Empathy Diminishes Prejudice: Active Perspective-Taking, Regardless of Target and Mortality Salience, Decreases Implicit Racial Bias

Abstract

Racism, and particularly the oppression of Black citizens, remains a significant problem in the United States. This manuscript reports on an experiment studying the effects of mortality salience and active perspective-taking empathy on racial bias. Specifically, social empathy was hypothesized to counteract the increased in-group preferential bias typical of those primed with mortality salience. The sample consisted of n = 111 White emerging adults affiliated with a small Midwest American university. Death anxiety and active perspective-taking were experimentally manipulated, and the dependent variables were implicit bias change scores (pre-test versus post-test on the Race-Related Implicit Association Test using White/Black faces) and explicit racial prejudice (self-report scores on the Quick Discrimination Inventory and Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy). The four experimental groups did not differ on implicit bias change scores or explicit discrimination scores—neither main effects nor interaction effects were statistically significant. However, the QDI and SEE were correlated (r = .76, p > .001), thus supporting their construct validity, and the pre-scores on the Race IAT across the whole sample were statistically significantly higher than the post-scores, with a moderate effect size (t(110) = 3.13, p = .002, eta-squared = .08). Findings appear to indicate that engaging in active perspective-taking, regardless of the race of the target and regardless of the presence of mortality salience, leads to decreased implicit racial prejudice. Empathy training in various clinical and educational settings could lead to a reduction in prejudiced attitudes, and ultimately aid in the dismantling of American racism.