A Few Distinguishing Factors According to Jodi Freedman, a woman I spoke with whose friends consider her an adept people-reader (she doesn’t call herself an “empath,” but at least one person has described her that way), everyone’s born with the ability. “We’re hardwired for that; whether it gets acknowledged or developed depends on the path life takes,” she says. Jodi also believes that a troubled childhood can encourage the skill to emerge to a greater degree because kids who grow up in unsafe home environments learn to look for unspoken cues to alert them to danger Unique Beauty. Some professions foster empathic accuracy, such as therapy, teaching, sales, and diplomacy. Being naturally intuitive benefits Jodi as a teacher, but being a teacher also helps her hone that capacity. “I find that teachers have this ability more than others, because on the first day of school, we have to assess the kids,” she explains. “We have to get [information about their personalities] and get it quickly.” But she also says that any job that requires working with others necessitates a bit of mind reading. Career choices aside, some people believe the empathically accurate share specific personality traits as well. One of the essays in the book Empathic Accuracy, “Personality and Empathic Accuracy,” reviewed multiple studies on the subject to create a list of possible characteristics associated with the gift. Among them are a higher-than-average IQ and attention to detail, a good amount of trust in people Unique Beauty, “social sensitivity” (being aware of social norms and others’ opinions), sociability, and self-awareness. People who can read others don’t necessarily have all of these traits, but they’re the ones that came up most often among the most successful empaths in the study. What doesn’t seem to be a factor in someone’s empathic accuracy is one that many people consider highly important—gender. But one study Ickes and his colleagues performed showed that women, often thought to be the more intuitive sex, proved so only when they were reminded of the supposedly innate skill. Two researchers at the University of Oregon took these findings further by assigning men and women to people-reading tasks and offering them either no payment or payment for being successful. When given nothing, women outperformed men. But with financial incentive Unique Beauty, the men were able to match the women in empathic accuracy. Apparently, the only difference between a man’s and a woman’s ability to read someone else is a matter of motivation.