Empathy vs Sympathy: What's the Difference?

The Psychology and Philosophy of Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

A doctor or nurse empathizing with a patient — Empathy begins with the simple but profound attempt to see the world through another person’s eyes.

Article substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

Article summary: Empathy and sympathy are often confused, but they are not the same. This article explores the psychology and philosophy of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion, explaining how they differ, why they matter, and what they reveal about human nature.

The terms empathy and sympathy are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Sympathy is care or concern for another person’s suffering. Empathy goes a step further: it involves understanding and, to some extent, sharing in that person’s emotional experience. Compassion, which involves the desire to relieve suffering, builds upon empathy. These distinctions matter—not only in psychology and medicine, but also in friendship, parenting, education, and everyday life.

Suppose a friend has just lost a parent. If I say, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you,’ I’m expressing sympathy. If I can also imagine, however imperfectly, what this loss feels like from within their own world, I begin to empathise. If that empathy inspires me to support them through their grief, it becomes compassion.

Before examining these concepts, it is worth asking where the modern idea of empathy came from.

What Is Empathy?

In 1909, the psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) as empathy. At that time, German philosophers discussed empathy in the context of artistic or aesthetic evaluation, but Titchener proposed that empathy can also help us to recognise one another as minded beings.

Today, empathy might be defined as a person’s ability to understand and, to a greater or lesser extent, share in the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. Empathy involves two closely related capacities: (1) seeing another person’s situation from their embodied perspective, and (2) resonating with, or sharing in, the emotions that they are feeling.

For me to share another person’s point of view, it is not enough merely to put myself into their position or situation. Instead, I must go further still and imagine myself as them, and, more than that, imagine myself as them in the situation in which they find themself. One cannot empathise with an abstract or detached feeling, only with a particular person. To empathise with them, I need to have some understanding of who they are and what they are doing, or trying to do. I need to have some idea of where they came from and where they want to go. As John Steinbeck famously wrote:

It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.

Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

Empathy is easily confused with pity, sympathy, and compassion, which are all prosocial reactions to the plights of others. Let us look at each one in turn.

Pity is a feeling of discomfort at the distress of one or more sentient beings and usually carries paternalistic overtones. Inherent in the notion of pity is that its object does not deserve its plight, and is incapable of preventing or overturning it. Pity is less engaged than sympathy, empathy, or compassion, often amounting to little more than a conscious acknowledgement of another’s suffering.

Sympathy (Greek, ‘fellow feeling’ or ‘community of feeling’) is care or concern for someone, often someone close or relatable, accompanied by a wish to see them better off. Compared with pity, sympathy implies a greater sense of shared similarities and deeper personal engagement. But unlike empathy, sympathy need not involve a shared perspective or shared emotions, and while the facial expressions of sympathy convey caring and concern, they do not ordinarily convey shared distress.

Sympathy and empathy often lead to one another, but not invariably. For instance, it is possible to sympathise with a hedgehog but not, strictly speaking, to empathise with it, since our access to its subjective experience is necessarily limited. Conversely, psychopaths with little or no sympathy for their victims may nonetheless possess sufficient understanding of another person’s thoughts and motivations to ensnare and manipulate them.

Sympathy might also be distinguished from benevolence, which is a more detached and impersonal attitude—akin to the attitude that I might have towards my students or neighbours, or that a monarch might have towards his or her subjects.

Compassion (Latin, ‘suffering alongside’) is more engaged than empathy and is associated with an active desire to alleviate the suffering of its object. With empathy, I share your emotions; with compassion I not only share your emotions but also elevate them into a universal and transcending experience. Compassion, which builds upon empathy, is one of the principal motivators of altruism.

Researcher Brené Brown has done much to popularise the distinction between sympathy and empathy, arguing that sympathy creates distance while empathy creates connection. Her work has helped bring empathy to a much wider audience. Even so, sympathy need not be distant or dismissive. Properly understood, it is often the beginning of empathy rather than its opposite.

