In the adult world, however, the virtues of empathy are less clear. As the pandemic pushes us into isolation, culture wars rage, and disinhibited cruelty brews on social media, it feels a little controversial to suggest that empathy has downsides. Yet in recent years, researchers have found that misplaced empathy can be bad for you and others, leading to exhaustion and apathy, and preventing you from helping the very people you need to. Worse, people’s empathetic tendencies can even be harnessed to manipulate them into aggression and cruelty. So, if not empathy, what should we aim to feel instead?