Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Consciousness and Cognition

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog

Empathy and the responsiveness to social affordances

Julian Kiverstein
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 141, 1012GC Amsterdam, Netherlands

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The direct perception theory of empathy claims that we can immediately experience a per-
Received 20 January 2015 son’s state of mind. I can see for instance that my neighbour is angry with me in his bodily
Revised 5 May 2015 countenance. I develop a version of the direct perception theory of empathy which takes
Accepted 7 May 2015
this perceptual capacity to depend upon recognising in what way the other person is
Available online 26 May 2015
responsive to the affordances the environment provides. By recognising which possibilities
for action are relevant to a person, I can thereby understand something about the meaning
Keywords:
they give to the world. I come to share something of their perspective on the world, and
Empathy
Direct perception theory
this allows me to grasp based on my perception of them something about their current
Shared affect state of mind. I argue that shared affect plays a central role in this perceptual capacity.
Affordances Shared affect allows me to orient my attention to possibilities for action that matter to
Body subject the other person. I end by briefly discuss the implications of this view of empathy for
Intersubjectivity the disturbances in so-called ‘‘cognitive empathy’’ that are found in people diagnosed with
Autism spectrum disorder autism spectrum disorder.
Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in empathy with a 300% growth in the articles on PUBMED with the
word ‘‘empathy’’ appearing in the title (Decety & Cowell, 2014: 337). Empathy has made appearances in politician’s
speeches, in studies of autism, psychopathy, ideology, morality, justice, gender, the media and art (Coplan, 2011).
Empathy seems to be pretty fundamental in our social life, but what is it?
Decety and Cowell (2014) capture well the meaning the term ordinarily has for most people in relating empathy to
‘‘understanding others’ feelings and subjective psychological states’’ and to a process that motivates ‘‘prosocial behaviours’’
such as ‘‘sharing, comforting and helping’’, and in general ‘‘caring for others’’. However beyond these generalities, there is
little agreement about how best to define empathy.1 There is also widespread disagreement about the role of empathy in
the life of pro-social animals. On the one side, we find theories that take empathy to be a trait humans share with many other
species. These theories point to the many striking examples in the animal world of species that exhibit a robust tendency to help
conspecifics in distress often at great personal risk and cost. According to one influential model – the ‘‘perception–action model’’
of empathy – this is because individuals of many species ‘‘feel’’ distress when an animal of the same species is in distress. They
will automatically engage in prosocial helping behaviour that brings the distress of other animal to an end (Preston & de Waal,
2002). Social animals tend to help those in distress because they feel something of the other’s suffering. This feeling of distress
on behalf of the other motivates them to act so as to end the other’s suffering.

E-mail address: j.d.kiverstein@uva.nl

1
The divergent conceptualisations of empathy in the empirical and philosophical literature is a point John Michael has also fruitfully explored (see Michael,
2013).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.05.002
1053-8100/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542 533

The perception–action model of empathy has been extensively criticised for failing to adequately conceptualise the dif-
ference between automatic processes of emotional contagion and motor mimicry, and cognitively controlled processes of
empathy. In emotional contagion, an emotion spreads from one person to others in a group: you feel sad, I see your sadness,
and I also feel sad. Motor mimicry is the involuntary and nonconscious copying of the mannerisms, postures, facial expres-
sions and other behaviours of a person with whom one is interacting. Both of these processes happen unconsciously, auto-
matically, effortlessly, and involuntarily. In emotional contagion, the perception of an emotion in you unconsciously primes
me to feel something similar. In motor mimicry, the perception of your behaviour unconsciously primes me to behave
similarly. There are good conceptual and empirical reasons for distinguishing empathy from contagion and mimicry.
Many theorists take empathy to be a cognitively controlled imaginative process (e.g. Coplan, 2011). Empathy, according
to these theorists, requires me to effortfully, and voluntarily set-aside my own perspective on the world so as to imagine
what it would be like to be in the situation of the other person. Thus it involves a clear self-other differentiation. I have
my point of view on the world which I set aside in order to imagine how the world might seem from your point of view.
In emotional contagion and motor mimicry, by contrast, the distinction between self and other becomes blurred. I share
in your sadness so that there is no longer a clear difference between your sadness and mine.
The focus of the affective response is also different in empathy and contagion. In empathy, the emotion I undergo is
understood as being about the situation of other person with whom I am empathising. In contagion this is not the case,
and the emotion I undergo is about my own situation. I may experience personal distress because you are distressed, but
personal distress is a self-oriented aversive emotional response. Moreover, such an aversive response has been shown to
interfere with empathic concern (Batson et al., 1997; Decety & Jackson, 2004; Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007). Finally, empa-
thy has also been shown to be modulated by contextual factors and by appraisal processes (De Vignemont & Singer, 2006;
Jacob, 2011). These findings have been taken to be grounds for denying that empathy is automatic, as seems to be the case
with contagion and mimicry.2
Many philosophers and psychologists have taken this conceptual distinction between empathy, contagion and mimicry to
have the consequence that empathy plays only a highly restricted, and narrow role in human social life. De Vignemont and
Jacob (2012) for instance have taken great care in their recent work to distinguish empathy from sympathy, contagion and
perspective-taking.3 The consequence of this definition is a view of empathy as a cognitive process people very rarely use in
their everyday social lives.
I will take issue with the claim that empathy occupies only a very special and remote corner of human social life.4 The
direct perception theory (DPT) of social cognition5 which I defend and develop in this paper takes empathy to instead occupy
a foundational place in the social life of humans. The rest of my paper will have the aim of explaining how it is possible for
empathy to play this foundational role.

