Empathy Is a Competitive Advantage. It Can Also Be Faked.

A Stanford study found that VR practice plus AI/structured feedback helped people sound more empathetic in manager-employee conversations.

Participants used more empathetic language afterward, but their self-reported empathetic concern did not increase.

The results suggest empathy can be coached as a communication skill, even if the underlying feeling does not change.

That raises an important question for AI-era leadership: are managers becoming more genuinely empathetic, or just better at performing empathy?