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A hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which a person underestimates the influences of visceral drives, and instead attributes behavior primarily to other, nonvisceral factors. The crux of this idea is that human understanding is "state-dependent". For example, when one is angry, it is difficult to understand what it is like for one to be happy, and vice versa; when one is blindly in love with someone, it is difficult to understand what it is like for one not to be, (or to imagine the possibility of not being blindly in love in the future). Importantly, an inability to minimize one's gap in empathy can lead to negative outcomes in medical settings (e.g., when a doctor needs to accurately diagnose the physical pain of a patient) or in workplace settings (e.g., when an employer needs to assess the need for an employee's bereavement leave).〔Empathy gaps for social pain: Why people underestimate the pain of social suffering. Nordgren, Loran F.; Banas, Kasia; MacDonald, Geoff Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(1), Jan 2011, 120–128.〕 The term ''hot-cold empathy gap'' was coined by Carnegie Mellon University psychologist, George Loewenstein. Hot-cold empathy gaps are one of Loewenstein's major contributions to behavioral economics. ==Areas of study== Implications of the empathy gap were explored in the realm of sexual decision-making, where young men in an unaroused "cold state" failed to predict that in an aroused "hot state" they will be more likely to make risky sexual decisions, (e.g., not using a condom). The empathy gap has also been an important idea in research about the causes of bullying.〔Simone Rovers, et al, "(Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2010 )," National Center for Education Statistics, (2010): iv〕 In one study examining a central theory that, "only by identifying with a victim’s social suffering can one understand its devastating effects,"〔http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-empathy-gap-bullying.html〕 researchers created five experiments. The first four examined the degree to which participants in a game who were not excluded could estimate the social pain of those participants who were excluded. The findings were that those who were not socially excluded consistently underestimated the pain felt by those who were excluded. A survey included in the study directed at teachers' opinions of school policy toward bullying found that those with an experience of social pain, caused by bullying, often rated the pain experienced by those facing bullying or social exclusion as higher than teachers who did not have such experience, and further, that teachers who had experienced social pain were more likely to punish students for bullying.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「empathy gap」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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