My understanding has always been that many psychopaths do have empathy. And they use this to their advantage to manipulate people, especially because they don’t care about your feelings.

On empathy more generally…..cognitive empathy is the important one. This is what is displayed by many nurses, police officers etc…..where they have a full understanding of what the person needs and delivers it in a very practical way, professionally and without a massive display of emotion. Some people mistake this for being “cold”.

The other form of empathy is not as useful, is less selfless and results in people sending teddy bears to disaster incidents.

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All of the above is relevant.

psychopaths literally have different brains and are not capable of understanding others in the way that most people can. Not all psychopaths are bad people, they can be functioning members of society, but the majority of serial killers are psychopaths.

Being able to feel what another person is feeling is a super power for insight. Not processing those feelings and using those feelings to inform rather than lead a decision is an error that can lead to lots of problems.