Empathy Fallacy: What Does Neuroscience Say?

The simplest definition of empathy is understanding the emotions of others. So, how do we understand emotions? Many of us might answer this question by saying, "By reading emotions from faces and body language." Let's do a quick test. What do you see when you look at my photo below?

You noticed my furrowed brows. Did you think I was a bit tense, maybe annoyed, or even angry?

Now, take a look at the original (uncropped) version of the photo.

Yönetici ve Liderlik Koçu Ayşen Bahar Önderol bir İK etkinliğinde dikkatle dinlerken

What do you think now? Not so sure I'm angry anymore? When this photo was taken, I was at an HR event; I was engaged in a deep conversation with the person across from me. My furrowed brows were simply an expression of my intense focus, curiosity, and attentive listening at that moment. The face is the exact same; however, when the context (the situation and the environment) changes, the meaning, and the emotion it conveys to you, changes completely.

Even if you know the context, understanding other people's emotions from their faces and body language is still not easy. Let's say you are in an important meeting, and you see your colleague at the other end of the table let out a deep sigh and slam their laptop shut. While you think they are angry and reacting to the decision being discussed, your other colleague sitting next to you thinks they have lost hope in the project and are demoralized. In reality, that person just closed their laptop because the battery died, and they took a deep breath simply due to the physical exhaustion of back-to-back meetings running since the morning. Both of you predicted their physical movement as a different emotion based on your own mental templates.

Empathy Fallacy 1: We can read other people's emotions from their faces

The accuracy of our guesses about other people's emotions can certainly improve depending on our closeness to the person and how long we have known them. You can guess the emotions of your spouse, your child, or your closest friends with much higher accuracy, but you still cannot read their inner world with absolute certainty; what you are doing is ultimately still a strong guess.

For years, we have been taught that we can read emotions from faces. In our families, our schools, movies, and even in the emojis we use every day, the idea that emotions can be read through universal facial expressions has been etched into our minds. According to the classical view, every emotion produces a specific pattern of movement on the face. It is as if our faces have fixed keys, much like letters on a keyboard, that produce a single, specific meaning when pressed. When you are happy, you are expected to smile; when you are angry, you are expected to scowl. These movements are said to be part of the fingerprint of their respective emotions. However, the truth is that even after a century of effort, scientific research has failed to reveal a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attached electrodes to a person's face to measure how facial muscles move during an emotional experience, they found immense variety rather than uniformity. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of today's leading neuroscientists, clearly reveals in her book How Emotions Are Made that we cannot make an accurate emotion translation just by looking at faces, as if we were reading a universal language that everyone knows.

The same face (facial movement) can express different emotions.

Furrowing your brows is certainly an expression of anger, but it is not unique to anger. Its meaning is highly variable depending on the situation you are in. Just like my expression in the photo, we might also furrow our brows when trying to focus on something with interest and curiosity, when struggling while lifting a heavy weight, or because the bright light bothers us when looking at the sun. That is, the same face (facial movement) can express different emotions.

Different faces can also express the same emotion.

Another difficulty in face reading is that the same emotion can have many faces. When we are happy, we laugh out loud, sometimes we cry tears of joy, and sometimes we just smile silently. It truly depends on the situation at that moment. Statistics strikingly support this. For example, when people are angry, they scowl only about 35% of the time; in the remaining 65% of the time, they move their faces in completely different ways.

Think about your own emotional experiences. When you experience an emotion like fear, you might move your face and body in various ways. During a terrifying scene in a horror movie, you might squeeze your eyes shut and clench your fists, or cover your face with your hands. However, if you encounter a threat on the street, you might open your eyes wide to assess the danger better, or you might freeze completely. That is, different faces can also express the same emotion.

We think we know other people's emotions intuitively (heuristically). However, these "intuitions" are actually predictions based on the rules of the classical emotion theory—which claims that emotions are universal—and our own past experiences. No matter how real and certain this intuitive state of knowing feels, it does not prove that we can read the inner worlds of others; just as our experience of watching the sun move across the sky does not mean the sun revolves around the Earth.

Empathy Fallacy 2: Mirror neurons are the source of empathy

Mirror neurons, first discovered in the brains of macaque monkeys in the 1990s, were used like a magic pill for years to explain empathy in leadership and emotional intelligence trainings. The claim was this: "When the person in front of us suffers or smiles, the mirror neurons in our brain fire, mirror their state, and we directly experience (empathetically) what they are feeling."

Modern neuroscience has proven that mirror neurons are not mystical cells that read emotions or empathize. They are actually motor action cells. When someone reaches for a coffee cup on the table, your brain simulates how to reach for that cup as a "motor movement." However, mirror neurons cannot tell whether that person picked up the cup to drink water, to throw it on the ground in anger, or to offer it to someone (i.e., their intention and emotion).

Mirror neurons can perceive and imitate how a person's facial muscles move (e.g., furrowing brows); however, they cannot decode the reason for that furrowing, or which emotion it stems from. To understand the intention and emotion behind an action, it is not enough for the brain to just copy that muscle movement; it must make an active prediction using your past experiences and the current context. In short, mirror neurons do not read minds; they merely provide a physical input to your brain's prediction process.

Empathy Fallacy 3: Understand what the other person is feeling by putting yourself in their shoes and express their emotion

We are told that to empathize, we need to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. It is claimed that this way, we can understand what they are feeling. However, when we put ourselves in the other person's shoes, we generally evaluate the situation through our own experiences and mental templates that form our perspective, and our feelings might differ from the person we are empathizing with.

For example, your friend might be very angry at another friend who is late for your meeting, while you might feel completely neutral and think to yourself, "There is nothing to be angry about, they are making a mountain out of a molehill." In order to empathize, we must first accept that emotions are personal, and that the same situation/behavior can create different emotions in different people.

Empathy is very important in communication; when you empathize, the other person feels understood, and this allows you to connect with them. For the person to feel understood, it is not enough for you to understand their emotion; you also need to express it. However, using statements like "You are angry right now" or "I know you are annoyed by this" can put the other person on the defensive, causing them to resist or withdraw. This is exactly why using "Perception Language," as in statements like "It feels to me like you are angry right now" or "I see you've been a bit down for a while, is everything okay?", is the safest and most respectful way to understand the other party and build true empathy.

True empathy is not about reading the other person's emotion or putting yourself in their shoes, but rather caring about their experience, being curious about what they feel, and opening a safe space for them to express their emotions by listening without judgment.

---

What Awaits Us in the Next Article?

The fingerprints of emotions have been searched for not only on our faces but also deep within the brain, yet they have not been found. The classical approach led us to believe that we have an old 'reptilian and emotional brain' responsible for animalistic instincts inside our brain, and a rational brain trying to control it. In fact, neuroscientific research clearly shows that there is no emotional brain fighting rational thought inside us.

In my next article, we will begin exploring how our brain actually works and how it creates emotions. Why are we doing this? Because if we truly understand how something works, we can manage it.

References: 

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• LeDoux, J. E. (2015). Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Penguin Books.

• Pessoa, L. (2013). The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration. MIT Press.