Is empathy a trait—or is it an interaction?

I've been studying empathy for most of my life. I write about empathy in books and studies and teach it across the world, and I developed a unique "big tent" model of empathy that helps people access, increase, or decrease their empathic capacities at any stage in their lifespans.

But the more I think about empathy, the more I question the concept of trait empathy. I question whether we can say that this person has this amount of empathy, and that person has that amount: she’s at 92, they're at 70, those people are at 6.5 …

Instead, I’m now observing empathy as something that exists in interactions, rather than merely in individuals.

We've all experienced the sudden loss of our empathy in interactions. For instance, if I forcefully make a statement that you don’t agree with, your empathy may fall away.

Imagine that you and I are committed vegetarians, and that's one of the ways we empathize with each other. If I suddenly glorify the health benefits of meat, it’s very likely that your empathy for me would fade or even disappear. If empathy were a trait that lived entirely within you, that wouldn’t happen.

In fact, empathy can be a very fragile thing. We've all seen that empathy can decrease in the presence of:

Empathy isn't a stable trait; it's something that appears in interactions, and often only when all the conditions are just right.

In my work, I help people develop robust emotional and empathic skills so that they can choose to empathize even when it's difficult. I also help people learn how to turn down specific aspects of their empathy when it's hyper-activated.

If empathy were a trait, we couldn't do that, but because empathy exists in........

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