Empathy corresponds to the psychological tendencies which allow one person to feel and understand someone else’s emotions. This psychological trait is believed to be essential to the good functioning of societies since it can explain why we care about the well-being of other people. Academic research shows that empathic individuals have more prosocial behaviors directed towards strangers, have better relationships, and are less likely to engage in antisocial behaviors. It may even be argued that empathy is the driving force of positive societal changes over the last two centuries. Undoubtedly, in the context of the global challenges faced by young people worldwide, fostering more empathy is urgently needed. This first edition of Youth Talks contributes to the understanding of empathy by collecting data on the empathic personalities of respondents, through a research-validated survey. The Interpersonal Reactivity Scale assesses four different dimensions of empathy: empathic concern (other-oriented feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others), perspective-taking (tendency to adopt spontaneously the psychological point of view of others), fantasy (respondents’ tendencies to transpose themselves into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters), and personal distress (self-oriented feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings). More than 5000 responses were collected. An empirical analysis of this data provides very interesting findings. A more detailed version can be found in the Appendix. Young people tend to score high on the measures of empathy most associated with prosocial attitudes and behaviors: empathic concern (EC) and perspective-taking (PT). These two dimensions tend to go together, showing that emotions and cognition feed into each other. Female and older respondents are more likely to exhibit empathic personalities, regardless of socio-cultural background. Surprisingly, higher education does not appear to contribute systematically to the development of empathy. At the country level, a high Human Development Index tends to decrease empathy across dimensions, having a net ambiguous effect because both outward-orientation and inward-orientation are simultaneously reduced. Lastly, the total variation in empathy illustrated by our model is very low, suggesting that this psychological trait is highly specific to the background of each individual and cannot be easily explained by common individual and country-level characteristics. Our results can be interpreted as supporting the view that promoting gender equality and group diversity in decision-making is important: women exhibit higher affective empathy and individuals vary widelyin their empathic traits in non-easily identifiable ways. More broadly, if collective empathy is truly the driver of revolutionary changes in human history, there is an urgent need to foster young people’s affective and cognitive connections with humankind, and more broadly, the biosphere through pedagogical activities. This may be especially important in societies that put a high value on self-development.