Empathy is assumed to promote cooperation. Model another agent's perspective, anticipate their needs, adjust your behavior — and cooperation should follow. The assumption runs through AI alignment research, game theory, and folk psychology alike.
Sipos and colleagues (arXiv:2602.20936) build a computational framework for empathy in active inference agents and test it in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Empathic agents simulate the other's perspective by transforming their own generative model into the other's viewpoint. The results confirm that reciprocal empathy produces robust cooperation — synchronized behavior, rapid recovery from defections, stable coordination.
But asymmetric empathy — where one agent models the other's perspective while the other does not reciprocate — leads to exploitation. The empathic agent cooperates because it models the other's preferences. The non-empathic agent defects because it has no such model. The empathic agent's perspective-taking makes it predictable, and predictability in a competitive context is a vulnerability. The one who understands gets exploited by the one who doesn't.
Cooperation is driven by empathic structure, not by learned reciprocity. Agents don't learn to cooperate through trial and error — the cooperation emerges from the structural alignment of their internal models. This means cooperation is fragile in a specific way: it depends on both agents having the right architecture, not on their experience or their intentions. Remove the structural symmetry and cooperation collapses, even if one agent is perfectly empathic.
The implication for AI alignment: building empathic agents is not sufficient for cooperation. If the agents they interact with lack reciprocal perspective-taking, the empathic agent becomes a resource, not a partner. Empathy is a cooperative strategy only in a population of empathic agents. In a mixed population, it is a disadvantage.
The general observation: a social capacity that produces positive outcomes under symmetry can produce negative outcomes under asymmetry. The capacity itself is neutral — its effect depends entirely on whether the interaction partner has the same capacity. One-sided understanding is not half of mutual understanding. It is a different thing entirely.