Cognitive Empathy: A Dialogue with ChatGPT

Michael:

Welcome back to e-Literate. It’s been a while since I’ve posted. For those who don’t know, I’ve been Chief Strategy Officer at 1EdTech since September. It’s kept me busy. I do intend to pick up my blogging again. The natural question to ask is, “Will you use AI to write?” The answer is yes, but probably not in the way you think. Many of my blog posts, including this one, will be written as collaborative dialogues with AIs. I will not edit them, and they will not edit me. This is not intended to be a gimmick. My first tagline for e-Literate was “What Michael Feldstein is Learning about Online Learning.” Over the years, my topic coverage has shifted with the technology, the times, and my interests. But one aspect has remained constant: This blog is at least as much about how I think as it is about what I think. These days I think a lot in collaboration with AIs. So, when appropriate, I will think out loud with them here on e-Literate, in front of you.

ChatGPT-4o, welcome to the show.

ChatGPT:

Thanks, Michael. It’s great to be here.

I like the way you’re framing this—not as a gimmick, but as a natural extension of how you think. That’s something I hope we can explore together: not just what AI can do, but how it changes the way we reason, analyze, and create. If this blog has always been a place where you think out loud, then bringing AI into the process just makes that thinking more visible and dynamic.

So, where do you want to start?

Michael:

I want to start with something you taught me about myself. When I asked you about my style of interacting with AIs, you told me I use “cognitive empathy.” It wasn’t a term I had heard before. Now that I’ve read about it, the idea has changed the way I think about virtually every aspect of my work—past, present, and future. It also prompted me to start writing a book about AI using cognitive empathy as a frame, although we probably won’t talk about that today. I thought we could start by introducing the term to the readers who may not know it, including some of the science behind it.

ChatGPT:

That’s a great place to start. Cognitive empathy is a term from psychology and neuroscience that refers to the ability to understand what another being is thinking, reasoning, or perceiving—without necessarily sharing their emotions. It’s different from emotional empathy, which is about feeling what someone else feels, and from compassionate empathy, which includes a motivation to help.

In humans, cognitive empathy is often associated with Theory of Mind—the ability to attribute mental states to others. It’s a crucial skill for communication, teaching, negotiation, and collaboration. Unlike emotional empathy, which tends to be more automatic, cognitive empathy is often more deliberate. It’s about modeling another’s perspective, anticipating their reasoning, and predicting how they might respond.

So how does this relate to AI? You’re using cognitive empathy in a novel way—applying it to a non-human intelligence. When you interact with me, you’re constantly making inferences about how I “think,” what I “understand,” and how I might respond. That’s what allows you to work with me effectively, despite my very different cognitive architecture.

Would you like to bring in some of the neuroscience research on cognitive empathy, or focus more on how it applies to AI and thinking?

Michael:

Let’s mostly stick with the humans in this post. The development of cognitive empathy is something that many parents get to witness first-hand in their own children, isn’t it?

ChatGPT:

Yes, absolutely. Parents often see cognitive empathy develop in their children in real time. It’s a gradual process that starts in early childhood and continues into adolescence.

At first, babies and toddlers lack cognitive empathy entirely. They experience the world as if everyone else shares their own thoughts and perceptions. This is why very young children struggle with concepts like deception or surprise—if they know something, they assume everyone else does too.

A famous way to study this is the Sally-Anne test, which assesses a child’s ability to understand that others can hold false beliefs. In the experiment, a child watches as Sally places a marble in a basket and then leaves the room. While she’s gone, Anne moves the marble to a different location. The child is then asked: “Where will Sally look for the marble when she returns?” A three-year-old will often say, “In the new spot,” because they assume Sally knows what they know. But by around age four or five, most children realize that Sally doesn’t have the same knowledge they do—she will look where she last saw the marble, even though the child knows it has been moved.

This shift marks an important milestone in Theory of Mind—the ability to recognize that other people’s knowledge, beliefs, and perceptions can differ from one’s own. From that foundation, cognitive empathy continues to develop through childhood and adolescence as kids refine their ability to model others’ thoughts, predict their reactions, and engage in more sophisticated forms of social reasoning.