1. The direct perception theory

The direct perception theory of social cognition is typically presented as a rival to the currently dominant theory of mind
approaches that take social cognition to be a matter of mindreading. Mindreading is the ability people have (and probably
other social animals also in some stripped down form) to identify the mental states of others, the other person’s beliefs,
desires, intentions, emotions and experiences. As is well known, there are a number of ongoing debates about the nature
of this ability. Some have taken mindreading to be (at least in part) an ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others, and
to imaginatively reconstruct the perspective of the other person on the world (Gordon, 1995; Goldman, 2006). I must first
work out what I would believe, desire, intend, or feel if I were in your situation. Only in this way can I understand what you
believe, desire, intend or feel. Others take mindreading to be a matter of theory-driven inference. Mindreading capacities
draw on a rich body of knowledge about human psychology either acquired through learning, or as an innate endowment.
This knowledge is employed to infer what mental states the person is most likely to have on the basis of how they have
behaved (Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Leslie, 1994). There are of course also mixed positions that combine something from
both these views (Nichols & Stich, 2003; Goldman, 2006).
Theory of mind views (be they of the ST, TT or blended varieties) all share in common an assumption that we understand
other people only through mindreading. The direct perception (DP) theory claims that before we engage in mindreading, we
already have immediate experiential access to the minds of others. Another person’s subjective mental life is not an
unobservable hidden cause of their behaviour; it is expressed in the way in which they comport themselves in the world.
In ordinary social interactions, people assume and never think to question that they are dealing with another person with
his or her own subjective point of view on the world. This is something each person recognizes immediately the moment
they enter into a social interaction, and we very rarely, if ever, find ourselves questioning this everyday certainty. In ordinary
everyday circumstances it never occurs to us to consider the possibility, for example, that this other person might in fact by a
cleverly disguised robot.

2
See Van Baaren, Janssen, Chartrand, and Dijksterhuis (2009), Stel et al. (2010) and Kavanagh, Suhler, Churchland, and Winkielman (2011) for evidence that
motor mimicry is also modulated by such factors as group identity, affiliation, goals and by how much we like a person.
3
Similarly restrictive philosophical analyses of empathy can be found in the work of Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Coplan, 2011; Goldie, 2000).
4
I will not have anything further to say about empathy in other non-human animals in this paper.
5
Gallagher (2001, 2008), Ratcliffe (2007), Zahavi (2008, 2011, 2014) and Krueger and Overgaard (2012).
534 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542

Empathy, as I will understand it, is a basic perceptual capacity that is the ground of this certainty about the subjectivity of
other people, and their states of mind. People do not typically think to question the existence of the external world because
the external world is so evidently given to them in their perceptual experiences. The same is true of the subjective mental life
of other people. We take the other’s person’s subjectivity to be a given, something to be taken for granted, and we do so on
the basis of perception. Empathy forms a part of the background understanding that people draw on in their everyday lives,
and that enables people to deal with each other and the world fluently and without thought. Empathy is prior to mindreading
then in the sense that it is a part of the background understanding of the social world that is taken for granted in mindread-
ing. In mindreading we wonder what mental states the other person might have that are explanatory of their behaviour, and
what they might do given that their perspective on the world is different from our own. This is to assume already that which
we grasp immediately in empathising with other people. It is to assume that we share a world with other people, and that
other people have a subjective perspective on this shared world that differs from our own, but that we can nevertheless
grasp. Empathy, as I will understand it, is a perceptual capacity that is the ground of these presuppositions.
DPT differs from standard theories of mindreading such as TT or ST insofar as the target of explanation is a type of under-
standing of other people that is presupposed as in the background whenever we engage in mindreading. The DPT as I will
develop it is thus not a theory of mindreading in which we are attempting to identify the propositional attitudes that are the
cause of the other person’s behaviour. The DPT is instead attempting to characterise a type of empathy that underwrites our
everyday perceptual certainty about the states of mind of other people.
How is it possible for me to be certain about states of mind that are not my own, and that belongs to another person? Each
person has their own, subjective perspective on the world: you have your own perspective on this world, and I have mine.
Each person’s perspective will often also differ qualitatively in its intentional directedness towards the world. Yet in empathy
I have suggested, I am able to immediately grasp your subjective perspective on the world on the basis of my perceptual
experience of you. I can for instance immediately recognise that you are happy or sad, and I thereby come to grasp something
about your subjective state of mind, your first-person point of view or perspective on the world. How can I on the basis of my
perceptual experience of you, come to share your perspective on the world when this perspective on the world is qualita-
tively different (in terms of its intentional directedness at the world) from mine? In order to address this question it will
prove helpful to have some additional conceptual terminology in place. I do some of this preliminary conceptual work in
the next section. In Section’s 3 and 4, I use the framework I have laid out in Section 2 to develop an answer to the question
I have just raised about how perception can deliver knowledge of a perspective of another subject on the world. It will be
argued that perception gives us epistemic access not to a person’s propositional attitudes. It gives us access instead to a more
basic form of intentional directedness to the world which I will characterise as a subject’s responsiveness to the affordances
of the surrounding environment.

2. The intentional structure of empathy

Empathy is a perception-based capacity that allows me to grasp (1) that other subjects of experience exist; (2) what a
person is experiencing or doing; and sometimes also (3) why a person has a specific state of mind, or why a person is carrying
out a particular action.6 Imagine I open the front door of my house to be greeted by a person shaking their fist and shouting at
me. Their whole countenance is animated by their anger, and this is something I see immediately when I see their face lit up
with ‘‘malice and cruelty’’.7 I see that they are anger and that I am the object of their anger.
I might then wonder to myself: why is it that this person is angry with me? Sometimes I can answer this question just in
grasping the meaning of the person’s angry gestures, the intentional object of the person’s anger. As soon as I grasp what the
emotion is about (the ‘‘intentional object’’ of their emotion) I may also grasp something of why the person is angry. However
often to answer this why question I will need to know more than just the specific object of the other states of mind. I will
need to delve more deeply into the other person’s psychology. I may need to know more about their past, or about what they
are likely to do in the future (Zahavi, 2014: 168). Some other cognitive capacities in addition to empathy may then be
required for providing these types of knowledge. It is worth noting however that even on those occasions a person need
not necessarily fall back on mindreading. There are many other strategies people employ in their everyday social interactions
that do not require them to engage in reasoning about mental states. They can rely on social stereotypes, on the details of the
place in which the other person is situated, and on the patterns of coordinated behaviour typically found among people that
participate in a particular practice.
We can make a distinction between three different levels of empathy based on differences in what a subject understands
of another person’s subjective mental life. At the first level of empathy (which we can call empathy1), I grasp that the object
of my perception is another subject with their own point of view on the world. I may not understand much or anything about
this perspective, aside from that the other person is the type of being that has their own subjective perspective on the world.8
At a second, somewhat deeper level of understanding (empathy2) I grasp something about the other’s specific state of mind, for

