruelty and exclusion. She even examines how technological communication—social media, texting, and online communities—both expands and erodes empathy depending on how we use it.

Segal’s exploration unfolds through vivid examples: the legislators who misunderstood welfare reform; the Puritans justifying oppression through religious texts; and educators teaching empathy through interactive learning. Each chapter connects empathy’s presence or absence to societal outcomes—showing that when empathy wanes, the result is prejudice, violence, or apathy. When empathy flourishes, the result is moral awakening and inclusivity.

A Practical Call to Action

Segal ultimately sees empathy as a teachable framework for civic life. She offers models for cultivating empathy through exposure, explanation, and experience: meeting people different from oneself, learning about how history shaped disparities, and imagining oneself within those lived realities. Her message is moral and pragmatic: empathy must guide democracy, connect divided citizens, and humanize policy.

In the end, Segal argues that empathy is not just about kindness—it’s about transformation. Social empathy lets us confront injustice not by guilt but by shared understanding. It is how societies evolve from separation to interdependence, from self-protection to collective flourishing. As she writes, empathy spreads person to person, group to group, until "they" becomes "us."

Segal blends neuroscience and social science to decode empathy’s structure. She explains that empathy is both physical and mental—a neurological mirroring that awakens emotional connection, followed by cognitive processing that interprets those emotions. This duality means empathy begins automatically but can be refined consciously. Mirror neurons activate as we see someone cry or smile, while our prefrontal cortex helps us understand what those feelings mean.

Seven Components of Empathy

• Affective Response: The primal feeling that mirrors another’s emotion.
• Affective Mentalizing: The conscious imagining of another’s experience.
• Self-Other Awareness: Knowing which emotions belong to whom.
• Perspective-Taking: Mentally walking in another’s shoes while distinguishing self from other.
• Emotion Regulation: Handling emotions calmly to engage thoughtfully.
• Contextual Understanding: Seeing the conditions that shape others’ lives.
• Macro Perspective-Taking: Understanding groups through history and social systems.

These components explain why empathy can fail when fear or prejudice interrupts our ability to see others clearly. Without context and emotion regulation, empathy turns into pity or distress rather than understanding. (Neuroscientist Tania Singer’s work echoes this finding—that sharing feelings without cognitive balance leads to burnout rather than compassion.)

Empathy in Practice

Segal illustrates these concepts through her metaphor of the welfare policy in 1996. Lawmakers lacking contextual understanding passed legislation that limited assistance to poor families. They saw "able-bodied individuals on the dole" instead of young mothers and children trapped by systemic barriers. The gap between legislators and recipients was a failure of social empathy—policymakers felt no connection to the group’s lived reality.

Important Insight

“Without contextual understanding,” Segal writes, “we act without realizing whose perspective we ignore.” Empathy that fails to reach structural understanding becomes sentiment without truth.

By dissecting empathy’s anatomy, Segal invites readers to diagnose where empathy gaps exist—in ourselves, our workplaces, and our governments—and begin rebuilding empathy as a multidimensional skill set, not a fleeting feeling.

Why is empathy so hard? Segal answers bluntly: because our brains are wired for survival, not understanding. Fear triggers ancient instincts that divide the world into friend or foe, ingroup or outgroup. This division fuels prejudice, racism, and oppression. As long as we perceive others as dangerous or different, our empathic circuits shut down. In societies, these instincts appear as tribalism, nationalism, and religious extremism.

The Roots of Otherness

Drawing from evolutionary psychology, Segal shows how early human survival created group identity—tribes that protected members and distrusted outsiders. This ingrained “otherness” persists today as unconscious bias. Neuroscience supports this: we process pain and emotion more fully for people like us than for those we see as different. In studies, participants showed stronger mirroring for same-race individuals, and weaker empathy toward those perceived as outgroup members.

Race and Dehumanization

Segal devotes significant attention to race as America’s defining barrier to empathy. Drawing on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, she argues that racial injustice persists partly because many Americans avoid confronting context—they adopt “colorblindness” rather than building understanding. She connects slavery, segregation, and modern policing to historical patterns of seeing Black Americans as less human. Without empathy for those experiences, structural inequality continues.

Segal also tells her father’s World War II story, where his empathy toward a German civilian—speaking kindly of his grandmother’s potato pancakes—saved him from starvation. This moment shows empathy’s power to transcend enemy lines and rehumanize others even amid war.

