From empathy to action: Can enhancing host‐society children's empathy promote positive attitudes and prosocial behaviour toward refugees?

Abstract

Over half of refugees are school‐aged children. In host communities, children's attitudes and behaviours are important for the integration of refugee children. This study examines the empathy–attitudes–action model in middle childhood (N = 94, 8 to 11 years old). In both the experimental and control conditions, children were introduced to a (fictional) refugee and told that he or she would be moving to their school. The experimental condition also listened to a storybook about the child's refugee experience. Empathy, outgroup attitudes, and prosocial behaviour toward the incoming child, and refugees as a group, were measured. Although mediation was not supported, the storybook condition reported more empathy and helping intentions, and attitudes predicted helping intentions but not giving to refugees. Results highlight how host‐society children can welcome refugees.

Empathy to action: Child and adolescent out‐group attitudes and prosocial behaviors in a setting of intergroup conflict

“…Multidimensional measures of empathy, such as personal distress and perspective taking ability (Batson & Ahmad, ), and related constructs such as sympathy (Eisenberg, ), may offer a more nuanced understanding. Empathy induction, or other state‐based forms of empathy, also may hold promise to promote intergroup prosocial intentions and behaviors among children (Sierksma et al, ; Taylor & Glen, ). For example, concurrent experiences of empathy may be essential for understanding the decision to act prosocially or not across different intergroup settings.…”

“…For example, higher levels of dispositional empathy, or the ability to imagine and understand others' feelings and experiences, among 5–10‐year olds was related to greater prosociality toward an out‐group member, even when intergroup dynamics were competitive (Abrams, Van de Vyver, Pelletier, & Cameron, ). In addition, empathy induction in children has also been shown to reduce differences in helping intentions between imagined in‐group and out‐group peers (Sierksma et al, ; Taylor & Glen, ). Therefore, higher empathy may promote positive action between groups; however, the underlying mechanism remains unclear and this link has not been explored with natural groups in settings emerging from violent intergroup conflict.…”

Out-group prosocial giving during childhood: The role of in-group preference and out-group attitudes in a divided society

“…Sometimes more negative attitudes about ethnic out-groups are associated with more prosocial intentions and behaviors (e.g., Sierksma et al, 2018). Sometimes more positive attitudes about an out-group are related to helping intentions of majority children toward an immigrant (Vezzali et al, 2015) but not actual prosocial giving (Taylor & Glen, 2019). Among adolescents, a positive crosslagged relationship from out-group attitudes and out-group prosocial behavior was found in Northern Ireland, a society of protracted conflict (Taylor et al, 2014).…”

Preschoolers' Empathy Profiles and Their Social Adjustment

“…Research has shown that empathy plays a role in protecting social abilities and positive relationships (Mayberry and Espelage, 2007;Girard et al, 2014) and promotes cooperation and group cohesion (Zahn-Waxler et al, 1992;Jolliffe and Farrington, 2006b). However, the positive link between empathy and prosocial behaviors has been mainly studied in school-age children (e.g., Girard et al, 2014;Murakami et al, 2014;Deschamps et al, 2015;Taylor and Glen, 2020) and specifically in adolescents (e.g., LeSure-Lester, 2000;Wang et al, 2019), but to a less extent at preschool age (e.g., Roberts and Strayer, 1996;Williams et al, 2014). Most of these studies have treated empathy as a unidimensional construct, or have only taken one of the two components of empathy into account.…”