The relationship between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion can be summarised as follows:

Can We Ever Know Another Mind?

My friend tearfully confides that, as a child, she was sexually abused by her father. Moved by her plight, I try to comfort her:

‘I know just how you feel.’

To my surprise and alarm, she snaps back:

‘No, you don’t know how I feel! How could you?’

Notice that, in claiming that I cannot know how she feels, my friend is implying that she knows how I feel—or, at least, that however I might be feeling, it is not how she feels. But if she is correct in asserting that I cannot know how she feels, how can she know how I feel, or that how I feel is not how she feels?

A similar paradox is raised in the Zhuangzi (c. third century BCE), one of the two foundational texts of Taoism:

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi were strolling on the bridge above the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, ‘Out swim the minnows so free and easy; this is the happiness of fish.’ Hui Shi said, ‘You are not a fish. Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘You are not me. Whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?’ Hui Shi said, ‘Granted that I am not you, I don’t know about you. Then granted that you are not a fish, the case for your not knowing the happiness of fish is complete.’ Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s trace back to the root of the issue. When you said, ‘Whence do you know the fish are happy?’, you asked me already knowing I knew it. I knew it from up above the Hao.’

The exchange captures an enduring philosophical puzzle. We can never inhabit another person’s consciousness. Yet, in everyday life, we routinely understand enough of one another’s inner worlds to communicate, cooperate, comfort, teach, love, and forgive. How is this possible?

Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons

Empathy rests upon what psychologists call theory of mind: the ability to understand that different people see the world from different perspectives and possess different beliefs, desires, sensitivities, commitments, and forms of understanding.

Some writers distinguish between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. From a philosophical point of view, however, it is preferable to distinguish theory of mind from empathy, rather than to divide empathy into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ forms, thereby obscuring the distinct role of theory of mind. On this view, theory of mind forms the cognitive basis for empathy, while empathy itself also involves emotional resonance.

Theory of mind is innate (‘from up above the Hao’), first appearing at about four years of age. Thereafter, it continues to develop, and can be trained in both reach and accuracy. Crucially, theory of mind enables us to posit the intentions of others and to explain and predict their actions.

Researchers have proposed that mirror neurons contribute to this capacity. These neurons fire both when we carry out a particular action and when we witness that same action in someone else. By internally modelling the actions of others, they may help us infer some of the thoughts, emotions, and desires that gave rise to them. Although empathy and theory of mind involve a broader network of cognitive processes, mirror neurons offer one suggestive illustration of how we may come to understand the experiences of others.

Why Did Empathy Evolve?

From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy has been selected for because it promotes parental care, prosocial behaviour, and non-verbal communication, and, by extension, the survival of the proximal gene pool. By supporting social interaction, collective enterprise, resource sharing, teaching and learning, and storytelling and other art forms, empathy increases the strength, stability, and resilience of a society and its members.

Empathy enables us to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to respond effectively to their ever-changing needs and expectations. At the same time, to empathise is not to merge. Because empathy remains at one remove, it provides a degree of distance in which to make normative judgements about the person or people being empathised with and to weigh up their best interests.

The Limits of Empathy

That said, empathy can also skew our judgement, leading us to violate moral principles to favour the one or the few over the many. It can be distressing or exhausting. Doctors and nurses who are surrounded by human suffering often constrain or regulate their empathetic faculty, not out of callousness or unconcern but to guard against compassion fatigue and burnout.

Yet in less pressured environments, the exercise of empathy is often rewarding and even revitalising. Doctors and nurses who are able to empathise with their patients—though not so much that it prevents them from resting and recuperating—are more likely to feel fulfilled in their work, to say nothing of the benefit to the patients themselves.

Empathy does not grant direct access to another person’s inner world. Rather, it is our best means of approaching that world while respecting its separateness. It allows us to understand without possessing, to care without collapsing distinctions, and to recognise that every human being lives a life that is uniquely their own.