Empathy Vs. Sympathy: What’s The Difference?

Here’s a hypothetical situation: Imagine you find out from someone that an acquaintance, we’ll call her Alice, recently started treatment for cancer. You and Alice have kids on the same gymnastics team, and while you’re not close, you like one another.

When you find out, you feel bad for her. Luckily, your mutual friend reports that they caught the cancer early and Alice should come through it OK. You’re a private person and if you were in that situation, you’d only want close friends to call or text. You want to give Alice her space while showing her that you’re thinking of her. So, you order a bouquet of flowers online and have it delivered to her house with a thoughtful card.

Your gesture was based on:

1. Empathy
2. Sympathy
3. This is a trick question—they mean the same thing

If you chose sympathy, you’re correct. According to Helena Roderick, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Northwell Health, while many people use the terms empathy and sympathy interchangeably, there are nuanced differences between the two.

“Sympathy involves understanding someone else’s emotions from your own perspective, and empathy involves feeling someone else’s emotions from their perspective,” Roderick explains.

In the hypothetical story, you looked at Alice’s circumstances through your own lens, and your actions were geared toward what matters to you: space and privacy, combined with an act of kindness to show awareness and concern. To be clear, the flowers and card were absolutely kind. But, as Roderick explains, someone who is highly empathetic would approach things somewhat differently.

“You’re theoretically going to engage in actions that are tailored to what that person needs because you’re tuned into their feelings,” she notes.

Now, you may be thinking, I’m not a mind reader, so how can I tune into someone else’s feelings? Roderick says there are ways you can move from sympathy to empathy. One way is through dialogue, with a focus on what’s going on with the other person and really paying attention to their responses.

“You can ask, ‘How do you feel about this situation?’ or ‘Is there anything going on that you want to talk about?’” Roderick suggests.

Another method of building empathy involves observing body language. For example, if you’re having a conversation and the other person breaks eye contact, it could indicate that they don’t feel recognized in that moment. Or, if their body is turning away from you or getting fidgety, there may have been a rupture in the empathetic dialogue you’re trying to have.

“Look for facial expressions and the fluency of their speech. Are they suddenly giving you one-word answers?” Roderick says. The same applies when texting with someone and they switch to abrupt replies. “Maybe you’re not as attuned to them as you were when they were providing more details,” she adds. 

But what about the situation with our fictitious friend, Alice? If you aren’t in her inner circle, how can you provide more empathetic support? Roderick says empathy is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and meeting them where they are. Perhaps you ask your mutual friend to find out what Alice needs most—such as a trusted parent who can give her child rides to gymnastics. Or maybe Alice is worried about becoming isolated, and the privacy you’d desire would feel to her like a lack of friends rallying by her side.

“Compassion involves taking action,” Roderick says. “It can be thought of as a subcategory of empathy, where empathy is about feeling the emotions of others, and compassion creates a desire to help others.”

But here’s where it gets more complex. A compassionate act can be sympathetic (like sending flowers to Alice) or empathetic (like offering to drive Alice’s kid to gymnastics). Roderick says even though both acts are coming from a place of good intent, a compassionate act can have less of a positive effect if the person on the receiving end feels like their needs were ignored or invalidated.

Is empathy ever unhealthy?

Empathy enables you to feel for another person from their perspective, so it’s easy to assume it’s more desirable than sympathy, which is framed through your own views. But Roderick says there are times when in fact it may be helpful to distance yourself from taking on the woes of the world.

“With mobile phones and social media, there’s a bombardment that happens, and you can find yourself drowning in empathy fatigue,” she says. “That’s where it can help to shift a little more into sympathy rather than empathy.” 

In such circumstances, for purposes of self-care, she recommends mindfully zooming out from the situation and using self-talk to set boundaries, such as reminding yourself that is them, this is me.

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