Our ability to understand others and help others understand us is essential to our individual and collective well-being. Yet there are many barriers that keep us from walking in the shoes of others: fear, skepticism, and power structures that separate us from those outside our narrow groups. To progress in a multicultural world and ensure our common good, we need to overcome these obstacles. Our best hope can be found in the skill of empathy.

In Social Empathy, Elizabeth A. Segal explains how we can develop our ability to understand one another and have compassion toward different social groups. When we are socially empathic, we not only imagine what it is like to be another person, but we consider their social, economic, and political circumstances and what shaped them. Segal explains the evolutionary and learned components of interpersonal and social empathy, including neurobiological factors and the role of social structures. Ultimately, empathy is not only a part of interpersonal relations: it is fundamental to interactions between different social groups and can be a way to bridge diverse people and communities. A clear and useful explanation of an often misunderstood concept, Social Empathy brings together sociology, psychology, social work, and cognitive neuroscience to illustrate how to become better advocates for justice.

"Segal summarizes her ten-plus years of research into social work, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology to present a new study of empathy, raising the fundamental helping skill of imagining oneself in another's place, to a higher level. . . . [Social Empathy] ought to be required reading for the pathologically narcissistic POTUS and all his lackeys." - Library Journal

"This important book deserves to be taken seriously by anybody interested in social welfare." - Times Higher Education

"A clear and useful explanation of an often misunderstood concept, Social Empathy brings together sociology, psychology, social work, and cognitive neuroscience to illustrate how to become better advocates for justice." - Stevo's Book of the Week

"The strength of this book is Segal's argument that the psychological literature on interpersonal empathy should be expanded to include a macro-sociological level." - Choice