Empathy vs. Dehumanization

Segal describes how authoritarian movements exploit fear to suppress empathy. Nazi Germany, racial lynchings, and modern hate rallies all use propaganda to depict outsiders as threats. Once a group is seen as “nonhuman,” empathy vanishes—and cruelty becomes justified. She quotes psychologist Peter Glick and neuroscientist Steven Pinker to show how scapegoating and chaos allow charismatic leaders to weaponize fear, promising safety through violence.

Segal’s Warning

“Empathy is the antidote to otherness,” she insists. When we understand the historical pain behind difference, ‘they’ become ‘we.’

This chapter challenges readers not only to feel for individuals but to face the systems that create separation. Segal calls for education, exposure, and multi-group dialogue to retrain our brains from fear to understanding.

Segal’s chapter on power and politics offers one of the book’s boldest insights: empathy becomes harder the higher you rise in hierarchy. Power breeds self-focus, while powerlessness fosters awareness of others. Using studies on Washington politics, university presidents, and even brain scans, she shows how authority interferes with perspective-taking and contextual understanding.

Empathy and Ideology

Segal cites surveys by Pew Research showing that conservatives emphasize obedience and hard work, while liberals emphasize empathy and helping others. Neurological studies affirm this divide: liberals’ brains show greater activation for complex, uncertain information, while conservatives’ show more habitual pattern recognition. Fear and hierarchy correlate with conservatism, she explains, and these block empathy’s flexibility.

While not partisan, Segal cautions that ideological rigidity—whether political, religious, or organizational—shrinks our empathy. Empathy thrives on fluidity and listening, traits often suppressed by power structures that reward control and certainty.

The Neuroscience of Power

Power changes both behavior and the brain. High-powered individuals attend less to context and emotionally dehumanize others to make tough decisions. They rely on stereotypes and lose compassion. Segal recounts stories of government leaders ignoring worker fears during institutional changes, and contrasts them with empathetic figures like Frances Perkins under FDR, who used first-hand experiences of injustice to reform labor law.

Case Study

Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and transformed grief into policy—an example of empathy channeling power toward justice.

Finding Balance in Leadership

Segal ends this section optimistically: power doesn’t automatically erase empathy. Leaders trained in self-regulation and inclusive thinking, like Barack Obama or Martin Luther King Jr., integrate empathy into leadership. The challenge lies in designing systems that reinforce connection over domination—creating leaders who see public policy through people’s stories, not abstractions. Empathy, she concludes, must become an ethical requirement for power.

Religion inspires some of humanity’s deepest acts of compassion—and its most violent atrocities. Segal’s exploration of faith reveals empathy’s dual role within spiritual systems. Every major religion preaches kindness through the Golden or Silver Rule, yet history shows how religion has also justified genocide, slavery, and oppression. Understanding this paradox requires empathy itself: to see how theology and tribalism intertwine.

The Good Side of Faith

Segal acknowledges that universal moral codes—“love thy neighbor as thyself”—reflect empathy’s foundations. The Golden Rule promotes compassion and cooperation. However, she warns this rule can be self-centered: loving others only as we love ourselves may ignore differences in their needs. True empathy, she writes, requires stepping into the other’s context, not projecting ours onto them.

Religious Tribalism and Extremism

Segal charts religion’s dark side through history: Puritan justifications for violence, the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery defended through biblical passages, and attacks between sects in Ireland, Lebanon, and Myanmar. Quoting scholar Charles Kimball, she identifies five warning signs of religious extremism: absolute truth claims, blind obedience, “ideal time” urgency, ends-justify-means logic, and holy war. All reflect empathy’s distortion—turning love inward, fear outward.

Inclusive religions that respect diverse truths nurture empathy; exclusive ones suffocate it. She also references Sam Harris’s The End of Faith to show how fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, erases tolerance and encourages violence.

Segal’s Solution

“Social empathy,” she writes, “lets us recognize the validity of others’ beliefs without fear.” Through perspective-taking and inclusiveness, religion can become a vessel for connection instead of division.

Spirituality vs. Orthodoxy

Segal contrasts spiritual growth—self-transcendence and curiosity—with rigid ritualism that separates believers. Research shows that people who interpret religion symbolically, rather than literally, are more empathic. Spirituality invites perspective-taking; dogma enforces conformity. Her story of learning Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” philosophy captures religion at its best: relationships that honor the humanity of others, not treat them as objects. Religion, she concludes, can either suppress or teach empathy—it all depends on whether believers aim to understand or control others.

Empathy lives in the body as well as the mind, and stress can block it. Segal explores how depression, trauma, poverty, and even alcohol affect the neural systems that generate empathy. She synthesizes brain research showing how prolonged stress and cortisol damage the limbic system and prefrontal cortex—the very regions needed for perspective-taking and emotion regulation.

