Underestimating how emotions will influence future decisions.

Explanation

The empathy gap, more precisely termed the hot-cold empathy gap, is the tendency to systematically misjudge how strongly visceral drives shape preferences and actions when those drives are not currently active. Visceral drives are powerful internal states that include hunger, thirst, physical pain, sexual arousal, fatigue, anger, fear, and craving for addictive substances. These drives produce an immediate unpleasant or urgent feeling and simultaneously change what feels desirable in the moment. A cold state is the ordinary condition of relative calm in which none of these drives is strongly active. Hunger is mild or absent, pain is not present, arousal is quiet, and thinking remains comparatively deliberate and oriented toward longer-term goals. From inside a cold state it is easy to believe that future choices will stay equally measured. A hot state is the opposite condition, in which one of these drives is intense and dominant. The person is acutely hungry, in significant pain, highly aroused, exhausted, furious, or craving a drug. In a hot state the immediate need to relieve the drive crowds out almost every other consideration; long-term plans and earlier resolutions lose force and behavior becomes more impulsive. George Loewenstein showed that people in a cold state chronically underestimate how powerfully a future hot state will seize control, while people already in a hot state overestimate how lasting that influence will remain once the drive subsides. Leaf Van Boven and colleagues demonstrated that emotional perspective taking rests on a dual judgment: first predicting one’s own reaction to a different affective state, then adjusting for differences between self and other. Because the first judgment already contains the gap, the second judgment inherits and amplifies the error. Neuroimaging work links the misprediction to incomplete simulation within interoceptive and valuation circuits, particularly the anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex, which fail to recreate the full intensity of a non-current visceral signal and therefore produce value representations anchored to the present state rather than the projected one.

Examples

• Sayette, Loewenstein, Griffin, and Black’s 2008 laboratory study of cigarette craving: Michael A. Sayette, George Loewenstein, and colleagues recruited 98 regular smokers and assigned them to one of three conditions across two sessions. In the cold condition, participants arrived non-deprived, made predictions about how much they would value smoking during a later high-craving session, and were then deprived of cigarettes for several hours before the second session. In the hot condition, participants were already deprived during the first session when they made the same predictions. Comparison participants experienced only the high-craving session. Results showed that cold-state smokers systematically underpredicted the monetary value they later placed on a cigarette once craving was elevated; hot-state smokers produced significantly more accurate forecasts. The cold-to-hot gap left participants underprepared for the intensity of future desire. Recognition of the gap and pre-commitment devices calibrated to actual hot-state valuations would have aligned cessation plans more closely with the motivational force of nicotine craving and strengthened quit attempts.
• Read and Loewenstein’s 1999 cold-water immersion experiment on pain memory: David Read and George Loewenstein asked university undergraduates how much monetary compensation they would require to immerse one hand in painfully cold water for a fixed period one week later. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups. One group experienced a sample of the ice-water pain immediately before stating their reservation price; a second group had experienced the same pain one week earlier; a third group had never experienced it. Those who had just endured the pain demanded the highest compensation. Those recalling the pain from a week earlier demanded substantially less. The never-experienced group demanded the lowest amount of all. The progressive fading of the aversive intensity produced a clear retrospective empathy gap that undervalued future pain. Realistic retention or controlled re-experiencing of the full intensity would have yielded more accurate reservation prices and better-calibrated decisions about elective painful procedures.
• Badger, Bickel, Giordano, Jacobs, and Loewenstein’s 2007 study of heroin-dependent individuals: In a controlled laboratory setting, thirteen individuals receiving buprenorphine maintenance treatment were offered choices between an extra dose of the medication and varying amounts of money, with delivery scheduled five days later. Buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist used in medication-assisted treatment for opioid dependence, occupies the same brain receptors as heroin or methadone yet activates them only partially, thereby reducing withdrawal symptoms and cravings while producing a ceiling effect that limits euphoria and overdose risk. Decisions were made either immediately before the daily maintenance dose (when craving was higher) or minutes afterward (when craving was lower). Participants placed a markedly higher monetary value on the future extra dose when they decided while still in the higher-craving state than when they decided after the dose had reduced craving. The cold-state undervaluation of future craving intensity left participants vulnerable to underestimating the force of later desire. Accurate projection of the hot state would have produced higher reservation prices and stronger protective commitments against relapse.
• Loewenstein’s synthesis of clinical data on physician under-treatment of pain: George Loewenstein reviewed multiple studies of cancer and emergency-care settings showing that physicians, who almost always evaluate patients while themselves in a cold, pain-free state, systematically underestimate the intensity of ongoing patient pain and therefore under-prescribe analgesics. Quantitative audits cited in the review documented rates of inadequate pain relief exceeding 40 percent in some oncology samples. The interpersonal cold-to-hot gap caused prolonged patient suffering and slower recovery. Protocols requiring clinicians to confront contemporaneous first-person intensity ratings or physiological markers of the patient’s hot state would have narrowed the gap and improved dosing accuracy.
• Nordgren’s 2007 studies on visceral states and the evaluation of impulsive behavior: Loran F. Nordgren and colleagues conducted a series of experiments examining how current visceral states shape judgments of impulsive actions. Participants were placed in either a cold state (for example, not hungry, not fatigued, or not sexually aroused) or a corresponding hot state and then asked to evaluate impulsive behaviors driven by the same drive, such as impulsive eating, resting when exhausted, or sexual impulsivity. Those in a cold state consistently judged the related impulsive behavior more harshly and attributed it more strongly to character flaws, while those in the matching hot state evaluated the same behavior more leniently and recognized the force of the visceral urge. The effect was state-specific: hunger influenced only judgments of hunger-driven impulses, and so on. The cold-state underappreciation of the motivational power of the drive produced stigmatizing evaluations that the hot-state participants did not share. Accurate simulation of the relevant hot state would have generated more charitable and realistic appraisals of impulsive behavior in both self and others.

