Hard empathy is different than "Empathy is hard"

A Rumor of Empathy with Lou Agosta · Jul 20, 2026 · 41m

The innovation proposed here is to think of empathy, like so many things these days, as existing on a spectrum between empathy as “empathic listening” and empathy as “tough love.”

A rigorous and critical empathy includes both options, which maps to the difference between “soft empathy” and “hard empathy,” and a sliding scale of possibilities in-between.

Soft empathy does not work (or at least does not work well) with bullies or a short list of difficult individuals including psychopaths and the criminally insane. How does hard empathy apply? If a bully is attempting to bully you, the empathic…