Verified by 
I’ve just witnessed the wielding of a superpower. You see, my son has a highly developed sense of what other people are feeling. At this moment, it’s manifesting in the form of a tantrum, which started when he ended up with “Unload Dishwasher” in our morning job selection. It was obvious to me that his performance lacked heart, but he managed to squeeze a tear out as he pushed past his sisters to his room.
Two of his three siblings felt bad enough to try to switch jobs with him. Is that a gesture of empathy on their part? Of course. Manipulation on my son’s part? Of course, but also…empathy.
I know, I know… the word “manipulation” brings to mind everything that is the opposite of what we usually associate with empathy. But, as a trained neuroscientist, I know manipulation and empathy are very closely related. It’s a carefully orchestrated brain performance to be not just aware of others’ feelings, but to also have the added awareness of how your actions can then change those feelings.
You may think of this skill set as someone’s emotional IQ, but it has little to do with personal emotions. Manipulative behavior is a form of Intellectual Empathy, commonly experienced as a separate event from Emotional Empathy (Preston et al 2007). In fact, emotional empathy is an altogether different process, relying on feelings rather than rational thought.
This active awareness is just another neurological trait that everyone has on a spectrum. We’re all somewhere on a sliding gray scale in terms of “being in tune” with the feelings and thoughts of surrounding people. Like Superman and his evil twin, Bizarro, intellectual empathy and its cousin manipulation are essentially one in the same—powers that can either be used for helpful or self-serving means.
Multiple studies have now shown that cognitive and intellectual empathy can run as separate systems, activated independently (Konrath et al 2014; Nozaki & Koyasu 2013), and making use of different brain areas (Eres et al 2015). We have two separate empathy buckets—each can be filled with generous or skimpy helpings of either the cognitive or emotional sorts of empathy. In the absence of any emotional empathy, enhanced intellectual empathy could result in narcissistic or even sociopathic behavior, assuming parents have no influence on their child’s value system.
Luckily, we do have that influence. We’re always telling my son he should use his powers for good and not for evil. He might not fully understand what we mean by that, but with repetition and examples, he will. It’s part of our own parenting challenge to teach our highly intelligent child to use his skills for the greater good. It’s an ongoing process and one that has had mixed results.
As my son traveled up through the elementary grades, it became clear that the only difference between getting stuck with the label “manipulator” vs. “leader” was whether he was doing good deeds or bad deeds with his skill set at any given moment.
The same attributes that allowed my eight-year-old to amaze one teacher by orchestrating a 15-minute game engaging a group of 12 laughing preschoolers at his sister’s school pickup also enabled him to derail the educational efforts of his own third grade teacher in such a routine and efficient way that she retired the year after she taught him. My son’s budding talents were honed razor sharp each day by influencing the goals and objectives of the other students sitting on his side of the room. His elderly teacher certainly did not appreciate this behavior, as evidenced by the resultant special individual desk for my son sidled up nice and close to the teacher’s desk and by the countless calls from the school.
Certainly both a manipulator and a leader have highly developed senses of empathy. I’ve seen highly intellectually empathetic kids use their skills as a form of social power, or even bullying, particularly in girl cliques. I get the feeling that they don’t even know they’re doing it—It’s like a synesthete before he figures out that not everyone sees blue 5s and red As. It’s Peter Parker surprising himself when he leaps up onto a building, not yet knowing that he’s Spiderman.
These situations are experienced by our children as they grow up, towing an invisible line into middle and high school all by themselves, unidentified and in uncharted territory. Parents don’t usually call it out because we don’t often recognize it in our children ourselves: Enhanced Intellectual Empathy. It’s no surprise that our children find a powerful skill set without a name hard to manage or understand.
We can shift a highly intellectually empathetic child from being a manipulator to being a leader by teaching thoughtfulness about every action. As parents, we’re having a constant conversation about the impact of actions on self and on other people. We’re always talking— whether by our words, our action, or our inaction. If we agree that empathy is something we should pay attention to, then we should also take care to culture respect for others as well.
Citations
- Eres, R., Decety, J., Louis, W. R., & Molenberghs, P. (2015). Individual differences in local gray matter density are associated with differences in affective and cognitive empathy. NeuroImage, 117, 305-310.
- Konrath, S., Corneille, O., Bushman, B. J., & Luminet, O. (2014). The relationship between narcissistic exploitativeness, dispositional empathy, and emotion recognition abilities. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 38(1), 129-143.
- Nozaki, Y., & Koyasu, M. (2013). The relationship between trait emotional intelligence and interaction with ostracized others' retaliation. PloS one, 8(10), e77579.
- Preston, S. D., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Grabowski, T. J., Stansfield, R. B., Mehta, S., & Damasio, A. R. (2007). The neural substrates of cognitive empathy. Social Neuroscience, 2(3-4), 254-275.
