In academic and public life empathy is seen as a fundamental force of morality – a psychological phenomenon, rooted in biology, with profound effects in law, policy, and international relations. But the roots of empathy are not as firm as we like to think. The matching mechanism that distinguishes empathy from compassion, envy, schadenfreude, and sadism is a product of learning. Here I present a dual system model that distinguishes Empathy¹, an automatic process that catches the feelings of others, from Empathy², controlled processes that interpret those feelings. Research with animals, infants, adults and robots suggests that the mechanism of Empathy¹, emotional contagion, is constructed in the course of development through social interaction. Learned Matching implies that empathy is both agile and fragile. It can be enhanced and redirected by novel experience, and broken by social change.

在学术和公共生活中，同理心被视为道德的基本力量–一种源于生物学的心理现象，对法律，政策和国际关系产生深远影响。但是，同理心的根源并不像我们想的那样坚定。区分同情与同情，嫉妒，幸灾乐祸和虐待狂的匹配机制是学习的产物。在这里，我提出了一个双重系统模型，该模型将“移情^1”（捕捉别人的感觉的自动过程）与“移情^2”（受控的过程）区分开，该过程解释了这些感觉。对动物，婴儿，成人和机器人的研究表明，共情¹的机制情感传染，是在发展过程中通过社会互动而构建的。博学的匹配意味着同理既敏捷又脆弱。可以通过新颖的体验来增强和重定向它，而可以通过社会变革来打破它。