For people of a certain age, all the education about these things that worked was delivered almost unintentionally, and all the attempts to impart it deliberate

For people of a certain age, all the education about these things that worked was delivered almost unintentionally, and all the attempts to impart it deliberately were ridiculous. Your parents read to you, and you developed a love of books? Probably you know pretty well how to imagine another person's emotions in a hypothetical situation. And that different characters could feel very differently about otherwise-similar situations. You can probably name three to five different ways a person might feel about, say, having their work usurped. On the other hand, a decade or two ago attempts to teach this sort of thing used exercises like dividing people into four quadrants, named things like 'plants' and 'stars' as if the very idea that different people are different was a shocking revelation they needed to spend several weeks introducing. Perhaps our techniques for teaching this stuff have improved in the past few years? The way it used to be taught was something of a waste of time.