Sociopaths can have empathy, but it tends to be selective, inconsistent, and weaker than what most people experience. The clinical picture is more nuanced than the popular image of someone completely devoid of feeling. People with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), the formal diagnosis closest to what’s colloquially called sociopathy, show specific patterns of empathy impairment rather than a total absence of it. Roughly 2 to 5 percent of the adult population meets criteria for ASPD at some point in their lives.
Two Types of Empathy, Two Different Deficits
Empathy isn’t a single ability. It breaks into two components: cognitive empathy (understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling) and affective empathy (actually sharing or resonating with that emotion in your own body). These rely on different brain circuits, and they don’t always travel together.
A systematic review of studies on adults with ASPD found that cognitive empathy was significantly more impaired than affective empathy. In practical terms, this means someone with ASPD may struggle more with reading another person’s perspective or recognizing what they’re going through than with feeling something when confronted with obvious distress. That said, both types are diminished compared to the general population. The deficit in emotional resonance is real, just smaller on average.
This distinction matters because it challenges the assumption that sociopaths are expert manipulators who perfectly read people but feel nothing. The research suggests the opposite pattern is more common: their ability to intellectually decode others’ emotions is actually the weaker link, while some capacity for emotional response remains, at least under certain conditions.
What Happens in the Brain
Neuroimaging studies consistently find that people high in antisocial traits show reduced activity in the amygdala, a brain structure central to processing fear and social distress signals. This reduction is most pronounced when viewing fearful facial expressions, exactly the kind of cue that normally triggers an empathic alarm in most people.
When someone sees fear on another person’s face, the amygdala typically fires as a kind of social alert system, prompting concern, caution, or the impulse to help. In people with significant antisocial behavior, that signal is dampened. The brain registers the face but doesn’t generate the same urgency. This helps explain why someone with ASPD might intellectually know they’ve hurt someone without feeling the visceral discomfort that would normally follow.
Importantly, the amygdala isn’t offline entirely. It still responds to some emotional stimuli, particularly anger and direct threats. The dampening appears most specific to cues of vulnerability and distress in others.
Primary vs. Secondary Variants
Not all people who fit under the sociopathy umbrella experience empathy the same way. Researchers distinguish between two broad subtypes, sometimes called primary and secondary variants, and the difference is significant.
Primary variants are characterized by low anxiety, emotional coldness, and a stable lack of guilt or concern for others. These individuals rarely experience social emotions like sympathy or remorse. They can mimic the outward expression of whatever emotion would get them what they want, but the internal experience is largely absent.
Secondary variants share the same callous traits on the surface but carry high levels of anxiety and emotional distress underneath. They feel mood shifts like sadness, anger, and even guilt more readily than primary variants. This subgroup is more emotionally reactive overall, which means they may genuinely experience empathy in some situations, particularly with people they feel personally connected to. Their antisocial behavior often looks more impulsive and chaotic rather than calculated.
Research on adolescents in both community and detention settings confirmed this split. Clusters with high callous traits but also high anxiety (the secondary pattern) represented a meaningful portion of those studied. These individuals aren’t emotionless. They’re dysregulated, often bouncing between genuine feeling and harmful behavior in ways that confuse the people around them.
Empathy That Comes and Goes
One of the most disorienting things for people close to someone with ASPD is that empathy can appear genuine in one moment and vanish the next. This inconsistency isn’t necessarily faking. It reflects the way empathy functions on a dimmer switch rather than an on/off toggle in these individuals.
Context plays a major role. Someone with ASPD might feel real compassion for a child or an animal while remaining indifferent to the suffering of a colleague. They might respond empathically when they’re calm and well-rested but show no concern under stress. Motivation also matters. When there’s a personal incentive to care, or when the other person is part of their inner circle, the empathic response can temporarily strengthen.
The DSM-5 defines the empathy impairment in ASPD as a “lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others” paired with a “lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another.” But “lack of concern” doesn’t necessarily mean zero concern in every moment. It means the baseline is set low enough that it consistently fails to prevent harmful behavior or produce appropriate guilt afterward.
Reading Emotions vs. Caring About Them
People sometimes confuse charm with empathy. Someone with ASPD can be socially skilled, attentive, and even warm in conversation without any of that translating into genuine concern. This is where the distinction between understanding emotions and being moved by them becomes critical in daily life.
A person with strong cognitive empathy but weak affective empathy can tell you’re upset, might even say the right comforting words, but won’t feel your pain as their own. They’re processing your emotional state as information, not as a shared experience. Over time, people in relationships with someone like this often describe a pattern: the person seems to “get it” in conversation but their behavior never changes in response to the hurt they cause.
Secondary sociopaths add another layer. Because they do experience social emotions to some degree, including guilt and sympathy, their empathic moments can be entirely real. The problem is that these feelings don’t reliably override their impulsive or self-serving tendencies. A person might feel genuinely sorry after an outburst and still repeat the same behavior the following week.
Can Empathy Be Strengthened?
The brain’s empathy circuits aren’t completely fixed. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire in response to new experiences and repeated practice, applies to emotional processing as well. Some therapeutic approaches focus on building perspective-taking skills, improving emotional awareness, and creating structured incentives for prosocial behavior.
Progress is slow and outcomes vary considerably. People with the secondary variant, who already have some emotional responsiveness, tend to be more reachable than those with the primary pattern. Younger individuals generally show more flexibility than adults with decades of entrenched behavior. The presence of motivation matters enormously. Empathy-building exercises only work if the person engages with them genuinely, and intrinsic motivation to change is one of the traits most consistently lacking in ASPD.
What most clinicians observe is that even when empathy itself remains limited, behavioral change is possible. Someone with ASPD can learn to act in less harmful ways through understanding consequences, even if they never develop the gut-level emotional response that makes most people wince when they see someone in pain. The ceiling for empathic growth varies from person to person, and predicting who will improve remains one of the harder questions in personality disorder treatment.