Empathy in Engineering Students – Initial Assessment of Student Perceived Ability

Empathy is an important 21st century skill for engineers, but little is known about how students self-identify their empathy skills. Forty second year systems design engineering students completed a survey containing a subset of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index focused on perspective-taking (seven statements) and empathic concern (two statements) with associated scores of 0-low empathy to 4-high empathy. There was little difference in median scores between statements. However, there was considerable variation between individual student responses. For perspective-taking scores, individual scores ranged from 11 to 28 out of 28. For empathic concern scores, individual scores ranged from 0 to 8 out of 8. There was no significant correlation between perspective-taking and empathic concern scores (rs = 0.280, p =0.084). This suggests a wide range in individual ability that may differ between empathy dimensions. Further research is needed using the full Interpersonal Reactivity Index on a wider diversity of engineering students.