Parochial Empathy Predicts Reduced Altruism and the Endorsement of Passive Harm

Bruneau, Emile; Cikara, Mina; Saxe, Rebecca

doi:10.1177/1948550617693064

Cited by 100 publications

(120 citation statements)

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“…Or did the mild nature of the events make it more socially acceptable for participants to express reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy? In related experiments using more extreme events across a variety of intergroup settings including among Americans vs. Arabs, Hungarians vs. Muslim refugees, and Greeks vs. Germans during Greek economic depression, people still exhibit pronounced intergroup empathy bias (Bruneau et al, 2017). These findings tentatively suggest that our effects would replicate with more extreme settings.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Researchsupporting

confidence: 51%

“…Finally, we measured group identification separately from our manipulations and entered in-group identification as a covariate in the analyses. Group identification reliably moderates individuals' levels of empathy and counter-empathy (Bruneau et al, 2017;Hoogland et al, 2015;Ouwerkerk et al, 2018) in intergroup contexts. By including in-group identification in the analyses, we can assess whether SDO is playing a unique role in driving empathic and counter-empathic responses.…”

Section: Study 3: Sdo Predicts Empathy and Counter-empathy In Novel Gmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This intergroup empathy bias has implications for both the willingness and capacity to engage with out-group members. For example, people reported reduced empathy in response to a person's distress if the person was not from their university (Tarrant, Dazeley, & Cottom, 2009), political group (Pliskin et al, 2018;Porat, Halperin, & Tamir, 2016), or country (Bruneau et al, 2017), and this led them to be less willing to help those in need. These biases even appear with novel groups: people who were 2 There is still an open question as to whether intergroup empathy bias is a broad and stable phenomenon (and thus might be better termed as trait intergroup empathy or trait parochialism) or context-dependent (i.e.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets

Hudson

Cikara

Sidanius

2019

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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Highlights• SDO predicted decreased empathy and increased counter-empathy in general.• Higher SDO scores were associated with greater intergroup empathy bias.• SDO scores also correlated with greater counter-empathy bias when groups competed. SOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION AND EMPATHY 3 AbstractThe capacity to empathize with others facilitates prosocial behavior. People's willingness and capacity to empathize, however, is often contingent upon the target's group membership -people are less empathic towards those they categorize as out-group members. In competitive or threatening intergroup contexts, people may even feel pleasure (counter-empathy) in response to out-group members' misfortunes. Social dominance orientation (SDO), or the extent to which people prefer and promote groupbased inequalities, is an ideological variable that is associated with a competitive view of the world, increased prejudicial attitudes, and decreased empathy. Thus, higher levels of SDO should be associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy in general, but especially towards those whose subjugation maintains group inequalities.Across three studies we show that among White individuals, higher SDO levels are associated with less empathy, and more counter-empathy in response to others' good and bad fortunes. More importantly, these reductions in empathy and increases in schadenfreude as a function of SDO were significantly stronger for Asian and Black targets than for in-group White targets when group boundaries were made salient prior to the empathy ratings. Finally, in a fourth study we show that this phenomenon is not dependent upon a history of status differences: higher SDO scores were associated with decreased empathy and increased counter-empathy for competitive out-group (relative to in-group) targets in a novel group setting. We discuss implications of these effects for hierarchy maintenance.

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Section: Limitations and Future Researchsupporting

confidence: 51%

Section: Study 3: Sdo Predicts Empathy and Counter-empathy In Novel Gmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets

Hudson

Cikara

Sidanius

2019

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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“…Although there is variability in whether this is what people actually prefer (Graham et al, 2014), parochialism has often been discussed as one of the most troublesome challenges for empathy. Yet in the contexts that might be mediated by finding common ground (Greene, 2013), empathy is dampened for people who are dissimilar (e.g., Avenanti et al, 2010;Azevedo et al, 2013;Bruneau, Cikara, & Saxe, 2017;Contreras-Huertas et al, 2013;Gutsell & Ends of empathy 40 Inzlicht, 2010Hein et al, 2010; for reviews, see Batson & Ahmad, 2009;Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011;Dovidio et al, 2010;Echols & Correll, 2012). Is empathy constrained to the in-group because we are unable, or rather, unwilling to empathize?…”

Section: Empathy and Partialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The ends of empathy: Constructing empathy from value-based choice

