Empathy Gap
We underestimate how much our current emotional state influences our decisions.
The hot-cold empathy gap is a cognitive bias in which people underestimate the influences of visceral drives on their own attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. The term was coined by Carnegie Mellon University behavioural economist George Loewenstein. When in a 'cold' emotional state, people make decisions without fully accounting for how they'll feel in a 'hot' state (hungry, angry, or in pain), and vice versa.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Grocery Shopping Hungry People buy far more food when grocery shopping while hungry than they intended to when they started.
- Politics Negotiating Under Stress Negotiators in a conflict underestimate how much anger will drive their decisions once they're at the table.
Someone has already built a business on this.
Biases are not only private errors. They are design targets — patterns deliberately engineered into interfaces because they reliably work.
- E-commerce Hunger Marketing Flash sale emails sent near lunch time exploit the hot empathy gap to drive impulsive purchases.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
Someone who is full and satisfied pushes away the grocery list, unable to imagine the frustration of an empty refrigerator later in the week because their current satiety makes future hunger feel like an abstract concept rather than a real sensation.
Someone who is full of confidence after a success promises to take on a leadership role, unable to empathize with the imposter syndrome and self-doubt they will feel when actually making high-stakes decisions for the first time.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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