The Political Cost of Empathy

• In Event: The Social and Emotional Foundations of Political Divisions

Abstract

In the last decades, political divisions have increased tremendously (e.g., Mason 2015, 2018), and Democrats and Republicans have grown apart, fearing and loathing each other (Iyengar et al. 2019). These divisions are also notable in Canada (Merkley 2022) and are described as an automatic and “ingrained” process in individuals’ minds (Iyengar and Westwood 2015). In 2006, Barack Obama made a speech for the K.I.D.S. gala, arguing that American society had an “empathy deficit.” For him, cultivating empathy in society would reduce social divisions. Is empathy the solution?

Although intuitive, the answer is not straightforward. On the one hand, empathy has been shown to increase prosocial behaviours (Klimecki 2019; Lockwood et al. 2016) and helped to reduce prejudice (Kalla and Broockman 2022; Simonovits, et al. 2018). On the other hand, research shows that empathy is biased toward the in-group: people tend to feel less empathic for out-group members (Cikara, et al. 2011; Cikara et al. 2014; Simas et al. 2020).

Yet, this literature fails to explain the motivation behind this gap. To better understand empathy, and its effects on individuals’ thoughts and behaviours, an increasingly important research program propose a theory founded in human motivations (Cameron et al. 2022; Tamir 2016). Empathy is described as context-dependent, where people will display different levels of empathy across situations (Weisz and Zaki 2018). These motives might either push people towards (approach motives) or away (avoidance motives) empathic responses (Zaki 2014). Approach motives might motivate people to feel empathy if they believe in the utility of this feeling or to strengthen their social ties. Avoidance motives will restrict empathic feeling because it interferes with goals (Cikara, et al. 2011) or because of its cognitive costs (Cameron et al. 2019).

A burgeoning literature is being built around these avoidance motives, especially its cognitive costs (Cameron et al. 2019). For example, Cameron et al. (2019, 963) argue that “when given a choice to empathize with strangers, people will tend to avoid empathy, and that avoidance will be associated with perceptions of cognitive work.” These findings highlight the centrality of the cognitive process behind empathy: people tend to avoid it if it does not benefit them, if the target is not similar to them, or if it is too costly cognitively. This research explores the implications of this avoidance and biases on individual political attitudes.

To date, little work has linked these literatures to understand the motivation behind the empathic gap and its implications in politics. This research intends to address three questions. First, do people avoid empathy? I expect to observe that respondents will avoid empathy in general (H1). Second, are people more likely to avoid empathy when the target is from a political out-group? I expect participants to select empathy less when the target is an outgroup member (H2). Third, do empathy avoidance has incidences on political animosity and polarization? I expect people who avoid empathy more generally will be more polarized and hostile toward their outgroup (H3a). Further, people that reported an empathy gap for the out-group will be more likely to be polarized and hostile towards their outgroup (H3b).

These questions will be answered using a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States and Canada to be administered in Winter and Spring 2023. Respondents will be presented with a modified version of the empathy selection task of Cameron et al. (2019). This task measures whether people are willing (or not) to approach (avoid) empathy for a target. During the task, they will be randomly presented with an image of an individual and several pieces of information about this person (conjoint experiment). The image will be a randomly selected photo drawn from the Chicago face database (N=1,176) varying several individual characteristics (emotion, gender, age, ethnicity, etc.). The target will also be presented with the following sentence: “This person lives in [City], works in [Occupation], and consider themselves as [Partisanship].”

Following this treatment, three types of variables will be measured: partisan cooperation, social distance, and affective polarization. The analysis will test the three hypotheses using Average Marginal Component Effects and Ordinary Least Square regressions to examine whether people (H1) avoid empathy altogether, (H2) if they avoid it more when the target is from the political out-group, and (H3) if this avoidance influences social divisions. Together, these findings will contribute to our understanding of the roots of partisan hostility and the implications of empathy in public opinion and political behaviour.

Author

• Thomas Bergeron, University of Toronto