Empathy as Predictive Misalignment Tolerance: A Co-Regulation Framework and the Regime Structure of Dialogue Repair

Explain Like I'm Normal

Researchers are moving beyond 'mirroring' emotions and have formalised empathy as Interpretive Error Tolerance (IET). This framework suggests that social intelligence isn't about being perfectly in sync, but rather managing the margin of error between what two agents expect from each other during long-term dialogue.