Self-Interest Induces Counter- Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses to Others’ Economic Payoffs

Abstract

Previous studies have found that individuals exhibit empathic responses when others are treated unfairly. However, there remains a lack of clarity over the extent to which self-interest regulates these empathic responses, and in identifying which component of empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, an experiment was designed based on a money distribution task with two conditions [observation condition (OC) vs. participation condition (PC)], and carried out using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). Behavioral data showed that the participants’ empathic responses were consistent with their coplayers’ emotional expressions in the OC, whereas they were inconsistent with the coplayers’ expressions in the PC. The electrophysiological data showed that the neural encoding of facial expressions (reflected in the N170) was not affected by self-interest. However, the late stage of empathic responses (LPP) showed a decline when participants’ self-interest was involved. Disadvantageous inequality and relatively fair distribution to others elicited a more pronounced feedback-related negativity (FRN) than advantageous inequality distribution in both the OC and PC. As the late stage of empathic responses is also indexed by the LPP amplitude, these results indicate that the participants were more concerned for their own outcomes than for others’ benefits when self-interest was involved, which reduced their empathy toward their coplayers at the late stage of empathic responses.

I Can But I Shall Not Always Be Empathic

“…As previously described, empathy relies on affective and cognitive components, as well as regulatory processes to maintain equilibrium between these components (e.g., Decety & Jackson, 2004). A speculative hypothesis is that the cognitive load could interfere with the cognitive component of empathy, possibly by affecting the mentalizing brain network, as suggested by previous studies (e.g., Gu & Han, 2007; Jie et al., 2019b; Morelli & Lieberman, 2013; Rameson et al., 2012; Spunt & Lieberman, 2013). This would then create an imbalance between the affective and cognitive components of empathy and force individuals to rely mostly on the affective component to generate empathic judgments.…”

Establishing a counter-empathy processing model: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging

“…The authors of that study argued that counter-empathy induced by unfair distribution was not a complete disregard for others’ interests but an emotional reaction accounting for others’ interests while focusing on one’s own interests. Their study showed that the relationship between counter-empathy and empathy may be a transformation relationship and not the opposite ( Jie et al. , 2019b ).…”

“…Second, counter-empathy may involve more complex psychological mechanisms than those of empathy. According to previous ERP studies, one reason for this is that counter-empathy induced by some contexts occurs at the late stages of empathic responses, exhibiting a transformation from empathy to counter-empathy ( Jie et al. , 2019b ; Fan et al.…”

“…In the current study, we adopted a similar paradigm to that of Jie et al. ( 2019b ) because this paradigm can reduce participants’ prejudice against persons empathized with.…”

Social Exclusion Down-Regulates Pain Empathy at the Late Stage of Empathic Responses: Electrophysiological Evidence

“…Empathy gives us important information about other people and the environment, making it more possible to handle potential threat and promote prosocial behavior (Frith and Frith, 2006 ; Decety, 2010 ; Graaff et al, 2018 ). Several studies revealed that empathy is influenced by contextual factors, such as fairness (Singer et al, 2006 ), social distance (Meyer et al, 2012 ; Wang et al, 2016 ), competition (Yamada et al, 2011 ; Luo et al, 2018a ), state anxiety (Luo et al, 2018b ), self-interest (Jie et al, 2019a , b ), as well as social exclusion.…”