"𝐖𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧."

Years ago I was a facilitator for a highly structured commercial management training program, essentially a discussion planning system. The first "Key Principle" was "listen and respond with empathy." Participants scripted and rehearsed and delivered on the principle, usually pretty convincingly, before moving on to telling the practice employee they were in trouble, or being laid off, or would have to start working Saturdays...

I remember back then a certain L&D author writing, "We are very good at teaching people to pretend to listen," and thought at the time, "We are good at teaching people to pretend to be empathetic."

Can empathy be taught? To AI? There are lots of research reports looking at what aspects of human behavior/communication AI can successfully be trained on. Here are 2, one from Ziao et al. and the other from Kumar et al., that crossed my path this week. Ziao et al. explicitly discuss using LLMs to teach "empathy"; Xiao et al., which I see as related, focus on whether AI can move beyond tasks to deeper aspects of teamwork like collaboration and "fragile communication".

My interest is in how empathy is defined. Xiao et al.’s study participants view empathy as an inner social state that is difficult for machines to replicate. Kumar et al. define empathy for their study as a set of linguistic strategies (prescriptive behaviors like validating emotions).

What do you think?

Kumar, A., Poungpeth, N., Yang, D., Lambert, B., & Groh, M. (2026). Practicing with Language Models Cultivates Human Empathic Communication. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.15245

Xiao, Q., Hu, X. E., Whiting, M. E., Karunakaran, A., Shen, H., & Cao, H. (2025). AI Hasn't Fixed Teamwork, But It Shifted Collaborative Culture: A Longitudinal Study in a Project-Based Software Development Organization (2023-2025). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10956