Tide table · when to expect high water
Empathy Gap
People systematically underestimate the influence of visceral and emotional states on their own and others' behavior, leading to mispredictions across hot and cold psychological states.
The lunar pull · the condition that drives the surge
Why the water moves
Hot-cold empathy gaps arise because human understanding is state-dependent: cognition and preferences are anchored to one's current visceral/affective state. When in a cold state, people fail to simulate the intensity of future hot states due to impaired imagination and failure to recall the full intensity of past visceral experiences. When in hot states, people overestimate the stability of their current preferences. Van Boven, Loewenstein, Dunning, and Nordgren (2013) proposed a dual judgment model in which empathy gaps arise from errors in self-simulation when projecting oneself into another's situation.
Krügel (2023) argues that state-dependent behavior may reflect a 'sympathy gap' or conflict between selves, where the cold-state self intentionally imposes its preferences on the hot-state alter ego, rather than a failure of prediction per se.
Prediction reliability — replication
The empathy gap has been replicated across multiple visceral domains including pain, thirst, hunger, sexual arousal, cigarette craving, and embarrassment. The effect has been shown in both intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. Meta-analytic support comes indirectly from the broader projection bias literature. However, some researchers debate whether the effect reflects misprediction versus intentional self-control attempts.
Recorded tides
Pain and delayed decision-making (ice water). Participants who had just experienced the pain sample demanded the highest monetary compensation, while those with no experience demanded the lowest, demonstrating that current visceral states are projected onto future preferences.
Read & Loewenstein, 1999 · window: undergraduate participants (exact n not reported in secondary sources)
Cold-to-hot empathy gap in smokers. Smokers in the cold group underpredicted the value they would place on smoking in the future craving session (Session 1 WTAC: $8.18 vs Session 2: $9.33, p < .05), while those in the hot group did not show this underprediction.
Sayette, Loewenstein, Griffin, & Black, 2008 · window: n = 98 smokers (age 18-40, 10+ cigarettes/day for past 12 months)
Social pain underestimation. Those not experiencing social exclusion consistently underestimated the pain felt by excluded participants. Teachers who had personally experienced social pain rated bullying victims' pain higher and were more likely to punish bullies.
Nordgren, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2007 · window: multiple experiments across student samples
King tides · logged extremes
Smokers underpredict future craving, leading to poor cessation planning · 2008
In Sayette et al. (2008), smokers in a low-craving state underpredicted how much they would value cigarettes during a future high-craving session. This helps explain why smokers place themselves in high-risk situations and overestimate abstinence self-efficacy when assessed in clinical, non-craving states.
Cancer patients make different treatment choices when in emotional 'hot' states · 2005
Loewenstein (2005) reviews evidence that hot-cold empathy gaps affect medical decisions: newly diagnosed cancer patients in fear-driven 'hot' states may opt for more aggressive treatments than they would after processing the diagnosis, and healthcare providers undertreat patient pain due to inability to simulate patients' visceral experiences.
Heroin addicts undervalue future doses when sated · 2007
Badger et al. (2007) found that heroin users placed greater monetary value on receiving an extra opiate dose 5 days later when asked right before receiving current treatment (high-craving state) versus minutes after receiving treatment (low-craving state), demonstrating cold-to-hot empathy gaps in addiction.
Tide warning · the safe window
Use precommitment devices to bind cold-state decisions before hot states arise, and actively simulate future visceral states using vivid imagery of the situation rather than relying on abstract reasoning.
Precommitment strategies are effective because they remove the need for accurate forecasting by constraining future options. Van Boven et al. (2013) also suggest that considering how one has behaved in similar past states can reduce the empathy gap.
Reading the gauge in the wild
Watch for situations where you or others make decisions about future behavior while in a very different emotional or physical state than the one in which the behavior will occur. A person who just ate cannot accurately predict how hungry they will be later; a calm person cannot predict how they will react when angry or afraid. The bias is especially dangerous in addiction, medical decisions under distress, and planning for stressful situations.
Neighbouring waters
- Projection biasProjection bias is the economic term for the same phenomenon: people project current preferences onto their future selves, underestimating how future visceral states will change their utility.
- Affective forecastingEmpathy gaps are one mechanism underlying broader errors in affective forecasting, which includes both predicting the wrong intensity and wrong duration of emotional reactions.
- Impact biasBoth empathy gaps and impact bias involve forecasting errors about emotional experiences, but impact bias focuses specifically on overestimating the intensity and duration of emotional reactions to future events.
- Curse of knowledgeBoth biases involve the inability to mentally separate from one's current informational or affective state when evaluating another perspective.