Empathy is considered a virtue, yet it fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: When given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here, we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the empathy selection task, which uses free choices to assess the desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies (N = 1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as more effortful and aversive and less efficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting that cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others’ feelings, people act as if it is not worth the effort.

Empathy is considered a virtue, yet fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: when given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the Empathy Selection Task, which uses free choices to assess desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies (N=1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as more effortful and aversive, and less efficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others' feelings, people act as if it's not worth the effort.

Collective memories of historical ingroup victimization can be linked to prosocial or hostile intergroup outcomes. We hypothesize that such discrepant responses are predicted by different construals of the ingroup's victimization in relation to other groups (i.e., comparative victim beliefs). Using improved measures of inclusive and exclusive victim beliefs, with a global or regional reference group, multigroup structural equation modeling showed across four different groups (Armenian Americans [N = 265], Jewish Americans [N = 297], Hungarians [N = 301], Poles [N = 468]) that inclusive victim beliefs predict prosocial, conciliatory attitudes, while exclusive victim beliefs predict hostile attitudes towards historical perpetrator groups and (in the Polish and Hungarian samples) religious and ethnic outgroups targeted in the present. Moreover, comparative victim beliefs mediated effects of more general psychological orientations (ingroup superiority, universal orientation, perspective-taking) on intergroup outcomes. These findings suggest the importance of considering distinct collective victim beliefs, and different contexts in research on collective victimhood.

Social psychological research on collective victimhood has focused on just a few ways in which people think about the ingroup's victimization that imply certain assumptions and limit our understanding of collective victim beliefs. Additionally, different historical and sociopolitical contexts may make different collective victim beliefs relevant. This article examines collective victim beliefs expressed in open-ended survey responses among six different groups: Northern Irish participants, Greek Cypriots, Hungarians, Poles, Jewish Americans, and Armenian Americans (N = 638). Qualitative content analysis revealed five broader categories with several collective victim beliefs each. General appraisals of the ingroup's collective victimization entailed centrality of ingroup victimization versus defocusing victimhood. More specific appraisals included contextspecific characteristics of the ingroup's victimization, perceptions of the perpetrator group (attributions of blame), and perceptions of other victim groups (comparative victim beliefs, including rejecting comparisons). The findings extend and challenge commonly studied collective victim beliefs, and propose novel theoretical directions.

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