Learning to Read Minds: Training Empathic Accuracy Through Feedback

Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately infer others' thoughts and feelings, is positively associated with interpersonal and professional outcomes, but observed accuracy levels typically remain modest. Feedback-based training shows promise for improving empathic accuracy, but its effectiveness under ecologically challenging conditions, its temporal dynamics, and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We address these gaps in an experiment in which 195 community adults inferred targets’ thoughts and feelings while viewing brief videos of unfamiliar individuals describing emotionally significant positive and negative life events. Participants were randomly assigned to a feedback condition, where participants received feedback on the targets’ actual thoughts and/or feelings, or a practice-only control condition, in which participants completed the same trials without feedback. Minimal repeated exposure to the same targets was implemented to isolate generalizable learning from target-specific familiarity. Participants’ empathic accuracy was scored by independent judges, and intrinsic motivation was self-reported after the experimental phase. Both groups showed improvements in empathic accuracy over time, demonstrating practice-related enhancement. Feedback yielded higher post-training accuracy, with gains emerging during initial training and maintained thereafter. Intrinsic motivation predicted overall performance but did not mediate feedback effects, indicating that cognitive recalibration rather than motivational shifts drove improvement. These findings demonstrate that empathic accuracy is malleable even under challenging conditions, and that brief, scalable feedback-based training can enhance social perception, with potential applications in clinical, relational, and professional settings.