Empathic Accuracy

Definition

Empathic accuracy refers to the degree to which people can accurately infer the specific content of other people's thoughts and feelings. The ability to accurately read other people's thoughts and feelings (everyday mind reading) is a fundamental skill that affects people's adjustment in many different aspects of their lives.

For example, one researcher found that mothers who were more accurate in inferring their child's thoughts and feelings had children with more positive self-concepts. Other researchers have found that young adolescents who were good at reading other people's thoughts and feelings had better peer relationships and fewer personal adjustment problems than those who were poor at reading others. And, with regard to people's dating and marriage relationships, other researchers have found that accurately reading a relationship partner to anticipate a need, avert a conflict, or keep a small problem from escalating into a large one is likely to be healthy and adaptive.

History, Measurement, and Validation

Empathic accuracy is a subarea of interpersonal perception research—a field of study that has had a long [Page 295]tradition in psychology. As a broad generalization, it can be argued that interpersonal perception research began with the study of accuracy regarding stable and enduring dispositions, such as traits and attitudes, and then gradually turned to the study of accuracy regarding more unstable and transient dispositions such as current thoughts and emotions (feelings).

The study of empathic accuracy emerged in the late 1980s when psychologist William Ickes and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Arlington devised a method for measuring the degree to which research participants could accurately infer the specific content of other people's thoughts and feelings. The essential feature of their method is that a perceiver infers a target person's thoughts or feelings either from a videotaped record of their spontaneous interaction together (the unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm) or from a standard set of the videotaped interactions of multiple target persons (standard stimulus paradigm). In each case, the target persons have previously reported the actual thoughts and feelings they had at specific points during the videotaped interaction, thereby enabling the researchers to compare the perceiver's inferred thoughts and feelings with the target person's actual thoughts and feelings to assess the perceiver's empathic accuracy.

To obtain a measure of empathic accuracy, independent raters make subjective judgments about the similarity between the content of each actual thought or feeling and the content of the corresponding inferred thought or feeling. Then, the number of each perceiver's total accuracy points is divided by the maximum number of possible accuracy points to obtain a percent-correct empathic accuracy measure that can range from 0 to 100.

Across many studies conducted since 1988, this method of measuring empathic accuracy has proved to be both reliable and valid. Raters typically agree with each other in their judgments of how many accuracy points should be assigned to each of the various thought/feeling inferences. In addition, perceivers tend to be quite consistent in how well or how poorly they infer the specific content of different target persons' thoughts and feelings. That is, some perceivers are consistently good at reading others, other perceivers are consistently average, and still other perceivers are consistently poor.

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