Published on June 29, 2026
In most public conversations about division, the diagnosis tends to center on information. If only people knew the facts, the thinking goes, they would understand each other better. If only the right argument were made clearly enough, positions would shift. But decades of research on persuasion, polarization, and political psychology suggest this framing is incomplete. The problem in deeply divided communities is rarely a shortage of information. It is a shortage of empathy — the capacity to genuinely understand how the world looks and feels from where someone else is standing.
Empathy is not a soft skill or a personality trait reserved for the naturally compassionate. It is a capacity that can be developed, practiced, and deliberately applied — and it may be one of the most powerful tools available for the work of building peace, at every scale from the personal to the political.
What Empathy Actually Is
The word gets used loosely, so it is worth being precise. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy involves feeling sorry for someone — it keeps you at a distance, looking in from the outside. Empathy involves something more demanding: the deliberate effort to understand another person's experience from the inside, to grasp what it feels like to be them in their situation, not as you imagine you would feel it, but as they actually do. The difference matters because sympathy can coexist with condescension, while genuine empathy requires a kind of humility — the acknowledgment that another person's inner life is real, valid, and in important ways different from your own.
Empathy is also not agreement. You can fully understand why someone holds a belief or makes a choice without endorsing it. In fact, genuine understanding often makes it possible to disagree more precisely and more charitably — to engage with what someone actually thinks rather than with a caricature. This distinction is important because it removes a common obstacle. Many people resist empathizing with those whose views they oppose because they fear it means giving ground. It does not. It means understanding the territory you are actually working with.
Why Empathy Is Hard
If empathy were easy, the world would look very different. The difficulty is not moral — most people believe they should try to understand others. The difficulty is cognitive and social. Human brains are wired to distinguish between in-group and out-group, and to extend trust, generosity, and the benefit of the doubt far more readily to those who seem like us. This is an evolutionary inheritance, not a character flaw, but it shapes how we perceive and interpret the behavior of those who seem different from us in meaningful ways.
The social environments most people inhabit reinforce this tendency. When our networks — social, informational, geographic — are composed primarily of people who share our background, values, and worldview, we lose the regular practice of understanding people who do not. Assumptions fill the gap. We imagine we know what the other side thinks and why, and we often get it wrong in predictable ways: attributing to malice what is better explained by experience, assuming that those we disagree with have thought less carefully about a question than we have, flattening complex people into simple representatives of a position we oppose.
Empathy as a Skill
The research on empathy contains an encouraging finding: it is not fixed. Unlike personality traits that tend to remain stable over time, the capacity for empathy can be developed through deliberate practice. Psychologists distinguish between affective empathy — the automatic, emotional resonance we feel when we see someone in pain — and cognitive empathy, the learned ability to understand another person's perspective even in the absence of strong emotional cues. Cognitive empathy is what carries the most weight in peacebuilding contexts, and it is highly trainable.
One of the most reliable ways to develop it is through sustained contact with people whose lives and experiences differ from your own — not superficial contact, but the kind that involves working toward shared goals, having genuine conversations, and encountering each other as full human beings rather than as representatives of a category. Another is through narrative: reading literature, watching films, listening to oral histories, engaging with journalism that puts specific human stories at the center. These encounters activate the same cognitive and emotional machinery as real-world perspective-taking, and researchers have found measurable shifts in empathy following sustained engagement with narratives that center experiences different from the reader's own.
Empathy in Practice
Translating the capacity for empathy into actual behavior requires a few specific habits, most of which run counter to how charged conversations typically unfold.
Ask before assuming. When you encounter someone whose views or choices seem baffling or wrong, the instinct is often to explain them — to construct a theory about why they believe what they believe. A more empathic approach is to ask. Not challenging questions designed to expose contradiction, but genuine curiosity: How did you come to think about it that way? What experiences shaped your view? What do you feel is at stake here? People rarely get asked these questions, and the act of asking them often changes the conversation entirely.
Listen for the feeling, not just the position. Behind almost every strongly held position is an experience — something that happened, something that was lost, something that feels threatened. When you can hear what someone is protecting or grieving, the position often becomes more legible, even when you still disagree with it. This kind of listening requires slowing down and resisting the urge to prepare a response while the other person is still speaking.
Resist the rush to judgment. Judgment closes down the empathic process. Once a person has been categorized — as ignorant, as naive, as complicit — genuine curiosity about them becomes very difficult. Holding judgment in abeyance, at least temporarily, is what keeps the door open to understanding something new.
The Limits of Empathy Alone
Empathy is not sufficient, on its own, to resolve injustice or structural conflict. Understanding why someone holds a harmful view does not make that view less harmful. Empathizing with those who have caused a wrong does not excuse the wrong or relieve them of accountability. These are real limits, and they matter. Empathy that stops at understanding without moving toward action can become a substitute for it — a way of feeling engaged without doing the harder work of actually changing things.
There is also such a thing as empathy fatigue — the depletion that can come from sustained engagement with others' pain, particularly for those who work in caregiving, advocacy, or crisis response. Sustainable empathy requires boundaries, self-care, and community support. It cannot be demanded indefinitely without cost.
What empathy offers is not a solution but a precondition. Before conflict can be addressed, before trust can be built, before two people with genuinely different views can find common ground, there has to be some basic acknowledgment that the other person's inner life is real and worth understanding. Empathy provides that acknowledgment. Everything else — the hard conversations, the compromises, the work of repairing harm — becomes possible from there.
A Civic Obligation
In a democracy, the ability to understand those who are different from us is not just a personal virtue. It is a civic necessity. Self-governance requires that people who disagree find ways to make decisions together without resolving their disagreements by force. That requires, at minimum, the ability to see each other as fellow citizens with legitimate interests and perspectives, even when those interests and perspectives conflict sharply with our own.
That ability starts with empathy. Not with agreement, not with the disappearance of difference, but with the simple and difficult act of trying to understand what it is like to be someone else — and letting that understanding shape how we engage with them. Peace is not built on unanimity. It is built on the willingness to remain in relationship with people we do not fully understand, and to keep trying to understand them anyway.
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