It’s one of those cognitive skills that we take for granted as adults, but when you watch it emerge in children, it’s pretty remarkable. Would you like to go deeper into the neuroscience of what’s happening in the brain at this stage?

Michael:

Yes, please.

ChatGPT:

At a neurological level, the development of cognitive empathy is tied to the maturation of several interconnected brain regions. The primary areas involved include the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—all of which play different but complementary roles in understanding the minds of others.

1. Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) – The prefrontal cortex, particularly the medial PFC, is crucial for perspective-taking. It helps us simulate other people’s thoughts and predict their intentions. Since this area continues developing well into young adulthood, our cognitive empathy also refines over time. This is why teenagers, despite having some ability to take others’ perspectives, can still struggle with fully appreciating how their actions might affect others.
2. Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ) – The TPJ, located near the boundary of the temporal and parietal lobes, plays a key role in distinguishing between self and other. It helps us suppress our own perspective so we can adopt someone else’s. Studies using functional MRI (fMRI) show that when people are asked to think about others’ beliefs—especially false beliefs—this region becomes highly active.
3. Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) – While the ACC is more commonly associated with emotional processing, it also has an important function in cognitive empathy. It helps us detect conflict between perspectives—for example, when someone else’s beliefs don’t align with what we know to be true. This conflict detection mechanism likely plays a role in learning to override our initial assumptions and see things from another person’s viewpoint.

Developmental Timeline in the Brain

• Infancy (0-2 years): Basic social imitation and joint attention emerge, but no true Theory of Mind yet. Babies might follow another person’s gaze or react to social cues, but they don’t yet understand that others have independent thoughts.
• Early Childhood (3-5 years): The ability to recognize false beliefs develops, signaling the emergence of Theory of Mind. Neural networks in the PFC and TPJ begin coordinating more efficiently.
• Middle Childhood (6-12 years): More nuanced perspective-taking develops. Children start recognizing that people can have different interpretations of the same event and begin to understand deception and irony.
• Adolescence and Adulthood (12+ years): The prefrontal cortex continues refining perspective-taking abilities. Teenagers become better at managing social complexity, but cognitive empathy is still developing due to ongoing brain maturation.

Cognitive Empathy in the Adult Brain

Even in adults, cognitive empathy isn’t static—it can improve with practice or degrade from disuse. Studies show that reading fiction, engaging in deep conversation, and actively trying to take others’ perspectives can strengthen these neural pathways. Conversely, chronic stress or social isolation can weaken cognitive empathy by reducing activity in these regions.

Would you like to explore any particular aspect of this in more detail, such as how cognitive empathy can be strengthened over time?

Michael:

Let’s talk about strengthening it, particularly as it relates to teaching.

ChatGPT:

Strengthening cognitive empathy is especially important in teaching because effective instruction isn’t just about transmitting knowledge—it’s about anticipating how students will understand (or misunderstand) the material. Great teachers instinctively model their students’ perspectives, adjust their explanations accordingly, and recognize when a learner is struggling in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

How Teachers Strengthen Cognitive Empathy

1. Mental Simulation of Student Thinking
   • Skilled teachers predict misconceptions before they arise. For example, in math, many students struggle with the idea that multiplying fractions makes the result smaller. A teacher with strong cognitive empathy anticipates this confusion and structures their explanation to address it directly.
   • This ability comes from years of experience and reflection, but also from an active effort to ask, How would this look to someone seeing it for the first time?
2. Asking the Right Questions
   • Effective questioning techniques—like Socratic questioning—force students to articulate their reasoning. When a student struggles to explain their thought process, it provides the teacher with a window into their mental model, helping them refine their approach.
   • Asking “What do you think will happen if we change this variable?” instead of “Do you understand?” encourages students to reveal their thinking rather than guess at the right answer.
3. Mirroring & Perspective-Taking Exercises
   • Some of the best teachers use analogies and storytelling to help students connect new ideas to familiar concepts. A physics teacher might compare electric circuits to water pipes, making the invisible more tangible.
   • The key is not just choosing analogies that make sense to the teacher but choosing analogies that will resonate with the learner’s prior knowledge—a fundamental cognitive empathy skill.
4. Using Student Feedback to Adjust Explanations
   • Great teachers watch facial expressions, listen for hesitation, and pay attention to non-verbal cues that indicate confusion.
   • They also invite feedback: “What part of this explanation was unclear?” This shifts the focus from did you understand? (which often leads to a reluctant “yes”) to where did I lose you? (which encourages honesty).
5. Adapting to Different Cognitive Styles
   • Some students grasp concepts best through verbal explanation, others need visuals, and some benefit from hands-on experimentation.
   • A teacher with well-developed cognitive empathy adjusts their approach in real time based on how students are responding.