Conclusion

The empathy gap undermines both self-regulation and social understanding by rendering visceral influences invisible precisely when they matter most. The hot-cold empathy gap primarily describes how people mispredict their own future or past reactions when they are in a different visceral state—underestimating a hot state’s power while calm, or overestimating its lasting hold while aroused. The same mechanism extends to predicting others’ reactions through a dual-judgment process: people first simulate how they themselves would feel in that state, then adjust for differences between self and other. Because the initial self-simulation already contains the error, the gap carries over and often amplifies when judging other people.

Individuals who plan while cold repeatedly underestimate the force of future hot states, generating broken resolutions, relapsed addictions, and inadequate preparation for pain or deprivation. The same distortion appears in childbirth, where a woman in a calm, non-labor state often underestimates the overwhelming intensity of labor pain and the urgent desire for relief, only to revise birth plans dramatically once contractions intensify; after the pain fades, the memory itself softens, making later preparation for subsequent births less realistic. Parallel dynamics shape the experience and planning of war: officers and policymakers operating in peacetime or training environments systematically undervalue the grip of combat fear, exhaustion, and trauma on behavior, producing strategies and expectations that diverge sharply from the realities faced by those in the heat of battle; returning to a calm state later makes it difficult to convey or fully recall that intensity, contributing to repeated under-preparation for psychological costs. At the societal level the bias surfaces in medical practice, public-health messaging, and policy design, where decision makers insulated from the relevant drives systematically undervalue the experiences of those who suffer them. Within psychology the bias demonstrates that emotional perspective taking is itself state-dependent and constrained by the limits of interoceptive simulation. In the brain, the regions that register internal bodily feelings and help weigh future outcomes do not fully engage when a person tries to imagine a different emotional state, so judgments remain tied to the present feeling rather than the projected one.

Mitigation is advanced by recruiting people who have recently been in the relevant hot state—for example, women who have just given birth, combat veterans still close to their deployment, or patients who recently endured severe pain—because their forecasts and recommendations are usually more realistic than those of people who have never faced the state. The gap narrows further when those individuals are asked for input while the memory is still relatively fresh, or when institutions deliberately re-expose decision-makers to controlled versions of the experience. Even then, the cold mind never fully recovers the full force of the hot body, which is why ongoing mechanisms such as recent testimony, vivid simulation, and pre-commitment devices calibrated to hot-state preferences remain necessary. Only by forcing the cold mind to confront the full intensity of the hot body can prediction approach the power that actually governs action.

Quick Reference

→ Synonyms: hot-cold empathy gap; visceral state misprediction; cold-to-hot projection error
→ Antonyms: accurate affective forecasting; state-congruent perspective taking; interoceptive simulation fidelity
→ Related Biases: projection bias; affective forecasting error; impact bias

Citations & Further Reading

• Badger, G. J., Bickel, W. K., Giordano, L. A., Jacobs, E. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2007). Altered states: The impact of immediate craving on the valuation of current and future opioids. Journal of Health Economics, 26(5), 865–876.
• Loewenstein, G. (1996). Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65(3), 272–292.
• Loewenstein, G. (2005). Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4, Suppl.), S49–S56.
• Nordgren, L. F., van der Pligt, J., & van Harreveld, F. (2007). Evaluating Eve: Visceral states influence the evaluation of impulsive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(1), 75–84.
• Read, D., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Enduring pain for money: Decisions based on the perception and memory of pain. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12(1), 1–18.
• Sayette, M. A., Loewenstein, G., Griffin, K. M., & Black, J. J. (2008). Exploring the cold-to-hot empathy gap in smokers. Psychological Science, 19(9), 926–932.
• Van Boven, L., Loewenstein, G., Dunning, D., & Nordgren, L. F. (2013). Changing places: A dual judgment model of empathy gaps in emotional perspective taking. In M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 48, pp. 117–171). Academic Press.