6
I base these distinctions on recent work by Dan Zahavi, see Zahavi, 2014: 167–8.
7
I borrow this description of the countenance of an angry person from Merleau-Ponty (2004), 83–4, quoted by Zahavi (2014): 183.
8
This ability to recognise other people as minded appears to be in place very early on in development. One source of evidence is infant’s preferences for
human faces as compared with other objects (see e.g. Legerstee, 1991).
 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542 535

example the anger of the person shaking their fist at me. Finally in empathy3 I may also grasp why they are angry at me, though
this will often require me to go beyond what is given to me in perception.
In what follows I will focus my attention on empathy2 – a type of perception in which what is perceived is the specific
state of mind of another person. Continuing with the example of emotion, we can distinguish between the manner in which
an emotion presents the world, and the intentional object of this emotion. If Arthur is angry with me, there is something his
anger is about. The intentional object of his anger is whatever his anger is about, perhaps an alleged wrong-doing to which
he believes I am party. The manner of presentation of his emotion is the way in which his emotion is directed towards this
intentional object. Anger is for instance a very different way of being emotionally engaged with the world than say happiness
or frustration. The other person has their own subjective point of view on the world, which has the two features which I have
just introduced in characterisation the intentionality relation: it is directed towards an object under a particular manner of
presentation.
In empathy2, a subject is in an epistemic position to understand the following about the other person. The subject can
grasp the specific attitude of the other person – the manner in which their state of mind is intentionally directed towards
the world, and the intentional object of their state of mind, or what in the world their state of mind is directed towards.
When a subject grasps this fact about another person, they understand, and hence share the other’s perspective on the world.
Empathy2 is thus a perceptual state whose intentional content allows me to understand and hence share a perspective on the
world with another person where this perspective may be very different from my own perspective on the world.
Now we can reformulate the question we raised above about how empathy is possible. Consider how the other person
may have different attitudes to the world than me. They will also often have a state of mind that is directed at different
intentional objects from my own states of mind: Arthur is angry with me, and I am afraid of Arthur. How is it possible
for me, based on perception, to understand and thus share a perspective on the world that is very different from my
own? How can perception allow me to apprehend both the manner in which the state of mind of the other person is directed
at the world and what their state of mind is about? These are questions I take up in the next section.

3. The perceptual presence of other people

When I perceive another person I am presented with a body that is like mine. It is a body that is like mine in being simul-
taneously a subject, or a lived body, and also a living, biological system. To continue with the earlier example, the perception
of the other person’s anger is something we perceive in their physical gestures, speech and threatening posture. We are not
only confronted with a physical body but with gestures that immediately express and communicate a meaning. The facial
expressions, intonation and bodily posture are all perceived as being imbued with meaning. I am presented with the specific
state of mind of the other person, their attitude towards the world, and the intentional object of this attitude. How can a
person’s bodily comportment communicate their state of mind?
There would seem to be substantial work for interpretation to do in perception if experience of bodily behaviour is to
deliver any kind of access to the state of mind of the other person. For what I can perceive – the other’s state of mind – goes
significantly beyond what is literally sensed by me in perception, the other person’s moving living body. How should we
think about this interpretative dimension in perception that enables me to perceive simultaneously a living moving body that
is also a body subject with a specific grip on a meaningful world?
Part of the answer to this question lies in noticing that we do not only perceive a body of a person isolated from the world,
but always a body situated in the world, the body of a person engaged in some practical activity. The gestures, expressions
and bodily comportment of the other thus succeed in communicating something and carrying a meaning which I can imme-
diately grasp because of the context in which the gestures, expressions and other forms of behaviour take place. To offer a
twist on an example from Sartre, we may for example notice a person running for and missing a tram. We see the urgency in
their running, and we immediately sense their frustration as the tram pulls away just as they attempt to climb aboard.
Merleau-Ponty wrote that the other person’s body ‘‘appears to me as a familiar manner of handling the world.’’
(1945/2002: 370) I immediately recognise the other’s body as having many of the same ways as dealing with the world
as I have. The body of the other person as like my body in having some of the same dispositions, abilities and skills for dealing
with the world.9
The perception of the other person as having a body like my own in its abilities for is not based on analogical inference. I
do not first perceive a similarity between the body of the other and my own, and then infer on the basis of this perceptual
similarity that the other must be an embodied subject just as I am. On the contrary, such comparisons between my body and
the body of another person presuppose that I am already in the perceptual presence of another person (Merleau-Ponty,
1945/2002: 410). The similarity I pick up on between my body and that of the other person has its basis in an orientation
in the world that I share with other people.
Consider again the example of the person running for, but missing the departing tram. The tram is a part of a transport
system, an element of the way of life of people living in a city. What I perceive are the movements of this person in the

