The borderline empathy effect: Do high BPD individuals have greater empathic ability? Or are they just more difficult to “read”?

Clinical psychologists have suggested that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are unusually accurate at “reading” other people. We investigated this claim by obtaining measures of trait accuracy and empathic accuracy in 38 same-sex dyads, each composed of one high BPD and one low BPD member. At first glance, the results suggested that the high borderline dyad members displayed both better trait accuracy and better empathic accuracy. Additional analyses revealed, however, that these effects were instead a consequence of the high BPD participants having more unusual, harder-to-predict personalities and more difficult-to-infer thoughts and feelings than those of their low BPD counterparts. We conclude that the relative empathic advantage displayed by high BPD individuals does not reflect greater ability; instead, they are simply more difficult to “read” than low BPD individuals are.