In the communications business, we spend a lot of time telling stories designed to elicit empathy in our audiences. Teachers rely on empathy to awaken the imaginations of their charges. And executives are rated highly if they show empathy for their employees, and maybe even as psychopaths if they don’t. But what is this quality, how does it work, and how do we know if we’re applying it correctly in these leadership roles?

Empathy is an emotional state we mostly believe we have in the just the right amount – while everyone else has too little. It’s the capacity, simply put, to feel someone else’s suffering. We know everyone else has too little because, well, like a world full of Mrs. Gummidges, we ‘feel it more than most’. And we pride ourselves on being able to ‘feel your pain’, as President Bill Clinton famously said. But aside from these general truths, what does the research show us is actually going on with empathy?

First of all, the most empathetic people are highly educated women. Empathy decreases with age; that cliché of the ‘grumpy old grandpa’ is apparently spot........

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