Us and Them: Intergroup Failures of Empathy

By Mina Cikara, Emile G. Bruneau, Rebecca Saxe. 2011

574 citations recorded by the source corpus.

People are often motivated to increase others' positive experiences and to alleviate others' suffering. These tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an outgroup member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help that “other.” In such cases, empathic responses are rare and fragile; it is easy to disrupt the chain from perception of suffering to motivation to alleviate the suffering to actual helping. We highlight recent interdisciplinary research demonstrating that outgroup members' suffering elicits dampened empathic responses as compared to ingroup members' suffering. We consider an alternative to empathy in the context of intergroup competition: schadenfreude—pleasure at others' pain. Finally, we review recent investigations of intergroup-conflict interventions that attempt to increase empathy for outgroups. We propose that researchers across the range of psychological sciences stand to gain a better understanding of the foundations of empathy by studying its limitations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0be3fc3d8889d441ad15bb9409a322d25ed54e71

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The power of being heard: The benefits of ‘perspective-giving’ in the context of intergroup conflict (2012, background): “Groups experience severe lapses in trust and failures in 10 empathy towards each other (Bruneau et al., 2012; Cikara et al., 2011; Nadler and 11 Liviatan, 2006; Tam et al., 2009); each group tends to see the other as motivated by self-12 interest and ideology, unwilling to hear or recognize…”
Addressing Empathic Failures (2015, background): “Their effect is perhaps most pervasive—and most costly—in the context of active intergroup conflicts, such as in our increasingly polarized political system (Prior, 2013) or longstanding ethnic and religious clashes (Cikara et al., 2011).”
Collective Narcissism Predicts Hypersensitivity to In–group Insult and Direct and Indirect Retaliatory Intergroup Hostility (2016, background): “Thus, understanding how different forms on in-group positivity motivate different responses to an out-group’s misfortune may help us to understand the limitations of out-group empathy (Cikara et al., 2011).”
The unique effects of blatant dehumanization on attitudes and behavior towards Muslim refugees during the European ‘refugee crisis’ across four countries (2018, background): “…ideological beliefs, empathic failures have been broadly implicated in intergroup con ﬂ ict (Batson & Ahmad, 2009; Bruneau, Cikara, & Saxe, 2017; Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011), and there is good reason to think that empathy may be especially relevant during an acute humanitarian crisis like…”
Intergroup Schadenfreude: motivating participation in collective violence (2015, background): “On average, people feel less empathy for out-group relative to in-group members: we term this difference the intergroup empathy bias [41,42].”