[pengaru]

Learning to separate empathy from sympathy with a conscious choice is part of adulting, a facet of establishing and enforcing (emotional) boundaries.

Those who lack that ability are quite vulnerable, it's one of the most rampantly exploited human flaws. "Bleeding Hearts" are a hugely exploited demographic, where people largely experience reactionary emotional sympathy and effectively lack empathy as a distinct observation they may then deliberate on what response is appropriate.

The psychopaths are the ones who either after deliberation never care, or can't even bother to deliberate on what they're seeing, which to the observer is tough if not impossible to disambiguate from a lack of empathy. Psychopathy is a pretty blurry thing though IMHO.