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Abstract
Psychological and physiological evidence has demonstrated that the underlying mechanisms for empathy and for autobiographical memories were related to a great extent. However, whether the facilitative effect of empathy on memory also applied to misinformation was unknown. To test this, we used a misinformation paradigm on a sample of 51 participants aged 20–27. The participants viewed videos that evoked different degrees of empathy, and then were fed misleading information. The participants’ susceptibility to misleading information was lower for the videos that provoked a high degree of empathy compared to the videos that provoked a low degree of empathy. Based on our data, we conclude that empathy can prevent people from being misled by false information.
Highlights
Psychological and physiological evidence has demonstrated that the underlying mechanisms for empathy and for autobiographical memories were related to a great extent
The close relationships between the mental processes for episodic memories and those for the sense of the self have been corroborated by improved memory performance if one relates memories with t hemselves1, as well as by brain imaging evidence of a more extensive network of brain areas associated with self-related memories than self-unrelated m emories2
The capacity to interpret the mental states of others is called “theory of mind” (ToM), and the ability to represent other people’s thoughts or feelings is referred to as empathy
Summary
Psychological and physiological evidence has demonstrated that the underlying mechanisms for empathy and for autobiographical memories were related to a great extent. In the study of Ciaramelli et al., for example, the participants read fictitious life stories, followed by a memory task. In the memory task of the study of Ciaramelli et al., the life stories might have triggered the participants’ situational empathy, prompting them to put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the stories. The more they could take the first-person perspective, the more details they could remember. Memory researchers have postulated that memory operates according to dual-process models In such models, memory performance is determined by the participants’ recollection of or familiarity with a past e vent. When you hear multiple stories from multiple storytellers, recollection enables you to correctly associate stories with their tellers, whereas familiarity increases your generic familiarity for all the stories and the tellers without guaranteeing their correct match; when the numbers of the stories or the storytellers increase, mismatches are likely to occur
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