Is empathy an attribute that is equally important for a historian and a human scientist? Discuss with reference to history and the human sciences.
TOK essays are a lot like dinner parties: you need good conversation starters, well-thought-out ideas, and a few funny lines that people will remember. November 2025’s prompt 6 is a great one to host if you like big questions with a side of subtle complexity.
The question “Is empathy equally important for historians and human scientists?” is a complex one that requires a nuanced answer. As someone who has been an IB TOK teacher for (what seems like) hundreds of years, I can tell you that students who are clear, thoughtful, and brave enough to handle some complexity without getting lost in it do well on essays like these. Here is a guide that will show you how to write this title, what examples to use, and how to make your TOK essay sound serious and competent without boring the reader.
How to Work on the November 2025 TOK Prompt 6?
When students are asked this question, they often give a broad answer right away, like “Yes, empathy is important for both!” or “No, historians must be cold and factual!” — they’re both traps. TOK can’t stand thinking in black and white.
Your task is to construct a fluid, multi-layered case that demonstrates your comprehension of the context in which empathy is formed, tested, and expressed in history and the human sciences. First, break down the key terms:
- Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone else’s thoughts and feelings.
- A historian is someone who seeks knowledge and makes sense of past events by using sources, stories, and proof.
- A human scientist is a researcher in an area like sociology, anthropology, or psychology who looks into human behavior, social systems, or psychological patterns.
Do not skip the “definitions” step; it helps you set the boundaries of your case right away. Make sure you define them clearly, but leave enough room for discussion.
Then you need to ask the right things:
- How does empathy affect the way knowledge is acquired, understood, or shared?
- When is it a strength (getting a better understanding)?
- When might it become a problem (because it leads to bias or wrong conclusions)?
Before writing your paper, it’s helpful to make a rough plan. You could order your essay by comparing and contrasting two situations: one in which empathy was needed to find deeper truths (like in anthropology), and the other in which it led to a skewed view of the past (like when nationalist historians made up stories about what happened).
Also, think about the methods and standards you have. For example, historians often see objectivity as a virtue, while human scientists sometimes see subjectivity as necessary and even helpful.
Remember, most importantly, that this TOK essay prompt is about going between different points of view with ease and giving each one careful thought. Think of it less like a trial play and more like a very polite academic dinner party where everyone listens, argues politely, and no one gets kicked out.
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What Are the Best AOKs and WOKs for This Title?
Picking the appropriate AOKs and WOKs is similar to choosing the appropriate construction materials for a home. If you have a hammer instead of a scalpel, things will come apart quickly and typically with a lot of noise. Here, accuracy—not chaos—is the aim.
You don’t need to add any new AOKs because the prompt already gives you History and Human Sciences. Instead, you should put extra thought into these two. Each one looks at empathy and how it changes knowledge in its way.
Best AOKs to Use
History
The job of a historian is to keep notes, remember events, and make sense of them. Think about this question: Do historians need to feel empathy to understand what people who wrote slave tales, diaries from the Holocaust, or letters from soldiers went through? Or will empathy change the facts?
While empathy can help historians understand how people felt and what drove them, it can also cause them to impose their current views on past events, a phenomenon known as presentism.
Human Sciences
Human scientists like anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists often need to really understand the people they study. For example, an ethnographic study requires seeing things from someone else’s perspective without judging them. Again, though, empathy can lead to subjectivity if researchers become too emotionally involved, making it difficult to distinguish between observation and support.
Best WOKs to Support Your Argument
Emotion
At the heart of empathy is emotion. It helps us understand what other people are going through, but it can also make us less objective. In your essay, you can talk about whether emotional understanding makes knowledge claims more accurate or less accurate.
Reason
As an essential measure, reason does its job. To examine sources and avoid the urge to “feel” their way to a conclusion, historians, in particular, must use critical thinking. When you show empathy for no reason, research can turn into a story.
Language
Because it affects how knowledge is shared, language is essential. Human authors and scientists can either foster empathy or distance through their writing style and word choice. The areas to investigate here are translations, cultural terms, and historical records.
Imagination
Imagination works in the background. To comprehend points of view that are very different from their own, historians and human scientists occasionally need to “imagine” new worlds or situations. Imagination can help you feel empathy by letting you picture what life was like for a farmer in the Middle Ages or a refugee today.
What Are the Real-Life Situations for This Prompt?
A good TOK essay must be grounded in real-life situations. Your essay will become dangerously dull and theory-heavy without them. This is the way you make this essay come to life.
For History
Empathy enables historians to see the emotion beneath dry military reports when they analyze letters home from World War I troops. However, they may transfer contemporary emotions onto historical characters if they have too much empathy.
While empathy is necessary to comprehend the experiences of the victims, Holocaust historians must also keep an academic distance to prevent emotional bias from influencing their interpretation of the facts.
Also, scholars need empathy when examining post-colonial histories, like the stories of indigenous communities during European colonization, to fully understand the viewpoint of colonized peoples, who are frequently left out of traditional records. But if they let empathy take over, they might oversimplify complicated political and cultural situations into simple stories of aggressor and sufferer and miss important details.
For Human Sciences
Anthropologists who work with native groups, like Margaret Mead in Samoa, depend on empathy to correctly portray the cultures of the region. But too much empathy could lead to romanticizing or misinterpreting local ways of doing things.
When assessing patients, clinical psychologists need to show empathy and understanding, but they also need to be careful not to over-identify, which could hinder an objective evaluation.
Also, sociologists who study underrepresented urban areas need to understand the problems faced by the people to conduct effective studies. However, empathy can also influence how researchers collect data if they unconsciously “side with” participants, which can affect how they ask questions or interpret poll results.
Final Thoughts
If you write this essay the right way, you’ll get something really interesting, not just for your TOK teacher but for anyone who will read it. Remember that TOK isn’t about being the loudest person who says what you think. It means having a well-thought-out conversation and demonstrating that you understand when to agree, disagree, and pause to say, “This is complicated.”
Be careful when you answer this prompt and make your references clear. Don’t sound like a robot (or worse, an inspiring speaker who is too excited). The most important thing is to show that you can think, not just repeat what you learned in school.
And don’t worry if you get stuck. Even experienced TOK teachers get stuck from time to time. You can get help right away.
Where Can You Get Help with TOK Essay Prompts?
The writers and tutors who work with me at Buy TOK Essay help IB students turn prompts like this one into essays that get the best grades. You can come to us for a planning session, a sketch, a complete TOK essay, or to hear someone say, “Yes, that’s a good idea. Go for it.”
It’s normal to feel like your brain is turning into oatmeal when you think about empathy, history, and human scientists. Remember that you don’t have to do everything by yourself. Visit BuyTOKEssay.com to get help from real TOK pros.
