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

Abstract

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 evaluate this framework with two computational probes under controlled noise. The IET update rule does not outperform fixed baselines. Instead, we find a robust regime-dependent structure: repair trades discriminative fidelity for gist preservation. At low noise, repair degrades retrieval accuracy; at high noise, it preserves gist meaning, revealing an interaction between noise level, repair, and evaluation metric. We interpret this structure through IET, suggesting that empathy in extended interaction is not eliminating divergence but regulating its dynamics. This motivates a shift in empathic AI design from convergence toward managing interpretive distance.