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I have the opposite experience - I’ve found that people who are good at abstract thinking (most of my software engineering colleagues) tend to also have more em

• mgaunard 5y ago
  Sympathy yes, empathy not so much. Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    > Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others. That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.