Explanation of the empathy gap

The empathy gap makes it difficult for people to imagine how they will feel and
act when they’re in a different emotional state than the one that they’re at at the
moment, and also makes it difficult for them to imagine how other people feel and
act when they’re in a different emotional state than they are.

For example, one of the most common ways in which the empathy gap influences
people is by causing them to underestimate the influence of their visceral drives,
which are factors such as hunger, pain, and sexual arousal, on their decision-
making ability.

Most people are familiar with this aspect of the empathy gap in an intuitive way.
Essentially, the empathy gap is there whenever you believe that you will act in a
rational, positive way in a certain situation, but end up failing to do so due to the
influence of your visceral drives, which you underestimated when planning for the
situation.

This means that the empathy gap can cause people to be unprepared for situations
where they are affected by various emotional considerations that cause them to do
things which satisfy their instincts, urges, and cravings in the short-term, but
which fail to help them accomplish their long-term goals, or to act in the way that
they would ideally prefer.

The influence of this cognitive bias can be so powerful that people often continue
to assume that they will be able to handle a certain type of situation properly, even
if they are repeatedly proven to be wrong.

However, despite the fact that this is the aspect of the empathy gap that people are
generally the most familiar with, the empathy gap affects people in many other
ways, both in terms of how they struggle to understand and predict their own
actions, as well as in terms of how they struggle to understand and predict the
actions of others.

Why we experience the empathy gap

The reason why we experience the empathy gap is that human cognition is state-
dependent, meaning that the way we process information and make decisions
depends strongly on the mental state that we are at the time.

For example, when we feel full, it’s difficult for us to predict how we will behave
when we are hungry, since the hunger represents a different mental state than the
one we’re experiencing at the moment. Essentially, in this example, the issue is
that it’s difficult for us to imagine how we will feel when we crave something we
enjoy, at a time when we are at a mental state where that craving is weak, and
especially immediately after we have satisfied that craving.

The same principle applies to other situations. For example, when we are angry
about something, we struggle to imagine the perception of someone who doesn’t
care about it, because we are at a distinctly different mental state than they are,
and because people generally struggle to adjust their perception in order to
account for that.