Cameron¹,

Cunningham²,

Saunders³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Empathy, or the ability to understand and resonate with the experiences of others, has long been considered by philosophers and scientists to be an important part of human morality. We present a new framework that explains empathy as resulting from motivated decisions. Drawing on models of cybernetic control, value-based choice, and constructionism, we suggest that empathy shifts depending on how people value and prioritize conflicting goals. We generate novel predictions about the nature of empathy from the science of goal pursuit, and address its apparent limitations. Empathy appears less sensitive to suffering of large numbers and out-groups, leading some to suggest that empathy is an unreliable ethical guide. Whereas these arguments assume that empathy is a limited-capacity resource, we suggest that apparent limits of empathy reflect byproducts of domain-general goal pursuit. Arguments against empathy reflect a misguided essentialism: they mistake our own choices to avoid empathy for intrinsic features of empathy, treating empathy as a capricious emotion in conflict with reason. We suggest that empathy results from a rational decision, even if its rationality is bounded, as in many decisions in everyday life. Empathy may only be limited if we choose to avoid pursuing empathic goals.Ends of empathy 3 "Empathy isn't just something that happens to us-a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain-it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, the dowdier cousin of impulse." -Leslie Jamison (2014), The Empathy ExamsIn the summer of 2016, empathy went viral. The world learned about Harambe, a silverback gorilla in the Cincinnati Zoo who was shot and killed by zookeepers in an attempt to save the life of a child who had fallen into his enclosure. In the aftermath of the incident, people around the world expressed support for Harambe in a variety of ways, ranging from social media posts to charitable donations to Harambe tattoos. Empathy for Harambe became a meme in its own right. On the other hand, many people appeared to lack empathy for the zookeepers, the child, and the child's mother, to the point that some even issued death threats. This example reveals a broader point about empathy (and the lack thereof): it can feel effortless, contagious, a passion to which we are subject, rather than something we choose or control.Empathy-our ability to understand and resonate with the experiences of others-is typically considered an emotion, which can entail the conceptual baggage that many people associate with emotion. People often see emotions as passions that are out of our control, as something that happen to us. This idea has much precedent. The term derives from the Greek empatheia, which takes feeling or passion (pathos) and directs it at or into (em) someone else;this was adapted to the German Einfühlung ("feeling into"), and translated into English as empathy (Wispe, 1987). These traditions emphasize continuity of empathy with emotions, and in so doing, ca...

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“…This body of research, exemplified by the work of Cikara et al (); Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau (); and Bruneau, Kteily, and Falk (), focuses primarily on how individuals view other groups. Some of the barriers in this domain are dehumanization (Gubler et al ; McDonald et al ; Kteily and Bruneau ; Bruneau, Jacoby et al ), prejudice (Er‐Rafiy and Brauer ; De Freitas and Cikara ; Kteily et al ; Orosz et al ), and failures of perspective taking at the intergroup level, as when people exhibit lower empathy for out‐group versus in‐group members (Saguy and Kteily ; Cikara et al ; Zaki and Cikara ; Bruneau, Cikara, and Saxe ).…”

Section: The Clustering Of Psychological Barriers Across Research Dommentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Barriers to Resolving Intergroup Conflict: An Extensive Review and Consolidation of the Literature

Friend¹,

Malhotra²

2019

Negotiation Journal

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This article reviews over sixty years of research on psychological barriers to intergroup conflict resolution and finds that scholars have identified eighty nominally different barriers that create or exacerbate intergroup conflict. In order to create a tractable list that would be more helpful to future scholars and practitioners, we consolidate this vast literature (e.g., by eliminating substantive and conceptual redundancies) to produce a list of twenty‐six “unique” psychological barriers. We further organize this inventory of barriers with a framework that distinguishes between “cognitive,” “affective,” and “motivated” psychological barriers. To better understand the literature ecosystem of research on psychological barriers, we employ a data visualization tool to illustrate the extent to which each of the twenty‐six unique barriers has been studied conjointly with every other barrier in the articles we reviewed. We then shift our attention to the work of scholars who have attempted, experimentally, to attenuate psychological barriers in negotiation and conflict settings, and identify five primary methods for doing so. Finally, we discuss the implications of our review for future work in this field.

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Parochial Empathy Predicts Reduced Altruism and the Endorsement of Passive Harm

Cited by 100 publications

References 39 publications

Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets

Preference for hierarchy is associated with reduced empathy and increased counter-empathy towards others, especially out-group targets

The ends of empathy: Constructing empathy from value-based choice

Psychological Barriers to Resolving Intergroup Conflict: An Extensive Review and Consolidation of the Literature

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