9
Again there is evidence that infants recognise this fact about other people from very early on in development. There is extensive evidence for instance that
the actions of the other person and the infant’s proprioceptive awareness of its own actions maybe coded in same cross-modal language (Meltzoff & Moore,
1994). This may explain why infants from very early on are able to mimic the behaviour they observe (but c.f. Ray & Heyes, 2011 for an alternative associative
explanation).
536 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542

context of already familiar practices that make-up city life. As I go about my everyday business in the city where I work I do
many things in my daily routine out of habit. I unreflectively allow my actions to be drawn from me by the situations I have
regularly, and successfully negotiated in the past. I experience my environment as a meaningful field of possibilities for
action, some of which call out to me act on them, while others immediately repel me. I experience the body of the other
person in the same way as I experience my own body. I experience their body as being moved to act by the very same pos-
sibilities for action provided by the environment that move me to act. The similarity I thus pick up on between my body and
that of the other person is a similarity in the experience of being embodied. Merleau-Ponty wrote that my body and that of
the other person are ‘‘a single whole, two sides of a single phenomenon.’’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 412) Although I experience
the other’s body as numerically distinct from my own, I nevertheless experience their body in the same way as I experience
my own, as being geared into an environment that invites and solicits actions. I experience my own body as being affected
and moved to act by the possibilities for action the environment offers to me, and I experience the body of the other person
in the same way as also being affected and moved to act by the environment.
This shared way of experiencing the body forms the basis for empathy1 as I have briefly described it in Section 1. In empa-
thy1, I perceptually grasp the subjectivity of the other person. When I experience the body of the other person, I experience a
body that is like mine in being drawn to act on the basis of its bodily habits. I will argue further in the next section that this
shared way of experiencing the body may also form the basis for my understanding something of the state of mind of the
other person. We perceive the behaviour of the other person in specific, meaningful practical contexts. The shared under-
standing of these familiar, everyday contexts of activity enables a person to grasp the perspective of another subject on
the world.

4. The selective responsiveness to (social) affordances

I experience both my own body and the body of the other person as being selectively open and responsive to the affor-
dances of the environment. It is this selective responsiveness to the environment that I can immediately perceive and that
forms the basis for me grasping something of the other person’s state of mind, as I shall now explain.
The ecological psychologist James J. Gibson (Gibson, 1979) coined the term ‘‘affordances’’ to refer to what the environ-
ment ‘‘offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’’ (Gibson, 1979: 127).10 ‘‘Affordances’’ are the
resources the environment offers to animals that have the bodily abilities and capacities to take advantage of those resources.
A hole may offer the potential to hide from a predator to an animal whose body is small enough for the hole to contain, but not
to an animal of a larger size. A tree can afford climbing to an animal that has the necessary gripping abilities, and is thus able to
remain attached to the tree. The possible actions the environment offers to an animal will thus depend on the bodily abilities
and skills of that animal.
Elsewhere (in work with Erik Rietveld), I have argued that the affordances of the environment should be understood in
the wider context of what Wittgenstein called a form of life. A ‘‘form of life’’, as we use this term, refers to the stable and
regular, rule-like patterns in the behaviour of animals of a particular species (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). In the case of
humans, many of these patterns of behaviour take the form of social and cultural practices, or normatively constrained coor-
dinated activities in which multiple individuals take part. Many of the abilities that human agents exercise in dealing with
the environment are abilities that have been learned from other people through social instruction. These social practices pro-
vide the context or background against which I can interpret the bodily activities through which the other person is engaged
with the world.
The world is rich with affordances, and only a subset of the possible actions the environment offers matter to a person
enough to move them to action. Moreover, of the possibilities that are of significance to a person, some matter more than
others. The possibilities for action to which I am responsive, invite and entice me to act to different degrees. Think of the
way in which the glass of water beside me while I write draws my hand towards it when I am thirsty. In the flow of writing,
the glass of water still has some significance, but it matters less than say finding a clear example in the text I am working on.
Other possibilities in the environment may be threatening and challenging to me to different degrees. Some may point to
imminent danger, such as the glass of water that I could accidentally knock over onto the keyboard of my computer.
Others present a less serious or immediate threat such as the cars I hear outside of my window. It is my subjective concern
and the way in which based on this concern I emotionally appraise my environment that makes some of the affordances of
the environment inviting and enticing, and others threatening and repelling. The possibilities for action that move me, mak-
ing me ready to act are possibilities that bear in some way on my concerns.
I suggest that this selective responsiveness to the affordances of the environment is also something I can perceive in the
other’s person bodily engagement with the world. Individuals differ in their concerns, needs and interests and thus differ in

10
Gibson’s introduced the concept of affordances as a part of an account of perception as a process in which information is directly gathered or picked up as
the animal moves, and actively explores its environment. Perception is ‘‘direct’’ in the sense that it is non-representational: information is present in the
environment sufficient to guide behaviour. Perception is not ‘‘mediated by retinal pictures, neural pictures or mental pictures.’’ (Gibson, 1979: 147) In the case
of vision, the information that is available in the environment is determined by the way in which light interacts with the substances and surfaces in the
environment surrounding the perceiving animal. Information is thus potentially available in the environment that specifies the available affordances. Whether
this information is picked up and acted on will however depend upon the abilities of the perceiving animal in the way argued above.
 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542 537

