How To Get a Narcissist to Feel Empathy

Posted on January 10, 2017

In your life chances are you have encountered one or two narcissist, a person who has extreme or excessive admiration for himself with very low concern for others' happiness and health. Egotistical and self-centered, these people commonly display a lack of understanding for other people's well-being, which leads to numerous interpersonal conflicts.

Erica Hepper and her colleagues conducted a study on low and high narcissists to assess if a certain method can help invoke empathy in the selected individuals. This method is might be less complicated than you think--it simply involves developing more awareness. Hepper and her team concluded that encouraging social understanding of other people's thoughts and feelings has increased empathetic levels of their participants.

For example, simply instructing a narcissist to imagine how another person would feel in times of challenges can invoke sympathetic thoughts. Hepper and her colleagues found that by using such methods their narcissistic participants were able to consider another person's distress and feel empathetic. Thus, they suggest that one way to help a narcissistic personality is to encourage them to visualize different perspectives and not focus solely on their own.


Source material from PsyBlog