Empathy as Predictive Misalignment Tolerance: A Co-Regulation Framework and the Regime Structure of Dialogue Repair
Empathy is most often theorized as resonance: a mirroring of another's present emotional or cognitive state. This synchronic framing has shaped artificial systems, where empathic behavior is defined as affect recognition and response alignment. We argue this is the wrong target for extended dialogue, where understanding unfolds over time through prediction, divergence, and repair. We reframe empathy as predictive misalignment tolerance: the capacity to anticipate and regulate divergence across time rather than collapse it. We formalize this as Interpretive Error Tolerance (IET), a dynamic-threshold heuristic that models empathy as maintaining a viable band of divergence between agents. We...
| Authors | Molood Arman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.HC |
| Published | 5 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 May 2026 |
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