Building Empathy
- Duncan Maclean
- Aug 8, 2025
- 3 min read
Empathy is important in telling a story. The audience needs to feel some kind of connection with the subject—to invest in their plight, to hope for one outcome or another. This is empathy.
For an audience to connect, they need to believe in the motivations, decisions, and actions of the characters within the diegesis. Without that connection, the story may feel hollow or pointless. In short, readers need to be able to see into the lives and experiences of people who are like them—not necessarily in every way, or even in many ways, but there must be some point of commonality for a story to have enough depth to engage them (DeHart, 2023).
Recently, I read Soon by Morris Gleitzman. I found myself sympathising with the central character, Felix. His plight—told from a child’s point of view, and simplified so believably—had me convinced of his experiences. What the book described was far removed from my own childhood. I’ve never been to Poland, and I’ve certainly never had to run from the Nazis. And yet, I could understand the choices Felix made: how he cared for his friend Zara, and the bravery he showed in jumping from a moving train bound for a death camp—something I could never imagine doing (possibly).
My point is, my life is about as far removed from Felix’s story as it’s possible to be, and yet I found myself connecting with him. I agreed with the choices he made and understood his motivations.
I empathised with Felix. On some base level, I recognised myself in him—or at least a version of myself.
At the other end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley also sparked empathy in me. Operating at mythic scale, the conflict between Batman and Superman felt inevitable and tragic. Their frustration with the world and their conflicting methods are profoundly human. I am not from Krypton. I’m not a billionaire with years of training, a trauma-fueled sense of justice, and buckets of spare time. But I understood both perspectives. I could see how, based on their experiences, this clash made sense— it wasn’t just spectacle—it was the logical, emotional outcome of their histories.
So, what’s the secret ingredient? How is it that I can empathise with both Felix from 1940s Poland and superheroes in a dystopian future?
Scott McCloud offers an answer through his theory of amplification through simplification (McCloud, 1994). By reducing forms—especially visual ones—storytellers create space for the reader to fill in the gaps. The simpler the depiction, the more opportunity the audience has to project themselves into the story. In a way, the “secret ingredient” in storytelling is the reader themselves (Book Trust, 2025).
A famous experiment by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel in 1944 illustrates this perfectly. Three groups of around 30 people were shown a short film featuring black geometric shapes moving against a white background. The film ran for roughly 80 seconds. Despite the abstract nature of the footage, all but three viewers interpreted the shapes as beings with emotions and intentions (Heider & Simmel, 1944).
Viewers assigned personalities to the shapes and constructed narratives around their movements. They imagined motivations and relationships. In post-viewing interviews, they even expressed empathy for the shapes and the “characters” they had projected onto them. Despite the simplicity of the animation, McCloud’s theory—published some 50 years later—seems to hold up.
After watching the clip myself, I found myself wondering: how much of this understanding was shaped by motion? How far can I simplify and still express a story clearly?
Does the story need to be simple? Can I remove speech—or even captions? How far into abstraction can I go with a comic and still expect some level of shared understanding?
At this point, I don’t have the answers. But it’s something I plan to explore.
Book Trust. (2025). Exploring empathy using comics and graphic novels.
empathy-using-comics-and-graphic-novels/
DeHart, J. (2023, August 11). What Can Comics Do? Tapping Into Empathy and Flexibility. National Council of Teachers of English.
Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944). An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 243-259
McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial.
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