the possibilities for action that have affective significance for them. In perceiving the other’s bodily orientation in the world, I
can immediately grasp their selective responsiveness to the environment.
It might be objected at this point that to know which affordances are relevant to the other person I must first know some-
thing about their beliefs, desires, needs and concerns. The environment offers many affordances and only some of these pos-
sibilities are appraised or evaluated by the person as relevant on any given occasion. The question of which affordances stand
out as being relevant to a person will depend on how the person appraises a situation. Appraisal, at least on many theories of
emotion, consists of a judgement about the significance of some event or aspect of the environment given the person’s
concerns.
Consider however what takes place when I perceive another person in pain. The other person’s pain is something I imme-
diately grasp when I see them writhing, and when I see their face contorted in agony. I grasp their pain because my percep-
tion of their behaviour puts me in position to understand something of the significance the world has for them. I
immediately perceive the awfulness of their situation, and that the only possibilities for action that matter to them are those
that contribute to lessening their suffering. Their behaviour tells me something about their state of mind because it imme-
diately tells me something about how they are responsive to a world I share with them. This is something I can understand
however just based on the perception of their behaviour. There is no need for me to re-present in my own mind their beliefs
and desires. I can immediately grasp something about their perspective on the world because I can understand based on
their behaviour what they are ready to do, and thus how they are responsive to the environment.
In Section 2 I suggested that to grasp another person perspective on the world I must grasp both the intentional object of
their state of mind, and the manner in which their state of mind is directed at the world. In this section I have been arguing
that I can perceive another person’s specific state of mind to the extent that I can perceive their selective responsiveness to
the affordances of the surrounding environment. To the extent that I can determine which of the affordances in their sur-
rounding environment are relevant, and have significance for the other person, this gives me a window through which I
can gain access to their perspective on the world. Picking up on what the other person is responsive to and engaged by tells
me about their state of mind. It allows me to understand in what way the world is significant for them from their particular
perspective on the world.
Empathy so construed is no doubt limited in the type of understanding it can deliver of the other person’s perspective. It
does not deliver an understanding of the type of intentional directedness towards the world we take to be characteristic of
propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires. It does however provide a subject with an understanding of another per-
son’s perspective on the world, an understanding that must be in place in order for us to understand what the other person
believes or desires. Empathy allows a person to grasp the intentional object of another subject’s state of mind, the particular
affordances the individual is engaged in acting on. It also allows the subject to grasp the manner in which the other person is
responsive to the affordances of the environment. I can grasp for instance something about the bodily abilities and habits the
other is exercising in responding to the world. I can do so in part based on the shared meaningful, practical context in which
she is acting but also because I experience the other’s body in the same way as I experience my own body as ‘‘a familiar way
of handling the world’’ (to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s words). Since I can recognise both the intentional object of the other’s
state of mind as well as the manner of presentation of this intentional object, I am able to share the other’s perspective
on the world. Thus I am able to empathise with the other person in the sense of sharing their perspective on the world.
I have characterised empathy in the title of my paper as the responsiveness to social affordances. I talk of ‘‘social’’ affor-
dances here because it is important for empathy and for sharing the other’s perspective that I recognise the affordances to
which the other person is responsive are aspects of a reality we share. They are action possibilities that I recognise as being
available and accessible not only to me, but to us together because of our abilities to engage in shared activities and projects
as participants in shared practices. The affordances of the human ecological niche belong to a reality I share with other peo-
ple; they have a social reality. It is against the background of this shared reality that I can recognise the other person as hav-
ing a perspective on the world that is different from my own.
In the remainder of the paper, I turn my attention to the claim that empathy requires that a person share a vicarious affec-
tive state with their empathic target. This is a thesis that has been defended by proponents of simulation theory. Simulation
theory (ST) endorses the claim I have made above in my definition of empathy2 that to empathise with another person I must
share their perspective on the world. Defenders of ST argue this is something I can achieve only by imaginatively re-enacting
or imitating the cognitive and affective processes of the other person. I deny that any such act of imaginative re-enactment is
necessary for empathy. I thus depart from ST. I can come to share the other’s perspective just based on perception, or so I
have been arguing. This difference notwithstanding, I will agree with ST that vicarious affect may nonetheless play an impor-
tant role in sharing a perspective with another person. I will argue that shared affect may matter for attuning me to the
specific affordances the other person evaluates as relevant.

5. The role of shared affect in empathy

In the psychological and neuroscientific literature it is often supposed that empathy is matter of imaginative perspective
taking. Empathy is distinguished from contagion on the grounds that in empathy we use our own affective and cognitive
capacities to imagine the point of view of another person. I recreate in my own mind what the other person thinks and feels.
In this way I come to understand and share the other person’s perspective on the world. Contagion is distinct from empathy
in that it does not require me to imaginatively reconstruct the point of view of another person. Instead the joy or suffering of
538 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542