The Biology of Empathy

Empathy activates the brain’s mirror neuron system, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex, creating a sequence of unconscious feeling and conscious reasoning. Damage to these areas, whether through stroke or chronic stress, disrupts our emotional recognition and understanding. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers parallels Segal’s argument: while stress helps short-term survival, chronic tension corrodes empathy. We become self-focused, our brains hijacked by fear hormones.

Social and Environmental Stress

Poverty, childhood neglect, and maltreatment all block empathy neurologically. Segal cites child studies showing reduced brain development under chronic stress, leading to poor emotion regulation later. Abuse and deprivation hardwire vigilance, not connection. Yet she adds hope: neuroplasticity allows recovery. With stable environments and emotional modeling, empathy pathways can reform.

Her detailed look at PTSD shows that trauma survivors may retain cognitive empathy—thinking about others—but lose affective empathy, feeling others’ pain. Healing requires rebuilding emotional control and safe environments that enable re-engagement with emotion. Segal even notes how substances like acetaminophen can dull empathetic pain responses, underscoring empathy’s physical vulnerability.

Lesson

“Empathy starts in the body,” Segal reminds us. “When our biology is strained, compassion falters.” Rest, health, and emotional balance aren’t luxuries; they are prerequisites for understanding others.

Can empathy survive social media? Segal asks this question in her exploration of technology’s impact on human connection. While communication has expanded through texts, video chats, and virtual communities, face-to-face contact remains the most powerful way to understand others. Technology, she argues, amplifies empathy when used for storytelling and outreach—but degrades it when anonymity breeds cruelty, as in cyberbullying and trolling.

Digital Empathy: Connection and Distance

Studies show virtual empathy mirrors real-world empathy but remains weaker. Online support groups for patients reveal that shared digital communities can build trust and understanding. Yet direct, physical empathy—body language, tone, presence—produces much stronger social bonds. Texts and media may spark empathy but lack depth.

Segal praises technology’s potential: texts reminding people to empathize (“Smile at the next person you see.”) measurably increase prosocial behavior. Websites spreading stories of war victims or marginalized groups can expose millions to new perspectives. But empathy generated through screens fades quickly without deeper engagement.

The Internet’s Dark Side

Segal’s research on trolling and cyberbullying links online cruelty to diminished emotional awareness. Trolls and bullies demonstrate cognitive empathy—knowing how others feel—but no affective empathy, using that insight to manipulate or harm. Anonymity removes accountability. Segal compares trolls to historical mobs who acted under hoods—anonymity enables power without conscience.

Segal’s Conclusion

Technology is a tool—neither good nor evil—but empathy requires responsibility. “The same hammer can build or destroy,” she writes. “So can the keyboard.”

In a world of tweets and posts, Segal reminds readers that empathy thrives in depth, slowness, and presence. Digital empathy can spread awareness, but true connection still depends on listening, seeing, and feeling face-to-face.

Segal ends her book by turning empathy into practice. She argues that empathy can—and must—be taught, both individually and collectively. Her framework for learning social empathy involves three levels: Exposure (meeting different people), Explanation (learning historical and social contexts), and Experience (imagining oneself in others’ lives). These steps move empathy from awareness to understanding to transformation.

Practical Lessons

Segal’s teaching exercises transform abstract ideals into engagement. In her classroom, she uses privilege ladders—asking students to move up or down based on their life circumstances—to visualize inequality. She promotes visiting museums, reading cross-cultural books, or joining public forums. Seeing exhibits like Hiroshima’s Peace Museum or the Heard Museum’s portrayal of boarding schools gives participants bodily, emotional experiences of history’s pain, awakening contextual empathy.

Empathy as Social Action

Segal broadens empathy’s horizon to policy and activism. Truth and reconciliation commissions, civic testimony, and movements like #MeToo exemplify empathy turning into system-level awareness. When societies listen to the marginalized, empathy drives reform—as it did for civil rights and women’s rights. Social empathy, she emphasizes, is never passive; it is transformative civic consciousness.

The Neuroplastic Path Forward

Empathy can be learned at any age thanks to neuroplasticity. The brain physically reorganizes when we practice perspective-taking, imagining others’ feelings, or learning history. Just as Olympic athletes mentally rehearse their movements, empathic people strengthen compassion through mental rehearsal and exposure. Society can train empathy like any other skill—through repetition, reflection, and dialogue.

Final Takeaway

“Empathy spreads person to person,” Segal writes, “until differences fade and ‘they’ becomes ‘us.’” Social empathy is not utopian—it is achievable, and its practice could redefine citizenship itself.