I always thought I knew what the differences where but today I’m getting them confused.
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Sympathy generally means feeling bad about someone’s misfortune. If someone’s cat just died and they’re having a miserable day, you might be very sympathetic; you know what it’s like to suffer loss, and you feel for them.
To be sympathetic to someone’s position is more like looking favourably upon it, or sharing their views.
Empathy is a little more contextual.
In one usage, empathy means mirror-neuron stuff: being elevated by someone else’s laughter or joy, wincing at their pain, sharing in their evident distress, etc.
In another usage, it means *genuinely understanding their motivations*.
In that context, it’s good and important, for instance, to empathize with people who have done terrible things. It doesn’t mean that you look favourably on their position, or that you feel the same emotions as them. Instead, it means that you have an accurate mental model of what makes them act that way, rather than simply ascribing their actions to being all grarr-i-am-evil – because without understanding the problem, you’re powerless to affect it.
Being able to keep the two things separate – understanding someone’s thinking, without having to agree (or conversely, disagreeing without having to crudely demonise them), is a very important and under-valued social skill.
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