Sympathy for the underdog: people are inclined to adopt the emotional perspective of powerless (versus powerful) others

ABSTRACT

Upon learning of the story of Cinderella, most people spontaneously adopt the emotional perspective of this helpless young woman rather than of her older sisters who oppress her. The present research examines whether this pattern reveals a general human tendency to empathise more with the emotions of individuals with low (versus high) power. Six experiments (N = 878) examined how power influences the focus of people’s emotional attributions. Participants were presented with situations in which one character exercised power over another one and had to resolve a referential ambiguity by considering the perspective of one or the other character. Results show that participants largely privileged the emotional states of the low-power character over those of the high-power character. This effect was observed with different types of stimuli (comics and video clips), with high- and low-power roles attributed to pairs of different genders (Experiments 1–4) or same gender (Experiments 5–6). Finally, the tendency persisted – though it was reduced – when participants adopted a less passive role with respect to the characters (Experiment 3) and when power occurred in a less despotic way (Experiment 6). Results are discussed with respect to social attention and sensitivity to fairness.

KEYWORDS:

• Perspective-taking
• emotion
• power
• mentalising
• referential ambiguity

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank very warmly the two actors Yvain Juillard (https://time-art.com/talent/yvain-juillard.htm) and Philippe Vindras for their dedicated contribution to the video-clips used in this study. This work was supported by the Labex/Idex CORTEX ANR-11-LABX-0042, CNRS and INSERM. The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to the study concept, design, data collection and interpretation. F.Q, A.F. and E.C. performed the statistical analyses. F.Q. and J-B.VDH drafted the manuscript, and A.F., E.C., E.B. and Y.R. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Labex CORTEX: [Grant Number ANR-11-LABX-0042].