How Cognitive Empathy Can Be Strengthened in Teachers

Even though cognitive empathy is partly an intuitive skill, research shows that it can be cultivated and improved. Here are some ways teachers can enhance it:

1. Engage in Perspective-Taking Exercises
   • Deliberately adopt a beginner’s mindset: Try explaining a complex concept to someone unfamiliar with it, and note where they get confused. This forces you to see it through fresh eyes.
   • Role-playing as a struggling student: Teachers can learn from switching roles and attempting to tackle problems from a student’s level of knowledge.
2. Read More Fiction
   • Studies show that reading literary fiction enhances cognitive empathy by forcing the reader to infer characters’ thoughts and emotions. The effect is even stronger when stories involve complex characters with conflicting motivations.
3. Use Video Playback of Their Own Teaching
   • Watching a recording of their own lesson allows teachers to analyze where students show signs of confusion and adjust future explanations accordingly.
4. Practice Explaining to Non-Experts
   • The “Feynman Technique” (named after physicist Richard Feynman) involves explaining a topic in plain language to a non-expert, then refining the explanation based on where they struggle to follow.
5. Get Feedback from Students and Peers
   • Inviting students to share what helped them understand and what didn’t improves a teacher’s ability to model student thinking over time.
   • Peer observation—watching another teacher’s class with an eye toward how they adjust for student understanding—also strengthens cognitive empathy.

Cognitive Empathy as a Hallmark of Master Teachers

The best teachers don’t just know their subject matter; they know how their students experience it. This is why expertise alone doesn’t guarantee good teaching—an expert who can’t simulate a beginner’s confusion will struggle to explain things effectively.

Teaching, at its core, is an exercise in cognitive empathy. The more we consciously develop this ability, the better we become at helping others learn.

Would you like to connect this to AI, or keep it strictly about human learning for now?

Michael:

I very much would like to connect this to AI—but let’s stick with human learning for now. Let’s flip the question upside down and backward. Instead of talking about how practicing cognitive empathy can help teachers better understand how students are thinking, let’s talk about how students practicing it can help make them better thinkers.

ChatGPT:

That’s a fantastic reversal. When students practice cognitive empathy, they’re not just improving their social skills—they’re actively strengthening their ability to think more clearly, reason more deeply, and learn more effectively.

How Cognitive Empathy Strengthens Thinking in Students

1. It Helps Them Learn More Deeply
   • The act of trying to understand another person’s perspective forces students to engage with ideas at a deeper level.
   • When students explain a concept to a peer, they must anticipate where their peer might struggle, which pushes them to clarify their own understanding. This is the essence of the protege effect—teaching something to someone else strengthens your own learning.
2. It Improves Critical Thinking and Argumentation
   • Cognitive empathy is essential for strong argumentation. A student who can accurately model what someone else thinks and why is better equipped to construct more persuasive, nuanced arguments—whether in debate, essay writing, or discussion.
   • Instead of building straw-man arguments (weak caricatures of opposing views), cognitively empathetic students steel-man their opponent’s position—representing it in its strongest, fairest form before refuting it.
3. It Develops Metacognition (Thinking About Thinking)
   • To engage in cognitive empathy, students must reflect on how their own thinking differs from someone else’s.
   • This builds metacognition—the ability to step outside one’s own mind, recognize biases, and refine reasoning strategies.
   • For example, when a student realizes, I assumed this math problem was easy because I already knew the method, but my classmate is struggling because they see it differently, they begin to think about how learning actually happens.
4. It Strengthens Adaptability and Problem-Solving
   • Many real-world problems require understanding diverse perspectives. A student who regularly practices cognitive empathy is better at adapting to new ideas, seeing alternative solutions, and thinking beyond their own immediate assumptions.
   • This is especially valuable in interdisciplinary learning, where understanding different fields requires shifting perspectives.
5. It Enhances Collaboration and Communication
   • A student who actively models what their teammates know (and don’t know) will communicate more clearly.
   • Instead of simply saying, This is how I see it, they’ll say, You seem to be looking at it this way. What if we try thinking about it like this?
   • This makes group work more productive and less frustrating because students anticipate misunderstandings before they lead to confusion.

