Empathy Is A Competitive Advantage. It Can Also Be Faked.

InnovationAIEmpathy Is A Competitive Advantage. It Can Also Be Faked.ByCharles Towers-Clark,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Charles writes about organisational changes required to scale & AI.Follow AuthorApr 24, 2026, 04:25am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Trying to find the empathy buttonIan Folley (Iantoons.com)Empathy is increasingly held up as the one leadership quality AI cannot replicate. The irony, then, is that new research from Stanford suggests it can be trained using AI - but that doing so may produce leaders who communicate empathy without actually feeling it.Anna Queiroz, now an associate professor at the University of Miami, conducted a studyin which participants used virtual reality to practice a performance review conversation with a virtual employee (themselves). After six minutes in a headset, something measurable changed. Participants started using more first-person language---"I understand what you're telling me" rather than "you should do this"---and introduced more emotional words into their speech. By the markers researchers use to assess empathetic communication, they had improved.There was just one problem. When asked how empathetic they actually felt toward the virtual employee, the answer was unchanged. The behavior had shifted. The feeling had not.What The Research Actually ShowsQueiroz's study placed participants across three conditions. In the first, they played a manager giving feedback to a virtual employee---establishing a baseline. In the second, they then embodied the employee and watched themselves as manager. In the third, they did the same but also received structured feedback on whether their communication demonstrated the five elements of Queiroz's LIVES framework: listening, being incisive, validating the other person's experience, expressing t...