The emergence of empathy

The ability to empathize with another individual or with groups can become an important interpersonal, not necessarily reciprocal, and therefore political competence. Empathy as a noun implies an act of "understanding," but as an action it implies a tool that serves as a means to certain ends. The aim of this book is to present an explanatory model of empathy along the lines of the extended mind thesis, which emphasizes the relationship between the environment and people. An explanation that emphasizes multicausality and emergence, showing that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, to account for the fact that the capacity for empathy is an emergent effect of the interactions of a system formed by a person and his or her environment.