Agreed. The way it works is this: You need to have a construction of someone (or something) to have empathy for it. The way you generate that construction is b

Agreed. The way it works is this: You need to have a construction of someone (or something) to have empathy for it. The way you generate that construction is by shared experience. The experiences that you have are what you use, the building blocks, to construct that abstract person. Biological Terry has no building blocks by which the empathizer generates empathy; only super diffuse academic terms. Psychosocial Terry, on the other hand, is an abstraction filled with facts which the empathizer (in almost all cases) shares. The extent to which the empathizer has loss of a close family member, a critical parent, a breakup, and issues at work will be the extent to which they can generate abstract Terry and thus the extent to which they can empathize. That's the mechanism they are running into in this study, I think.