Is it enough to put yourself in another’s shoes? Thoughts about the relationship between empathy and prosocial behavior

Abstract

Empathy is the ability to understand another one’s mental states in terms of emotions and thoughts. In the pubblic mind, often, this skill is directly related to the ability to act in a prosocial, or moral, way. Clinical literature shows us that some neural deficits and psychological disorders can actually cause a significant lack of empathic ability and therefore the implementation of socially maladaptive behaviours, even criminal. However, there are also some diagnostic categories characterised by failure to “put yourself in another’s shoes”, but patients don’t usually act in an antisocial way; then, not all the criminals meet the criteria for psychiatric diagnosis. So, the question is: only low levels of empathy leads to antisocial behaviours? And if so, does therapeutic interventions for empathic skill entail moral enhancement? The present work aim to answer to all those issues through a multilevel and cross-discilplinary analysis of psychology, neurosciences and philosophy literature.