other person spreads to me. I do not imagine what I would feel in the other’s person’s situation using my own affective and
cognitive capacities. I simply find myself feeling something similar to what the other person is experiencing.11
On this view of empathy I must feel what the other person is feeling if I am to share their perspective on the world. It is by
feeling what they are feeling that I can imagine for myself what it might be like to be in their situation. Empathy thus
requires that an isomorphism condition be satisfied whereby the person empathising and their target share a similar affec-
tive state. Dan Zahavi has argued that it is distinctive of the direct perception theory of empathy that it denies the necessity
of such an isomorphism condition.12 I do not need to share an affective state with you in order to experience that you are suf-
fering. I may experience a quite different affective state from the other person when I empathise with them. I can for instance
empathise with a person’s social anxiety for instance by feeling sad they are anxious and unable to relax in social situations.
Similarly, I can recognise that my neighbour is angry with me based on their gestures and facial expression whilst myself feeling
calm. Zahavi argues on this basis that I do not empathise with the other person by using my own affective and cognitive
processes to simulate the point of the view of the other person. No such act of simulation is necessary since I can immediately
experience what the other person is feeling and thinking.
I agree with Zahavi that empathy does not depend on simulation. Empathy does not depend on me recreating in imag-
ination what I would feel if I were in the other person’s shoes. Shared affect may however be necessary for empathy (and
here I depart from Zahavi) because of the role it plays in orienting attention to the subset of affordances the target of empa-
thy evaluates as relevant. There is extensive evidence in cognitive neuroscience that the body of the empathising subject is
affected when for instance we empathically experience another person in pain. When I see you in pain, I am affected by your
suffering. The bodily affect I thereby undergo serves the function of orienting my attention to the world in ways that allow
me to grasp something of the meaning the world has from your point of view. Shared affect thus plays a crucial role in allow-
ing me to pick up on the ways in which the other person is responsive to affordances. It thus plays a crucial role in allowing
me to share the other person’s perspective on the world.
Consider in this light the finding that the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insula cortex (AIC) are two
of the core brain areas involved in empathic pain (along with, supplementary motor area, periaqueductal grey, and
somatosensory cortex, Lamm, Decety, & Singer, 2011). Bud Craig has shown the central involvement of the anterior insula
in the interoceptive awareness of bodily sensations (Craig, 2009; see also Gu, Hof, Friston, & Fan, 2013). The AIC also has
extensive bidirectional connections with limbic forebrain areas (Nieuwenhuys, 2012). Bodily sensations are normally accom-
panied by some degree of arousal and hedonic value. Thus the tracking of my own states of bodily states of arousal certainly
seems to be playing some role when a person empathises with another’s pain. The ACC is a part of the network of brain areas
known as the salience network (Menon & Uddin, 2010). This network functions to orient the brain’s processing to stimuli
that are homeostatically or metabolically relevant. Perhaps the salience network makes a similar functional contribution
to empathy. The perception of another person in pain or at risk undoubtedly exerts a powerful pull on a person’s attentional
capacities. Perhaps this attentional effect occurs because when we experience another person in pain a state of arousal
occurs in our own body that has a similar hedonic value to that which occurs in the body of the person in pain. This state
of arousal allows us to immediately experience something of the meaning the world has for the other person by orienting our
attention to the affordances in the environment that are relevant to the other person.
Anil Seth has recently proposed a predictive coding account of interoceptive processing focusing in particular on the role
of the AIC in interoception (Seth, 2013). Seth reviews evidence that suggests that the AIC functions as an integration hub
comparing a cascade of top-down predictions with bottom-up prediction errors. The top-down predictions represent the
desired internal physiological state of the body continuously updated according to the animal or person’s desires and goals.
The AIC detects a mismatch between the expected state of the body and the current state of the body and engages either
motor control or autonomic control processes so as to reduce this discrepancy. Interoceptive predictions are said to ‘‘enslave
autonomic reflexes (e.g. heart/respiratory rate, smooth muscle behaviour)’’ maintaining these states of the body within a
constant range of values ‘‘just as proprioceptive predictions enslave classical motor reflexes in predictive coding formula-
tions of motor control’’ (Seth, 2013: 568, citing Gu et al., 2013).
Seth’s characterises the AIC as having the function of preparing the person to take action that reduce the mismatch
between the current internal physiological condition of the body, and the states of the body aimed at based on one’s desires
and goals. Now consider again the description that was given above of the person’s responsiveness to affordances. The envi-
ronment contains many possibilities for action and some stand out as relevant while the vast majority leave us cold.
Interoceptive changes in the body that prepare the body to take action are I suggest elicited by affordances that stand out
as relevant to the agent. Relevant affordances elicit patterns of action readiness – they make us ready to act on them
Frijda (2006). It therefore makes sense to think of the AIC as playing a part in making an individual selectively responsive

11
This difference between empathy and contagion is captured nicely in an experiment by Lamm and colleagues in which participants watched a series of
video-clips of a patient who they are told is undergoing a painful medical treatment (Lamm et al., 2007). Participants were given the instruction to adopt two
perspectives while watching the clips. They were to either imagine themselves in the shoes of the patient, and thus to imagine themselves experiencing similar
pain to the patient, or they were to focus their attention on the feelings and reactions of the patient and hence to imagine how the other person feels. The
subjects that imagined undergoing the painful treatment themselves did indeed show more signs of personal distress. They also showed greater activation in
brain areas thought to be involved in threat response such as the amygdala, and in parts of the pain network associated with the aversive and unpleasant,
negatively valenced feelings that accompany pain (bilateral insular cortices, anterior medial cingulate cortex). Activity in the middle insula is interpreted by the
authors as reflecting ‘‘sensory aspects’’ of pain that were not a part of the experience subjects undergo when they take up the perspective of the other.
12
Zahavi (2011, 2014).
 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542 539

to affordances. Now consider the extensive findings that the AIC is active both for first-person experiences of pain, disgust,
and pleasant taste and when we observes these emotions and sensations in other people. When the AIC is active in response
to the emotions and sensations of other people, I suggest it may serve the function of informing us as observers of the per-
son’s overall state of action readiness. It can contribute to a person’s orienting their attention to some aspect of the environ-
ment that allows them to grasp which affordances are relevant to the other person. I have been arguing that this can allow a
person to perceive a person’s state of mind by giving a person a grip on what the other person finds relevant and important in
the environment. Shared affect is thus a part of the process of perceiving the other person’s state of mind. It makes an impor-
tant contribution to my perception of the other person and their state of mind by orienting my attention to the affordances
that are currently relevant to the other person.
Contrast this with the ST interpretation of these findings. A proponent of ST would claim that the AIC plays a role in empa-
thy because it is a part of a network of brain regions that simulates the state of action readiness of the other person. My body
reacts as if it were me that is disgusted or in pain and this is what allows me to understand something of the disgust or pain
the other person is experiencing. In my interpretation of these findings, the role of the AIC is quite different. The AIC is a part
of a network of brain regions that orients my attention to relevant aspects of the environment. When I observe someone else
in pain, the AIC in my brain fires as if it were me in pain. This is not however what allows me to empathise with the other
person. Shared affect rather has the effect of orienting my attention to aspects of the environment that the other person
relates to as relevant. When I share an affective state with the other person, my attention is oriented to the same possibilities
for action and aspects of the environment that are salient to the other person. Shared affect plays a necessary role in empathy
because it allows me to grasp something about how the other person is ready to act. It allows me to immediately recognise
what the other person is selectively responsive to in the environment. It is this that allows me to perceive their state of mind.

