Empathy can be a powerful and positive tool for shaping and changing policy preferences, encouraging cooperative or inclusionary behavior, and warming attitudes towards others. Yet, recent work has shown that engaging in empathy is costly. We investigate what those costs are --- whether they are emotional or cognitive --- and propose and test an intervention designed to lower the barriers to empathy. In our first study, we verify the cognitive costs of empathy and further harness an incentive-compatible reservation wage design to estimate a monetary price to the cost. We then propose peer praise as an effective and light-touch approach to overcoming such costs and promoting empathetic behavior, developing a second study with an intervention that generates naturalistic peer praise. In a third study, we employ a randomized experiment with natural peer praise (elicited in Study 2) and demonstrate that some of the costs of empathy can be overcome by receiving praise for empathetic behavior from peers. Finally, we propose and test potential emotional mechanisms that might be at play in making peer praise an effective empathy promoter and offer preliminary empirical evidence of such.