Can you nurture empathy or is empathy mostly innate? Many researchers have been trying to better understand the link between empathy and genetics. In this week’s episode, we look at two studies which assessed the heritability of empathy in twins versus non-twin siblings as well as how much empathy is really determined by our genes.

TLDR: Empathy is variably dependent on both genetics and environment, where affective empathy was found to be more heritable compared to cognitive empathy

Links:

Quiz - http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_your_empathy_determined_by_your_genes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-017-0082-6

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Credit for theme music: Fresh Time by Roa https://soundcloud.com/roa_music1031

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