Journal ArticleDOI
Using Empathy to Improve Intergroup Attitudes and Relations
C. Daniel Batson,Nadia Y. Ahmad +1 more
TLDR
In this article, social psychologists have given considerable attention to the possibility that empathy can be used to improve intergroup attitudes and relations by reviewing theory and research on the psychological processes involved, and it is important to consider the limitations of each form of empathy as a source of improved intergroup relations.Abstract:
Recently, social psychologists have given considerable attention to the possibility that empathy can be used to improve intergroup attitudes and relations. For this possibility to bear practical fruit, it is important to know what is meant by empathy because different researchers use the term to refer to different psychological states. It is also important to understand how each of these empathy states might affect intergroup relations by reviewing theory and research on the psychological processes involved, and it is important to consider the limitations of each form of empathy as a source of improved intergroup relations. Finally, it is important to consider the role of different empathy states in existing programs designed to improve intergroup relations, whether in protracted political conflicts, in educational settings, or via media. In this article, we pursue each of these goals.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy
TL;DR: The authors consider an alternative to empathy in the context of intergroup competition: schadenfreude (pleasure at others' pain) and show that outgroup members' suffering elicits dampened empathic responses as compared to ingroup members' sufferings.
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Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking.
TL;DR: Results show that participants who performed any type of perspective-taking task reported feeling more empathetic and connected to the homeless than the participants who only received information, and the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses
TL;DR: This research establishes the boundary conditions of intergroup empathy bias and provides initial support for a more integrative framework of group-based empathy.
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The power of being heard: The benefits of ‘perspective-giving’ in the context of intergroup conflict
Emile Bruneau,Rebecca Saxe +1 more
TL;DR: This article examined the effect of controlled, dyadic interactions on attitudes towards the "other" in members of groups involved in ideological conflict, and found that the effects of dialogue for conflict resolution depend on an interaction between dialogue condition and participants' group membership, which may reflect power asymmetries.
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Seeing the Unseen Attention to Daily Encounters With Sexism as Way to Reduce Sexist Beliefs
Julia C. Becker,Janet K. Swim +1 more
TL;DR: For instance, this article found that women and men endorse sexist beliefs because they are unaware of the prevalence of different types of sexism in their personal lives, while paying attention to sexism did not have these effects.
References
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Intergroup contact theory
TL;DR: The chapter proposes four processes: learning about the outgroup, changed behavior, affective ties, and ingroup reappraisal, and distinguishes between essential and facilitating factors, and emphasizes different outcomes for different stages of contact.
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Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases.
TL;DR: The Perception-Action Model (PAM), together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature and can also predict a variety of empathy disorders.
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How does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Meta‐analytic tests of three mediators
TL;DR: In this article, the authors test meta-analytically the three most studied mediators: contact reduces prejudice by enhancing knowledge about the outgroup, reducing anxiety about intergroup contact, and increasing empathy and perspective taking.
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Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy
TL;DR: Empathy is an ideal candidate mechanism to underlie so-called directed altruism, i.e., altruism in response to anothers's pain, need, or distress, and the dynamics of the empathy mechanism agree with predictions from kin selection and reciprocal altruism theory.
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The empathic brain: how, when and why?
TL;DR: This work proposes two major roles for empathy; its epistemological role is to provide information about the future actions of other people, and important environmental properties, and proposes a contextual approach, suggesting several modulatory factors that might influence empathic brain responses.