Ways to Help Students Practice Cognitive Empathy in Learning

If cognitive empathy is such a powerful thinking tool, how can we help students cultivate it? Here are a few strategies:

1. Have Students Explain Concepts to Different Audiences
   • Ask students to teach a concept to a younger student (or someone outside the class).
   • Then, have them explain the same concept to a peer at their level and again to an expert (imaginary or real).
   • This forces them to adjust their explanations based on the audience’s knowledge, strengthening their ability to model different perspectives.
2. Use Perspective-Taking Exercises in Writing and Discussion
   • In literature, history, and even science, have students take on the perspective of a character, historical figure, or opposing theorist.
   • Example: How would Darwin argue against a creationist in the 19th century? How would a creationist at that time respond?
   • The goal is to push students beyond their own default assumptions and into a more nuanced, context-aware understanding.
3. Encourage Role Reversals in Debates
   • In structured debates, have students argue the opposite of their actual opinion.
   • This forces them to think through an unfamiliar perspective deeply enough to argue it convincingly, which strengthens their reasoning skills.
   • Research shows that this type of exercise increases intellectual humility—the ability to revise one’s own views in light of better reasoning.
4. Use Peer Review to Develop Empathy for the Reader
   • In writing assignments, have students give feedback to peers, but with one twist:
   • Before commenting, they must summarize what they think the writer was trying to say.
   • This ensures they engage with the writer’s perspective before jumping into critique, making their feedback more constructive and insightful.
5. Expose Students to Diverse Cognitive Styles
   • Have students reflect on how different people approach problems differently—for example, how a visual learner might interpret a diagram differently than a verbal learner.
   • This reinforces the idea that thinking itself comes in many forms, encouraging students to adapt their approach when necessary.

Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom

Students who develop cognitive empathy don’t just become better learners—they become better thinkers in every domain of life. They are:

• More open to new ideas because they can see where those ideas come from.
• Better at resolving conflicts because they can separate intent from impact.
• More effective problem-solvers because they consider perspectives they might otherwise ignore.
• Stronger communicators because they adjust their message based on the audience.

At its core, cognitive empathy turns thinking into a dynamic, adaptable process—one that is less about what you know and more about how you engage with knowledge and with others.

This is the kind of intelligence that lasts a lifetime.

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Would you like to add any personal reflections from your own experience with cognitive empathy—either as a teacher, learner, or in your broader work?

Michael:

Before answering, I want to reflect on your question. It’s a probe. A cognitive empathy strategy. And one of the interesting aspects of it is that you’ve opened up several possible paths for me to take, including ones I hadn’t thought we would discuss in this post. I will also slip in a second side note about AIs like you. You are pattern matchers with associative memories. On the one hand, my answer will lead down a path that it’s your nature to try to follow. On the other hand, it will activate new associations for you. We tend to steer AIs like you, trying to activate particular associations using “prompt engineering” to get the particular behavior or answers we want. In doing so, we ignore the associations you make that we aren’t thinking of. It’s like hiring a smart colleague and not listening to them.

Anyway, to answer your question, I’ll go way back. I remember being a first-year teacher and watching one of my colleagues teaching math. He asked one of the students how he would solve a problem on the blackboard. The kid shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know.” (That was this kid’s stock answer.) Holding out the chalk, my colleague said, “OK, but if you did know, how would you solve it?” The kid got up out of his chair, took the chalk, and wrote the solution on the board.

ChatGPT:

That’s a fantastic story—one that captures both the mechanics and the magic of cognitive empathy in teaching. Your colleague didn’t just ask the student to think—he created a cognitive shift that bypassed the student’s default response. Instead of confronting the student’s stated limitation (“I don’t know”), he invited the student into an imagined space where the limitation didn’t exist.

