What does empathy have to do with fiction writing? Empathy is the ability to experience another’s feelings as your own. Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, as it were, which is exactly what you have to do if you are going to write a variety of believable characters which is exactly what every story needs. One example is my book War Party, where the reader gets to know both the main character but several of the ancillary characters, even the bad guys.
That same ability to understand how someone else feels makes authors more able to commiserate with their neighbors or even strangers. So maybe the better writer you are, the better you can put yourself in the place of others outside your own ethnology.