6. Empathy in individuals with ASD

In this final section I will apply the hypothesis I have developed so far to discuss the empathic abilities of people with
autism spectrum disorder ASD. I will propose an explanation of why empathy (conceived of as a perceptual capacity, a part
of background understanding) may be less direct in people with ASD. ASD is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder char-
acterised by problems with social interaction and communication.13 Smith (2009) has hypothesised that ASD is accompanied
by an imbalance in empathy, with individuals with ASD experiencing high affective arousal in interaction with others and low
cognitive empathy. I begin by briefly reviewing a recent study of pain empathy in people with Aspergers, a high-functioning
variant of ASD (Fan, Chen, Chen, Decety, & Cheng, 2014).
In keeping with the empathy imbalance hypothesis, Fan and colleagues found reduced activity in the anterior insula (AIC)
when subjects with ASD passively viewed pictures of other people in pain. They suggest that these differences in activation in
AIC reflect differences in how people with ASD attend to social stimuli. Such differences in attention are well-established in
studies in which individuals with ASD show very different patterns of visual fixation in social interactions (Klin, Jones,
Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002; Klin, Jones, Schultz, & Volkmar, 2003; Klin, Lin, Gorrindo, Ramsey, & Jones, 2009). Longer gaze
fixation has been found to be associated with increased body arousal (as can be seen in heightened amygdala activation) in peo-
ple with ASD (Dalton et al., 2005). Studies measuring cardiovascular, neuroendocrine and neurochemical responses to novel
and stressful stimuli in individuals with ASD have also shown abnormal arousal (Tordjman et al., 1997; Hirstein, Iversen, &
Ramachandran, 2001). In keeping with these previous findings, Fan and colleagues observed an increased N2 frontal response
associated with affective arousal (Ibanez & Manes, 2012) when they asked their ASD subjects to actively make judgements
about other’s pain. Seeing others in pain is thus highly arousing for people with ASD. The lower AIC activation they found in
individuals with ASD seems to reflect a social attentional strategy for avoiding highly arousing social stimuli.
Based on this study (and the previous arguments of this paper), I suggest a slight tweak to a suggestion Schilbach and
colleagues have recently made. They argued that people with ASD lack the ability to ‘‘respond intuitively to socially relevant
information’’ (Schilbach et al., 2013: 411). Eye-tracking studies show for instance that when watching a romantic scene in a
film, people with autism fixate on irrelevant details in the background (e.g. a light-switch) instead of looking at the actors
(Klin et al., 2003). In another study Klin and colleagues found that toddlers with autism attended to audio-visual synchrony
when viewing point light displays of human biological motion (Klin et al., 2009). They attended to irrelevant contingencies
that distracted them from the social meaning expressed by the movements in the light display. Schilbach and colleagues
emphasise the consequences this has for the ability of individuals with ASD to take part in social interaction. Individuals with
autism lack the ability to orient attention to possibilities for interaction the other person offers because they cannot take
advantage of the social cues that the gaze of the other person offers.14 I am pointing to a different consequence that may flow

13
Baron-Cohen and colleagues are well-known for having claimed that people with ASD experience deficits in empathy (e.g. Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith,
1985). Such a claim however remains a matter of controversy with studies showing that people with Aspergers score significantly higher in tests of emotional
empathy than typically developing controls (Rogers, Dziobek, Hassenstab, Wolf, & Convit, 2007; Dziobek, Rogers, Fleck, et al., 2008).
14
Schilbach and colleagues describe the different patterns of gaze fixation in the person with autism as compromising their ability to pick up on social
affordances or the ‘‘possibilities for interaction provided by others’’. They characterise possibilities for social interaction as activating motor programmes that
‘‘could allow for interpersonal coordination of behaviour.’’ (p. 401). The use of the term ‘‘social affordances’’ in their work is different from mine in a way that
deserves noting. For Schilbach and colleagues a special category of affordances exist that are social and that take the form of possibilities for coordinated
behaviour. In my view all affordances that the human environment offers count as ‘‘social’’ because the affordances humans pick up on belong to an
intersubjective shared reality and are bound up with normatively constrained social practices.
540 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542

from differences in pattern of gaze fixation in people with AHD. It may lead people with ASD to orient attention to the wrong
aspects of a shared situation in a way that makes it much harder to pick up on the affordances that the other person finds
salient.15
Typically developing individuals are able to immediately pay attention to the relevant aspects of a social situation, to ori-
ent themselves correctly to affordances that belong to a shared reality and thus to find the social meaning in what they per-
ceive. I have argued that shared affect may play a crucial role in this ability, enabling the brain to orient attention to the same
aspects of the environment the other person finds importance. This allows me to share a perspective on the world with
another person. Individuals with autism by contrast lack this ability, and I speculate this may in part be a consequence of
the strategies they have developed for regulating the abnormal arousal they experience in face to face encounters. This
inability to attend to what is salient and important for the other person in a shared situation stands in the way of sharing
a perspective on the world with the other person. It has the consequence that they are unable to bring into the foreground
what is important to the other person in a particular situation (as we see quite literally in the studies of eye movements in
people with Aspergers). They experience a flood of information and are unable to parse out what matters and what does not.
If the reasoning of this section is along the right lines, it suggests that the role of interoception in orienting attention to
relevant features of the environment may indeed really matter for empathy. People with ASD may have found other ways to
manage the intense bodily arousal they experience in social interaction. Unfortunately this deprives them of important
body-based signals that we normally rely on to get a grip on what other people find important in the environment.
Without this source of information they must find other means of orienting their attention to what other people find impor-
tant. They must learn rules and generalisations along the lines of a theory of mind. Such strategies are necessary however
because they lack the basic orientation to what other people find important. I am suggesting this is something they may lack
because of the abnormal patterns of gaze fixation which mean they do not find themselves with states of bodily action readi-
ness that direct their attention to aspects of the environment that others find salient.

