The current highly polarized U.S. political culture impedes people’s ability to live and work together effectively. Here we examine one factor that may play a role: selective empathy based on shared political ideology. Across seven studies (N = 3,476), participants read about a hypothetical politician and his political ideology, trustworthiness, or both. Participants reported their empathy for the politician after learning he was fined (Studies 1–6) or injured (Study 7). When trustworthiness alone was manipulated, liberals and conservatives expressed similar levels of empathy, with greater empathy for the more trustworthy politician. However, when the politician’s ideology alone was manipulated, participants reported greater empathy for the politician who shared their ideology. When trustworthiness and ideology were manipulated, selective empathy was observed when the politician was trustworthy. Participant ideology alone had little effect on empathy. The results suggest that empathy is sensitive to both trustworthiness and ideological match, but not ideology itself.
BäckströmM.BjörklundF. (2007). Structural modeling of generalized prejudice: The role of social dominance, authoritarianism, and empathy. Journal of Individual Differences, 28, 10–17.
2.
BakkerB. N.SchumacherG.GothreauC.ArceneauxK. (2020). Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats. Nature Human Behaviour, 4, 613–621.
3.
BatsonC. D. (2010). Empathy-induced altruistic motivation. In MikulincerM.ShaverP. R. (Eds.), Prosocial motives, emotions, and behavior: The better angels of our nature (pp. 15–134). APA Books.
4.
BatsonC. D.FultzJ.SchoenradeP. A. (1987). Distress and empathy: Two qualitatively distinct vicarious emotions with different motivational consequences. Journal of Personality, 55(1), 19–39.
5.
BenabouR.TiroleJ. (2006). Belief in a just world and redistributive politics. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2), 699–746.
6.
BrandtM. J.ReynaC.ChambersJ. R.CrawfordJ. T.WetherellG. (2014). The ideological-conflict hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conservatives. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 27–34.
7.
ChandlerJ.SissoI.ShapiroD. (2020). Participant carelessness and fraud: Consequences for clinical research and potential solutions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 129(1), 49–55.
8.
ChiaoJ.MathurV.HaradaT.LipkeT. (2009). Neural basis of preference for human social hierarchy versus egalitarianism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167, 174–181.
9.
CikaraM.BruneauE. G.SaxeR. R. (2011). Us and them: Intergroup failures of empathy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 149–153.
10.
CohenJ. (1983). The cost of dichotomization. Applied Psychological Measurement, 7(3), 249–253.
11.
CombsD. J. Y.PowellC. A. J.SchurtzD. R.SmithR. H. (2009). Politics, schadenfreude, and ingroup identification: The sometimes happy thing about a poor economy and death. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 635–646.
12.
CrawfordJ. T.BrandtM. J. (2020). Ideological (a) symmetries in prejudice and intergroup bias. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 40–45.
13.
DavisM. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113–126.
14.
DecetyJ.JacksonP. L. (2006). A social-neuroscience perspective on empathy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 54–58.
DovidioJ. F.AllenJ. L.SchroederD. A. (1990). Specificity of empathy-induced helping: Evidence for altruistic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 249–260.
17.
EisenbergN.MillerP. A. (1987). The relation of empathy to prosocial and related behaviors. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 91–119.
18.
FrimerJ. A.SkitkaL. J.MotylM. (2017). Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another’s opinions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 1–12.
19.
GoldenbergA.HalperinE.van ZomerenM.GrossJ. J. (2016). The process model of group-based emotion: Integrating intergroup emotion and emotion regulation perspectives. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2), 118–141.
HaidtJ.GrahamJ. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116.
22.
HassonY.TamirM.BrahmsK. S.CohrsJ. C.HalperinE. (2018). Are liberals and conservatives equally motivated to feel empathy toward others?Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 1449–1459.
23.
HoffmanM. L. (2008). Empathy and prosocial behavior. In LewisM.Haviland-JonesJ. M.BarrettL. F. (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 440–455). Guilford Press.
24.
IyerR.KolevaS.GrahamJ.DittoP.HaidtJ. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PLOS ONE, 7(8), Article e42366.
25.
JohnsonN. D.MislinA. A. (2011). Trust games: A meta-analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 32, 865–889.
26.
JostJ. T.FedericoC. M.NapierJ. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307–337.
27.
KahanD.PetersE.DawsonE.SlovicP. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1, 54–86.
28.
MacCallumR. C.ZhangS.PreacherK. J.RuckerD. D. (2002). On the practice of dichotomization of quantitative variables. Psychological Methods, 7(1), 19–40.
29.
McAdamsD. P.AlbaughM.FarberE.DanielsJ.LoganR. L.OlsonB. (2008). Family metaphors and moral intuitions: How conservatives and liberals narrate their lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 978–990.
30.
McCueC. P.GopoianJ. D. (2000). Dispositional empathy and the political gender gap. Women & Politics, 21, 1–20.
31.
McFarlandS. (2010). Authoritarianism, social dominance, and other roots of generalized prejudice. Political Psychology, 31, 453–477.
32.
RighettiF.FinkenauerC. (2011). If you are able to control yourself, I will trust you: The role of perceived self-control in interpersonal trust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 874–886.
33.
RoystonP.AltmanD. G.SauerbreiW. (2006). Dichotomizing continuous predictors in multiple regression: A bad idea. Statistics in Medicine, 25(1), 127–141.
34.
SimasE.CliffordS.KirklandJ. (2020). How empathic concern fuels political polarization. American Political Science Review, 114, 258–269.
35.
TetlockP. E.VieiderF. M.PatilS. V.GrantA. M. (2013). Accountability and ideology: When left looks right and right looks left. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 122, 22–35.
36.
ToiM.BatsonC. D. (1982). More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 281–292.
37.
WashburnA. N.SkitkaL. J. (2018). Science denial across the political divide: Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to deny attitude-inconsistent science. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 972–980.
38.
WaytzA.IyerR.YoungL.GrahamJ. (2016). Ideological differences in the expanse of empathy. In ValdesoloP.GrahamJ. (Eds.), Social psychology of political polarization (pp. 61–77). Routledge.
39.
ZmigrodL.RentfrowP. J.RobbinsT. W. (2020). The partisan mind: Is extreme political partisanship related to cognitive inflexibility?Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, 407–418.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
