On Culture: Is Empathy Toxic?
Is empathy toxic? How strong is the connection between oxytocin and empathy? Is there a war on empathy?
For the record, I am a strong believer in the power of empathy, in its salience to a leader's effectiveness - how vividly and frequently a leader notices, prioritizes, and responds to the emotions and perspectives of team members. I consider empathy a sensory capacity, a skill and a value.
I wonder whether some of those who devalue empathy lack this neurological/psychological capacity. I’ve “joked” about how those taking testosterone supplements might be inhibiting oxytocin and diminishing this capacity. My friend Professor Paul Zak has tied oxytocin to trust building and empathy in numerous academic studies and in his 2017 HBR article: The Neuroscience of Trust. An emerging academic theory is the "social salience hypothesis," which argues oxytocin doesn't create trust or empathy directly, but instead amplifies the salience of social cues in general, for better or worse depending on context.
Elon Musk is cited as attacking empathy on the Feb. 28, 2025 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. I’ve done so, not having seen the full context of his comments. He actually said "I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide,” citing Gad Saad’s framing of “suicidal empathy.”
Marketing & consumer behavior professor Gad Saad (also a YouTube sensation) provides a framing following an inverted-U model: too little empathy breeds psychopaths, too much breeds paralysis and civilizational self-harm, a dysregulated state he calls "suicidal empathy." Personally I believe his marketing thesis provides cover for selfish billionaires and politicians who want a rationale, not a diagnosis.
I’m a fan of practicing Wise Empathy as a leader. And, yes, there's a war on empathy and on valuing humans over technology, wealth and power.
Yours in curiosity, discovery & resistance,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder, Culturati
Artificial intelligence is transforming how work gets done, but it hasn't replaced the need for human judgment. If anything, it has made it more valuable. As AI delivers instant analysis and recommendations, leaders must still decide which opportunities to pursue, how to balance competing priorities, and how to lead people through uncertainty.
That raises an important question for organizations: How do we develop business judgment quickly enough to keep pace with technological change? How are MBA programs adapting to this challenge and what alternative pathways are being created to tackle this big workforce challenge?
Join us for a Culturati: LIVE conversation with Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Abilitie; Alexis Stokes, Dean of The Bill Munday School of Business at St. Edward’s University; and Kate Hogan, VP of Learning & Development at Hagerty, exploring how business education and workforce development are evolving for the age of AI. Leaders from industry and higher education will discuss what it takes to develop managers who can think strategically, collaborate across functions, and make sound business decisions in an increasingly AI-enabled world.
HBR: The Neuroscience of Trust
Harvard Business Review By Paul J. Zak Summary: Zak's research on oxytocin — the brain chemical shown to facilitate collaboration, empathy, and teamwork — led him to a framework for building organizational trust. Compared with employees at low-trust companies, those at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 40% less burnout. He identifies eight management behaviors that reliably trigger oxytocin release and build trust, including recognizing excellence, giving employees discretion, sharing information broadly, and leaders showing vulnerability by asking for help. The throughline: trust isn't a soft cultural nicety but a measurable neurochemical response — one leaders can deliberately cultivate, and one that compounds with purpose and empathy to reinforce itself. |
The Social Salience Hypothesis of Oxytocin
Biological Psychiatry By Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory and Ahmad Abu-Akel Summary: Oxytocin has been shown to modulate empathy, trust, in-group preference, and social memory, but the research is a mess of contradictory findings — the same hormone that increases trust and generosity in some studies also drives aggression and envy in others. Rather than picking a side, this paper proposes a unifying framework: oxytocin's real function isn't making people more prosocial, it's amplifying the salience of social cues, sharpening attention toward whatever social signal is most relevant in a given context — cooperative or threatening, in-group or out-group. That's why oxytocin increases trust, love, and empathy toward in-group members while simultaneously fueling defensive aggression toward outsiders, and why its effects shift depending on gender, personality, attachment style, and even psychopathology. The upshot: oxytocin isn't a simple "trust hormone" or "love hormone" — it's a volume knob for social attention, turning up whatever social signal (friend or threat) is already in the room, with real implications (and real risks) for using it therapeutically. |
How Leaders Can Practice Wise Empathy
Harvard Business Review By Nick Hobson and Gregory J. Depow Summary: Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire — leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood. The authors make the case for "wise empathy": recognizing that different emotional moments call for different responses, rather than treating empathy as one uniform reflex. Sharing in employees' negative emotions can accelerate a leader's own burnout, while responding instead with compassion and support protects both leader and team; the opposite holds for positive emotions, which benefit from genuine shared celebration. The stakes are concrete — unempathetic organizations risk losing $180 billion a year in attrition costs — and the authors lay out five steps to help leaders identify and calibrate the right emotional response for each moment, strengthening relationships and engagement without leaders losing their own footing in the process. |
Is There A Case For Performative Empathy?
Fast Company By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic Summary: Organizations rarely select leaders for empathy — they select for ambition and confidence, traits often at odds with it. So most leaders lack natural empathy and learn to perform it instead, which the author argues isn't necessarily a problem. Drawing on Paul Bloom's distinction between raw emotional empathy (biased, exhausting, prone to favoring people similar to us) and rational compassion (behaving decently without being emotionally consumed), the piece argues employees experience leaders behaviorally, not internally — they judge whether a manager listens, acknowledges emotions, and treats people with consideration, not what the manager actually feels. His conclusion: rehearsed, deliberate empathetic behavior isn't hypocrisy — it may simply be professionalism. |
A Communications Playbook for 2026
Fast Company By Martha Marchesi
Summary: As AI speeds up communication, leaders must know when to let automation drive and when to lead with empathy. The piece lays out four moments requiring different balances: when speed matters, technology sets the pace but leaders shape the message with empathy, since 86% of consumers prioritize empathy over response time; when stakes are high, employees trust leaders who show they care far more than those who don't, and human-written crisis messages read as more credible than AI ones; when personalization matters, data should inform but not replace human context; and when teams need future-proofing, emotional intelligence determines how well they adapt to new tools. Companies like Microsoft and USAA pair AI with empathy training — using automation for scale while reserving empathetic judgment for moments where trust is built. |
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