Empathy Isn't Unmeasurable: Here's How Psychologists Do It

"Many people assume empathy is too soft, too subjective, or too deeply personal to quantify. In our own survey, nearly half of the respondents agreed that "it is impossible to measure empathy." This sentiment echoes a familiar cultural belief: that empathy is like love, beautiful precisely because it resists dissection. As one commentator put it, attempts to measure empathy require "stripping it of softness, feelings, and any sense that it's a touchy-feely-can't-exactly-measure-it" quality. And if you strip that away, she argued, "it's no longer empathy.""

"This skepticism surfaces often, especially in fields where empathy training has become a priority. Medical educators worry that evaluation will devolve into a "tick-box" exercise, and resist what they see as an overly bureaucratic approach to something inherently human. Similar worries appear in education, where concerns about measurement threaten the long-term viability of social and emotional learning programs. Even empathy researchers voice reservations, noting that people are notoriously unreliable at rating themselves, especially for something as socially desirable as empathy."

Dozens of reliable and valid empathy measures exist, each designed to assess different components of empathy. Self-report measures capture momentary feelings and more habitual traits. Performance-based measures assess how accurately people infer others' emotions. Observer ratings from teachers, parents, patients, and others measure how empathic someone appears in context. Cultural beliefs and professional concerns often create skepticism about measuring empathy, with worries about 'stripping' empathy or reducing it to a tick-box exercise. People are prone to overreporting socially desirable traits, so multiple methods are needed to capture the cluster of empathy processes.

Read at Psychology Today