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Bridging the empathy perception gap fosters social connection

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Young adults face a rising tide of mental illness and loneliness. We propose that an overlooked barrier for social connection is how people perceive each other’s empathy. Here, our longitudinal study of an undergraduate student community (N = 5,192) reveals that undergraduates who perceive their peers as empathic report better current and future well-being. Yet we document an ‘empathy perception gap’: people systematically see others as less empathic than others see themselves. Students who perceived their peers as less empathic were less willing to take social risks and grew more isolated over time. To disrupt this cycle, we conducted two field experiments that presented students with data on their peers’ self-reported empathy and behavioural nudges to encourage social risk taking. These interventions reduced the empathy perception gap, increased social behaviours and expanded social networks months later. This work offers a promising, scalable strategy to cultivate social well-being, simply by presenting people with data about each other.

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Fig. 1: The vicious cycle of empathy misperception.
Fig. 2: Empathy perception is associated with well-being and social connectedness.
Fig. 3: Gaps in empathy perception between perceived empathy of others and aggregated self-reported ratings from community members.
Fig. 4: Using normative campaign posters and in-person workshops to shift students’ empathy perception and social risk behaviours.
Fig. 5: Intervention effects on social risk behaviours, empathy perception, social connectedness and well-being.

Data availability

Data used in the analyses are available in a publicly accessible OSF repository at https://osf.io/u584x/files. Note that to protect participant privacy, demographic variables are not shared publicly.

Code availability

All code was written using available R packages and has been provided at https://osf.io/u584x/files.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (no. 1R01MH125974-01 awarded to J.Z.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

We thank D. Ogunbamowo, G. Yeung and A. Ferreira da Motta Costa for their help collecting data; V. Khandelwal and X. Zhao for their feedback on study design and writing; H. Echo Huang for designing the posters used in Study 3a and Study 3b; Y. He, B. Xu and C. Brennan for developing the Well Ping application; and S. Doğa Karaca for checking the replication materials. We are also grateful to the staff at Stanford University for their institutional support, particularly C. Wong Mineta, J. Calvert, L. Lambeth and the Frosh 101 program team: P. Hanlon-Baker, N. Wilson and S. Quoc Doan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Rui Pei, Annabel Bouwer, Emily Huang & Jamil Zaki

  2. Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Samantha J. Grayson

  3. Department of Communication, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Ruth E. Appel, Serena Soh & Gabriella M. Harari

  4. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Sydney B. Garcia

  5. Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Matthew O. Jackson

  6. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Matthew O. Jackson

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Contributions

R.P., S.J.G., R.E.A., S.S., S.B.G., M.O.J., G.M.H. and J.Z. designed the studies and experiments. R.P., S.J.G., A.B. and E.H. implemented the study and collected the data. R.P., S.J.G., R.E.A. and S.S. analysed the data. R.P., S.J.G., R.E.A. and J.Z. drafted the paper. All authors provided critical feedback and approved the final paper for submission.

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Correspondence to Rui Pei or Jamil Zaki.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Nicholas Epley, Leah Sharman and Simone Shamay-Tsoory for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Empathy perception is associated with psychological well-being and social connectedness.

a,b. Standardized regression coefficients from mixed-effect multilevel models examining the association between empathy perception and (a) psychological wellbeing as well as (b) social connectedness (Nparticipants = 4970; NObservations = 14437). Both models include covariates for individual traits, social behaviors, social network characteristics, and academic performance. The standardized regression coefficient for empathy perception was statistically significant in panel a (β = 0.02, 95% CI: [0.00, 0.03], P = 0.01), and b (β = 0.08, 95% CI: [0.03, 0.12], P = 0.0004). P-values are two-sided, and no adjustments were made for multiple comparisons. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Blue bars indicate significant positive coefficients, orange bars indicate significant negative coefficients, and grey bars indicate non- significant coefficients.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Standardized regression coefficients for baseline empathy perception predicting.

(a) psychological wellbeing as well as. (b) social connectedness in the next quarter after controlling for baseline wellbeing and social connectedness, respectively (Nparticipants = 4970; NObservations = 14437). Blue = significant positive coefficient (p < 0.05); orange = significant negative coefficient (p < 0.05); gray = not significant coefficient.

Extended Data Table 1 Cross-sectional correlation between empathy perception, well-being, and social connectedness across all samples in Study 1
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Longitudinal associations between empathy perception and well-being as well as empathy perception
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–4, Tables 1 and 2, Methods, Results and Frosh 101 course material.

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Pei, R., Grayson, S.J., Appel, R.E. et al. Bridging the empathy perception gap fosters social connection. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02307-1

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