7. Conclusions

Familiar findings on the social brain look rather different when viewed against the backdrop of the direct perception the-
ory of social cognition as I have developed it in this paper. Uta and Chris Frith tell us that the social brain in humans ‘‘has a
‘theory of mind’, which enables us to predict what others are going to do on the basis of their beliefs and desires. It also has a
‘mirror system’ which enables us to understand others’ goal and intentions and to empathise with their emotions by a mech-
anism of motor resonance.’’ (Frith & Frith, 2010: 165) In recent work, Alvin Goldman has interpreted this emerging consen-
sus on the dual architecture of the social brain to argue for a distinction between two types of empathy. The first relies on the
mirror neuron system while the second recruits the default-mode network, the network of brain regions (medial prefrontal
cortex, right and left temporo-parietal junction, and the temporal poles) that is engaged both when people remember past
experiences and when they plan for the future. Goldman reviews evidence that the default mode network is also involved in
mentalising and theory of mind tasks, findings which he takes to support the simulationist account of social cognition
(Goldman, 2011, 2006).
I have outlined an alternative hypothesis about the role of shared affect in empathy to the simulationist account defended
by Goldman. I suggested that shared affect may be important in orienting the person’s attention to aspects of the environ-
ment the other person finds significant. I have argued that this may give us a way to share another person’s perspective on
the world, and this capacity may be missing in people with ASD because of the abnormal patterns of gaze fixation that are
found in this group.
I will end with some all too brief comments on Goldman’s hypothesis that the default mode network has a
domain-specific function of mentalising. In a meta-analysis focusing on the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ), Decety
and Lamm found this area showing up in studies of theory of mind and empathy but also of the sense of agency,
self-other differentiation, violation of expectation studies, and attentional orientation (Decety & Lamm, 2007). They conclude
that the right TPJ specifically might be involved in carrying out a domain-general, low-level computational function of
‘‘generating, testing, and correcting internal predictions about external sensory events’’ (p. 583). Along similar line
Schilbach et al., 2013 report activation of areas belonging to the DMN when subjects spontaneously coordinate their atten-
tion with a virtual character. They speculate that rather than serving a domain specific function of mentalising this network
might be ‘‘trained up by participation in social interaction in terms of basic mechanisms which allow the use of analogies and
associations to generate predictions. During later stages in development this network may then be brought into the service
of explicit social cognition (p. 403, references omitted). Both these groups of researchers point to a role for the DMN in social
perception, in particular for furnishing perceptual interpretations that can be tested out in social interaction with others.
Goldman himself recognises that this network has been found to be active for a variety of different cognitive tasks, and
hence that the DMN may not have domain-specific function. It would be mistake for instance to identify the DMN with the
mentalising network.16 Goldman suggests however that all of the cognitive tasks the DMN has been shown to be involved in

15
Uddin (2015) reports evidence of atypical patterns of activity in insular cortices, and in the salience network more generally in people with autism which
would seem to strongly support the hypothesis I have outlined in this section.
16
Matthew Lieberman comes close to making such a proposal in a recent popular science book when he characterises social cognition as the brain’s default
mode. He writes ‘‘we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.’’ (Lieberman, 2014: 19).
 J. Kiverstein / Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 532–542 541

share something important in common. They all involve simulation-based perspective-taking. In line with the arguments of this
paper, I suggest that activity in the DMN could just as well be thought of as a part of the neural basis of social perception. When
we see activity in the DMN we should not assume that this is the subject using their own cognitive apparatus to simulate the
perspective of the other person. It could be that the work of the DMN is to add flesh to a perceptual interpretation of why a
person acted.
Consider in this light the findings that the DMN is active for tasks in which the person engages in prospective planning as
well as in tasks in which the subject engages their capacities for episodic memory (Andrews-Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng,
2014). The default mode network is interpreted by Goldman as carrying out the function of perspective-taking. What is com-
mon to memory, planning and empathy is that all of these psychological processes require a subject to switch perspectives.
One must switch from one’s current perspective on the world, and recreate in imagination a different perspective be it one
that we occupied in the past, might occupy in the future, or that of another person with whom we are motivated to
empathise.
An alternative hypothesis in line with the arguments of this paper is that autobiographical memories contribute addi-
tional layers of meaning to one’s current perception of a person. Past experiences are the basis for personal narratives
one builds up over time to make sense of the events that happen over the course of one’s life. Personal narratives can how-
ever also give one a means of making sense of what one is experiencing here and now. They are a valuable source of infor-
mation about the possibilities for action the world offers, and the cares and concerns of other people (Nelson, 2007). I must
leave the task of developing this suggestion to future work. It suffices to note for now that the ST interpretation of the role of
autobiographical memory in social cognition is not the only game in town. There are other possible interpretations of the
role of the DMN in social cognition that fit very well with the perspective on empathy that has been defended in this paper.
Empathy begins with perception but the interpersonal understanding it provides can take on increasingly elaborate forms
through the interaction of perceptual processes with memory, and also crucially through the feedback we get from commu-
nicating with another person.
I have argued that empathy is what allows us to share another person’s perspective on the world. I have argued that this is
something people can do just based on perception because perception draws on a background understanding of the possi-
bilities for action the world offers us, and the abilities and skills people have for exploiting these possibilities. We can per-
ceive a person’s state of mind because we can immediately grasp which affordances matter to the other person on the basis
of our perception of them. We can thereby perceive in what way the world matters to them and this allows us to immedi-
ately appreciate something about their particular state of mind.
Empathy has a fundamental place in our social life. It is not a cognitive capacity we occasionally have recourse to when
we care enough about another person to ask ourselves what they might be feeling. Empathy is rather the capacity that allows
us to shared a perspective on the world with other people, and to understand the meaning another person gives to the world.
It is fundamental to sharing a world with another person and in this sense is a part of the very fabric of social life.

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