Empathy vs Pity
Pity is often confused with both empathy and sympathy, but it is structurally different from both. Understanding the distinction changes how we relate to people in difficulty.
The Three Positions
Feeling with
You enter the other person's experience. You are alongside them, inside their world. The relationship is horizontal: two people at the same level.
Feeling for
You acknowledge their suffering from outside their experience. You feel sorrow or concern on their behalf. Still broadly horizontal, but with some distance.
Feeling above
You feel sorry for someone from a position of superiority. There is an implicit comparison: they are unfortunate; you are not. The relationship is vertical.
Why Pity Damages the Person It Is Aimed At
Pity is distinct from sympathy not just in degree but in structure. Sympathy involves feeling sorrow alongside someone as their equal. Pity involves feeling sorry for someone while implicitly placing yourself above their circumstances. It looks downward.
This positional difference has significant effects on the recipient. Research on social stigma, including work by Erving Goffman on "spoiled identity" and more recent work on disability and chronic illness, shows that being pitied reduces a person's perceived agency and competence in the eyes of both the observer and often themselves.
When someone who is ill, disabled, grieving, or in poverty receives pity, they often report feeling diminished: seen as defined by their misfortune rather than as a whole person. The message implicit in pity is: "I am glad I am not you." This is radically different from either sympathy ("I feel for what you are going through") or empathy ("I am with you in this").
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), distinguishes pity from compassion on exactly this basis. Compassion involves a judgement that the person's suffering is serious and not self-inflicted, plus a recognition that the same fate could befall you. Pity lacks that final recognition: it maintains the implicit assumption of the observer's immunity.
Recognising Pity in Everyday Language
A friend has lost their job after long-term unemployment
"Job hunting in this market is genuinely demoralising. I can imagine how ground down you must feel. Tell me where things are."
"That's really tough going. I'm sorry you're still dealing with this. I hope something comes up soon."
"Oh, poor you. I don't know how you cope. At least I've never had to go through something like that."
Someone living with a chronic health condition
"Living with something that never fully goes away must shape everything. What's it like to manage day to day?"
"I'm really sorry you have to deal with that. I hope you have good days alongside the difficult ones."
"You poor thing. I genuinely couldn't do what you do. It must be so hard being you."
Self-Pity: When the Inward Version Becomes Unproductive
Pity directed at oneself, commonly called self-pity, shares the same structural problem as pity directed at others: it positions the person as a passive victim of their circumstances rather than as an agent within them. While self-compassion (which Kristin Neff distinguishes carefully from self-pity) involves treating yourself with the same kindness you would show a good friend, self-pity tends to amplify suffering by focusing on how uniquely unfortunate your situation is.
Neff's 2011 research distinguishes self-compassion (which correlates with resilience, lower anxiety, and greater motivation) from self-pity (which correlates with rumination and lower wellbeing). The key difference is that self-compassion involves acknowledging difficulty as part of a shared human experience ("this is hard, and many people struggle with things like this"), while self-pity involves experiencing one's difficulty as uniquely isolating.