1. Condition and Race Interaction Conclusions and Future Directions
Conditional Empathy: Empathy for Rejected Others Based on Race and Experience
Carolyn E. Gibson, Kristina L. McDonald, & Alexa Tullett
The University of Alabama
Method
Research Question
Results
Condition and Race Interaction
Analyses indicated a marginally significant interaction for race X condition on empathic concern, F(1, 193) = 3.05, p = .082.
No interactions were found for empathic distress or perspective taking.
Does rejection make people more or less empathic?
People who have been rejected will have more empathy for a rejected others than people who have been accepted.
OR Rejection may decrease empathy for the rejected other, regardless of similarity.
People who are similar racially to the target will have more empathy than people who are racially different.
Participant Characteristics
Play Cyberball
Answer questions about Cyberball experience
Watch someone play Cyberball
Answer questions about that person’s cyberball experience
People recognized they had been rejected and generally felt worse than those who had been accepted.
Introduction
What is empathy?
Ability to take on another’s perspective of a situation (cognitive) and to experience an emotional response pertinent to the other’s well-being (affective) (Borke, 1973; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987)
Components of empathy include sharing emotions, perspective taking, sympathy, empathic concern, personal distress, emotion regulation
Empathy and Identification
Empathy for another requires previous experiences similar in nature (Aragno, 2008; Batson, Fultz, & Shoenrade, 1987)
Perceived similarity may play a role in recognition of emotions in another person (Markin, 2011)
Level of identification with another can influence estimates of pain (Nordgren, Banas, & MacDonald, 2011)
People watching a person being ostracized report remembering their own experiences of rejection (Masten, Eisenberger, Pfeifer, & Dapretto, 2010)
Racial Empathy Gap
Empathy for out-group members increases when participants are asked to mimic out-group members (Gutsell & Inzlicht, 2010)
Empathy for pain for in-group/out-group members has largely focused on physical pain.
Pain from social rejection is processed similarly to physical pain (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; MacDonald & Leary, 2005)
Do people feel empathy for social rejection similarly to physical pain?
Could rejection be a special case?
People who experienced rejection were less likely to show empathy for another rejected individual (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006)
Rejection decreases prosocial behavior (Twenge, Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007)
Rejection disrupts emotional processes and “soaks up” cognitive resources (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco, & Twenge, 2005)
Rejection increases aggressive behavior (Gaertner, Iuzzini, & O’Mara, 2008)
Does rejection disrupt the process of empathy?
Conclusions and Future Directions
Identification Hypothesis
White participants were more empathic for the white target after rejection than minority participants.
Perhaps rejection may make people more attuned to similarities and differences.
Does rejection disrupt empathy?
Not necessarily. When participants were racially similar to the target, having had a similar rejection experience increased empathy.
Future directions:
Replicate the current study with a video to see if people differ in their empathy after rejection for an African American female.
How does being different from the target affect empathy?
How badly does she feel?
We created a composite variable consisting of the anger and depression subscales on the POMS and questions addressing how they believed the target felt about herself, how powerful she felt, and how included she felt.
There was a significant difference based on race, F (1,193) = 8.57, p < .01, with white students predicting that the target felt worse. There was not a significant effect based on condition.
Participants
205 participants
148 female, 57 male
60.5% European American, 39.5% Minority
People were randomly assigned to an exclusion condition:
52.2% Acceptance Condition
47.8% Rejected Condition