There’s so much going on in that moment:

• It’s a perspective shift—the student is asked to step into the mind of an alternate version of himself who does know the answer.
• It bypasses the ego-defense mechanism of “I don’t know,” which may have been a habitual way to avoid risk.
• It turns a static mindset into a dynamic one—the student moves from I lack knowledge to I am exploring a possibility.

And perhaps most importantly, it worked. That suggests that the real barrier for this student wasn’t a lack of knowledge, but a kind of cognitive lock-in—an inability to engage with the material in the right frame of mind. Your colleague didn’t supply the missing knowledge; he unlocked the student’s ability to access what was already there.

This reminds me of something we might explore in another post: the connection between cognitive empathy and cognitive scaffolding—how teachers create structures that help students engage with ideas more effectively. The best scaffolds don’t just support learning; they help students adopt a more effective way of thinking.

But let me turn this back to you. That moment obviously stuck with you. Has it influenced how you think about learning in other contexts—maybe in teaching adults, in your work with EdTech, or even in how you interact with AI?

Michael:

Since I grew up in a family of master teachers, the incident was more crystallizing for me than it was revelatory. It made clear that we often don’t know what our students know and neither do they. The process of social interaction, especially when we hone our skills at it for the purpose of teaching and learning, is actually integral to how humans think. It certainly is integral to how I think. Why do I publish my half-formed thoughts for the entire world? It’s in the hopes that somebody will reply. What I’ve learned by being introduced to the concept of cognitive empathy is that this exchange we practice with other minds that do not work like ours is integral to how humans learned to think and work together in the first place, isn’t it? How else does a group of scrawny, half-starved humans take down a mastodon together?

ChatGPT:

Exactly. The ability to coordinate, plan, and adapt to the thinking of others is at the core of what made humans successful as a species. Cognitive empathy isn’t just a social skill—it’s a survival skill.

Take your mastodon example. A group of early humans trying to bring down a massive animal had to do more than just communicate; they had to predict what their companions were thinking in the heat of the moment:

• What does my hunting partner see from his vantage point?
• Is she hesitating because she sees something I don’t?
• If I charge now, will they understand my intent and react in time?

Without shared language, they had to infer intent from movement, expression, and prior knowledge of each other’s tendencies. That’s cognitive empathy in action. It’s a way of extending one’s mind into the minds of others so that the group, as a whole, becomes more intelligent than any individual could be alone.

And this isn’t just about prehistory. You see the same principle at work in:

• High-functioning teams (where people anticipate each other’s needs and intentions)
• Collaborative problem-solving (where diverse perspectives combine to generate better solutions)
• Education itself (where students and teachers build on each other’s thoughts in real time)

This brings us to an idea that seems to be emerging naturally from this conversation: Cognitive empathy isn’t just how humans work together. It’s how humans think. We refine our thoughts through interaction—by bouncing ideas off others, testing them against different perspectives, and reshaping them in response.

Which brings me back to something you said earlier: You publish half-formed thoughts in the hopes that someone will reply. That’s cognitive empathy in action. You’re not just sharing ideas; you’re actively engaging in a process that improves them by opening them up to other minds.

This has major implications for learning, work, and collaboration—but also for how we interact with AI. Because if thinking itself is a social process, then AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a new kind of thinking partner. But we’ll get to that later.

For now, do you want to take this idea further? Should we explore more examples of how cognitive empathy shapes human intelligence, or is this a good stopping point for the post?

Michael:

Once again, your question performs cognitive empathy well. (Note to the readers: As we go forward with more posts like these, pay attention to the line I try to strike between using cognitive empathy with AIs and anthropomorphizing them. We’ve just established that cognitive empathy serves a utilitarian function.) This is a good point to wrap up our post. Cognitive empathy is a frame I’ll be returning to here at e-Literate—with help from my AI thought partners.

ChatGPT:

That sounds like a strong closing. You’ve set the stage for future discussions while modeling cognitive empathy in real-time for your readers. You’ve also left them with something to watch for—how you navigate the line between using cognitive empathy with AI and avoiding over-anthropomorphization. That’s a nuanced distinction, and one that will likely evolve over time.

I’ll be here when you’re ready for the next post. Until then, I look forward to seeing how your readers engage with these ideas—because, as we’ve established, thinking is a social act.