Empathic responses are reduced to competitive but not non-competitive outgroups

ABSTRACT

Individuals feel more empathy for those in their group (i.e. ingroup members) than those who are not (i.e. outgroup members). But empathy is not merely selective to group distinctions, rather it fluctuates according to how groups are perceived. The goal of this research was to determine whether group-based evaluations can drive biases in self-reported empathy as well as in the underlying neural activity. Participants were asked to rate a target’s physical pain while BOLD responses were recorded via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The target was either a member of the ingroup or one of two outgroups, one which was more of a rival to the ingroup than the other. Participants reported feeling more empathy for targets experiencing painful compared to innocuous events, showing bias only in favour of their ingroup. Neural responses were stronger while observing painful, compared to innocuous, events but only for targets from the ingroup or the less competitive outgroup. The difference was non-significant and trended in the opposite direction when the target was from the more competitive outgroup. This provides evidence that empathy is not merely selective to “us” vs “them” but is more nuanced by whom we refer to by “them”.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• intergroup
• rivalry
• pain
• fMRI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ At the time of testing the University of Exeter was ranked 10^th in the UK overall, compared to Sussex at 21^th and Cardiff at 31^st; CUG, 2016).

² Within each condition, the target’s group membership was held constant throughout the study to ensure that the social identity would not be perceived as transient or arbitrary.

³ Only participants who answered these questions correctly – and thus who processed the information – were included in the statistical analysis. However, participants were given the opportunity to revise the article at any point, resulting in accurate responses to those items, across the test sample.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory under Grant DSTLX-1000083201