Abstract
Research on empathy for pain has provided evidence of an empathic bias toward racial ingroup members. In this study, we used for the first time the “minimal group paradigm” in which participants were assigned to artificial groups and required to perform pain judgments of pictures of hands and feet in painful or non-painful situations from self, ingroup, and outgroup perspectives. Findings showed that the mere categorization of people into two distinct arbitrary social groups appears to be sufficient to elicit an ingroup bias in empathy for pain.
Highlights
Empathy is thought to play a critical role in social interactions in motivating prosocial behavior (e.g., Dovidio et al, 1990)
After filling out the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), participants were informed that the session was part of a larger project investigating the relationship between cognition and emotion
PAIN JUDGMENT TASK Pain ratings The two-factor analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant effect for Stimulus, due to higher ratings for pain stimuli (M = 5.32 ± 1.45) than for no-pain stimuli (M = 0.49 ± 0.74), F (1, 35) = 634.77, p < 0.001
Summary
Empathy is thought to play a critical role in social interactions in motivating prosocial behavior (e.g., Dovidio et al, 1990). Research on the psychological and neural mechanisms of empathy has substantially grown this past decade, focusing on how we share the pain of others, one of the most basic and universal human experiences In this regard, it has been recently demonstrated that response to other’s pain depends on the social relationships between the observer and the individuals experiencing the outcome. In the field of social psychology, it is well-known that people are remarkably adept at dividing up the social world into us versus them, and that this propensity has important affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences such as prejudice, stereotype, and discrimination These various implications are induced when categorical information such as race, gender, or age, provide visually salient cues to group membership (Fiske and Neuberg, 1990). Participants had to rate the level of perceived pain according to the different perspectives (e.g., Jackson et al, 2006)
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