Experiments in Empathy

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

Paper 1: "Empathy as Game Theory" (Claire Adida and Andrew Little)
Most game-theoretic analysis assumes players make a correct conjecture about how others behave. But where do these beliefs come from? One possibility is that individuals imagine how they would behave in the others' role. But social scientists have also shown that imagining oneself in the other's shoes is a form of empathy, which engenders other-regarding behavior. This paper illuminates the mechanisms through which empathy affects individual behavior, with implications for cooperation. Theoretically, it highlights two possible channels: eliciting empathy can improve the accuracy of beliefs about what the other will do and/or increase the weight placed on the other's payoff. Each channel has implications for cooperation. We develop a simple model to illustrate these potential pathways, and test it empirically with a lab experiment.

Paper 2: "Praise from Peers Promotes Empathetic Behavior" (Adeline Lo, Lotem Bassan and Jonathan Renshon)
Empathy can be a powerful and positive tool for shaping and changing policy preferences, encouraging cooperative or inclusionary behavior, and warming attitudes towards others. Yet, recent work has shown that engaging in empathy is costly. We investigate what those costs are — whether emotional or cognitive — and propose and test an intervention designed to lower the barriers to empathy. In our first study, we verify the cognitive costs of empathy and harness an incentive-compatible reservation wage design to estimate a monetary price to the cost. We then propose peer praise as an effective and light-touch approach to overcoming such costs and promoting empathetic behavior, developing a second study with an intervention that generates naturalistic peer praise. In a third study, we employ a randomized experiment with natural peer praise and demonstrate that some of the costs of empathy can be overcome by receiving praise for empathetic behavior from peers. Finally, we propose and test potential emotional mechanisms that might be at play in making peer praise an effective empathy promoter and offer preliminary empirical evidence of such.

Paper 3: "The Effects of Photo-journalism on the Outgroup Empathy Gap" (Vin Arceneux, Bert Bakker and Johanna Dunaway)
Common explanations of media influence on bias toward out-groups focus on racial biases. Empathy is a psychological trait ostensibly capable of minimizing perceived differences between in-group and out-group members, but evidence suggests that for some, empathetic capacity is limited for out-group members.We ask whether and how media depictions of refugees and domestic natural disaster victims as in-group and out-group members influence attitudes. We conduct a series of experiments in which the skin tone and group size of refugees depicted in news story images varies by condition. We test whether photo-journalistic portrayals of refugees as more human decreases outgroup bias in people’s empathetic responses. We further explore whether individual differences in empathy and racism condition the effects of media images on empathic responses to outgroups.

Paper 4: "When Empathy and Negative Group Stereotypes Collide: The Case of Immigration” (Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman and Romeo Gray)
Empathy is a basic human ability and a possible foundation of support for immigration. Drawing on data from two studies, we examine the role of empathy in amplifying support or opposition to immigration based on someone holding a negative stereotype of members of the immigrant group. The first study involves a national online survey in which we examine the power of empathy to shape support for—or opposition to—acceptance of child refugees from Central America among those who hold negative and positive stereotypes of Latinos. In a second online survey experiment, respondents are assigned to read about a white or black immigrant and indicate their support for the immigrant as a function of their empathic ability and negative racial attitudes. In both studies, empathic ability is measured with Baron-Cohen and colleagues’ (2001) “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” task. The key hypotheses concern enhanced support for an immigrant among those high in empathic ability who also hold positive stereotypes of the immigrant group; in contrast, we predict enhanced opposition to the immigrant among those high in empathic ability who hold negative stereotypes. In line with our past research (Feldman et al 2020), we find in the first study that empathy enhances support for child refugees among those who hold positive Latino stereotypes, but backfires to increase opposition among those who hold negative stereotypes. We replicate these findings in the second study focused on a black or white immigrant. In the second study, we also assess the causal role of empathy regulation as the explanation for why empathy backfires in the context of a disliked immigrant. Respondents in that study are given an opportunity to further empathize with the immigrant after expressing their support for his case.

Sub Unit

• Division 51: Experimental Research

Individual Presentations

• Empathy as Game Theory - Claire Leslie Adida, UCSD; Andrew Little, University of California-Berkeley

• Praise from Peers Promotes Empathetic Behavior - Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Adeline Lo, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Lotem Bassan-Nygate, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• The Effects of Photo-Journalism on the Outgroup Empathy Gap - Johanna Dunaway, Texas A&M University; Kevin Arceneaux, Sciences Po; Bert Bakker, University of Amsterdam

• When Empathy and Negative Group Stereotypes Collide: The Case of Immigration - Leonie Huddy, SUNY, Stony Brook; Stanley Feldman, Stony Brook University; Romeo Gray

Chair

• Scott Clifford University of Houston

Discussant

• Scott Clifford University of Houston