Empathy gaps for social pain: Why people underestimate the pain of social suffering.

Abstract

In 5 studies, the authors examined the hypothesis that people have systematically distorted beliefs about the pain of social suffering. By integrating research on empathy gaps for physical pain (Loewenstein, 1996) with social pain theory (MacDonald & Leary, 2005), the authors generated the hypothesis that people generally underestimate the severity of social pain (ostracism, shame, etc.)--a biased judgment that is only corrected when people actively experience social pain for themselves. Using a social exclusion manipulation, Studies 1-4 found that nonexcluded participants consistently underestimated the severity of social pain compared with excluded participants, who had a heightened appreciation for social pain. This empathy gap for social pain occurred when participants evaluated both the pain of others (interpersonal empathy gap) as well as the pain participants themselves experienced in the past (intrapersonal empathy gap). The authors argue that beliefs about social pain are important because they govern how people react to socially distressing events. In Study 5, middle school teachers were asked to evaluate policies regarding emotional bullying at school. This revealed that actively experiencing social pain heightened the estimated pain of emotional bullying, which in turn led teachers to recommend both more comprehensive treatment for bullied students and greater punishment for students who bully.

Citizens’ adaptive or avoiding behavioral response to an emergency message on their mobile phone

“…Respondents were phoned within 48 h after the incident occurred, granting our results high validity. Generally, future emotions (and related behavior) are hard to imagine when people are in a relatively unemotional state (Loewenstein 2005;Nordgren, Banas, and MacDonald 2011). Measuring behavior in real emergency situations therefore provides increased opportunities to actually assess emotional effects.…”

Too much experience: A desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

“…In tum, participants overestimated how willing others would be to perform and underestimated how much others would demand to be paid in the same way (Van Boven, Loewenstein, & Dunning, 2005), The general notion of using one's own "cold" unemotional state as a proxy to judge someone else's "hot" emotional state has been shown across a variety of related contexts. For example, people who are not hungry judge others who eat large quantities harsher than do people who are hungry (Nordgren, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2006), and people who find it easy (vs. hard) to "fit in" underestimate how much social exclusion hurts (Nordgren, Banas, &MacDonald, 2011). Accordingly, consistent with the view that underexposure to emotional situations causes people to underestimate the impact of emotions on others, providing people with a "sample" of an affective state helps reduce these gaps in empathy and understanding.…”

Many ways to walk a mile in another’s moccasins: Type of social perspective taking and its effect on negotiation outcomes

“…In addition, a robust literature focused on negotiation identifies not only the need for disputants to cultivate a positive relationship over time, but to also identify optimal, win-win solutions where possible as they allocate scarce resources (Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin, & White, 2008;Trötschel, Hüffmeier, Loschelder, Schwartz, & Gollwitzer, 2011). Other important studies also suggest that SPT plays an important role in improving these outcomes between individuals and groups as well as at the intergroup level (Nordgren, Banas, & MacDonald, 2011;Paluck, 2010). …”