{"id":3164,"date":"2017-04-17T22:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T02:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=3164"},"modified":"2017-09-06T12:46:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T16:46:46","slug":"empathybias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/17\/empathybias\/","title":{"rendered":"Pleasure from your pain: how the empathy bias makes us kinda shitty people"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Notice the girl wearing a white sweater in the background smiling as she walks by? Her reaction could be a perfect example of the empathy bias. (https:\/\/giphy.com\/search\/mean-girls<\/p><\/div>\n

Remember in high school when there was that clique (or whatever the boy-version of a clique would be called) that you absolutely loved to hate and got a sense of personal pleasure when something went wrong for a member of the group? For example, when the fourteen-year-old you watched that annoyingly pretty girl drop her lunch in the cafeteria all over her side-kick best friend, you laughed\u00a0and felt a swell of happiness. I might not be able to claim that you\u2019re not still a slightly shitty person for feeling that way, but cognitive psychology research may have some reasoning behind those feelings and it\u2019s called the empathy bias.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

My first thought when reading “empathy bias” is that I’m a super empathetic person so this must not affect me, right? Wrong.\u00a0The empathy bias sets up an \u201cus\u201d versus \u201cthem\u201d system when it comes to basically every form of identity including (but not limited to): race, gender, sexuality, age, religious views, class, social status, and interests. Empathy is the ability to see emotion in others (sadness, pain, or suffering for example), and feel similar emotions for them. Empathy is the emotional basis of most social functioning and I was shocked to learn that it develops in infancy! Although it is considered extremely socially significant to have some capacity of empathy, it is not a universal response. For example, when more than 46,000 people lost their life as a result of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, many of those not impacted had a difficult time feeling empathetic. This is likely because those affected would be considered too \u201cdifferent\u201d in terms of race, class, religious views, and or nationality for someone watching a video on Facebook to feel empathy for them.<\/p>\n

What is an ingroup and what is an outgroup and why does it matter? The idea of \u201cus\u201d versus \u201cthem\u201d was explored in a study by\u00a0Cikara et al.<\/a> in which\u00a0social identity and groupings were used to explain how one can experience lack of empathy for outgroup members and maybe even pleasure in outgroup pain. Someone\u2019s ingroup would be those whom they share the most similarities with (race, gender, age, interests, religious affiliation etc). Someone\u2019s outgroup would be those whom they share the least similarities with. 320 participants were placed on a team and then read scenarios about members of their team (ingroup) and members not on their team (outgroup). Most of the scenarios would be intended to cause empathy, for example, \u201cParticipant X got into a car accident on his way to the research center today\u201d. Researchers concluded that when explicitly placed in teams, participants were more likely to show a lack of empathy (or even antipathy, which is feelings of dislike) towards opposing group members than they were to show strong empathy towards members of their own team. This possibly shows that people are more likely to see the teams as a reason to act competitively towards members of the opposing team rather than empathetically towards members of their own team. They also concluded that it doesn\u2019t matter the standing of your team in comparison to the opposing team when it comes to reduction of antipathy.<\/p>\n

\"\"

If the blue team were winning by 20 points at this point in the game, research suggests members of the blue team wouldn’t feel any less antipathy towards this kid being pelted with the ball. (https:\/\/giphy.com\/search\/kids-soccer)<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, researchers suggest that the only way to reduce the intergroup empathy bias is to blur the lines between \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d. Unfortunately, in real-world application, sometimes blurring the lines of groupings is very difficult, for example class or race discriminations. I believe that blurring these lines should be our greatest focus in order to better the workings of society as a whole and reduce the prevalence of empathy biases.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So how could this bias potentially be life threatening?\u00a0Drwecki et al. completed a study<\/a>\u00a0that analyzed the treatment of pain in the medical field and how the empathy bias could be harmful. Medical school students and nursing professionals (the participants) were shown real videos of facial expressions of African American patients and white patients after experiencing trauma. They were then asked to\u00a0provide pain treatment decisions and report their feelings of empathy for each patient. Researchers found that if the participant was white, they scaled their feelings of empathy significantly higher for the white patients (and vise versa for African American participants towards African American patients). This finding suggests that ingroup versus outgroups feelings of race are applicable to everyday scenarios. Also, if the participants felt more empathy towards one group of patients, they were more likely to prescribe more appropriate pain treatment for those patients. In conclusion, researchers suggest that the only way to improve racial disparities in pain treatment is to address empathy biases amongst race in medicine. As someone who is interested to perusing a career in medicine, simply being aware of the problems this bias can cause opens my eyes to how cognitive biases can be influential in life-or-death situations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

If empathy bias is at play in this photo, this doctor may not be treating this little girl appropriately for pain due to their differences in race.(https:\/\/saboteur365.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/05\/white-doc-helps-black-africa.jpg)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What about some neuropsychological evidence you ask? As someone who is extremely interested in neuroscience, analyzing brain data can be helpful in better understanding why cognitive biases happen. A\u00a0study by\u00a0Mathur et al.\u00a0<\/a>used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology to examine the neural basis of empathy and antipathy in African-Americans and white Americans. Researchers found that when observing the suffering of people of a different race (outgroup), brain activity response is within the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula. When presented images of the suffering of one\u2019s same race (ingroup), brain activity response is additionally in the medial prefrontal cortex. Basically, this means that different parts of the brain respond to ingroup or outgroup empathy. Therefore, if the brain reacts differently to different stimuli in order to produce empathy, how in the world are we supposed to counteract the problems this bias can cause?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration of weapons-priming procedure. After shown the face and the object, subjects are asked to respond whether the object was a weapon or a tool as quickly as possible. (goo.gl\/za352S)<\/p><\/div>\n

If assessing ingroup versus outgroup is so important to the empathy bias, how are we to decide so quickly who is our ingroup and who is our outgroup? In reflection of cognitive processes, facial recognition and attention are extremely important to determining these groupings. For example, this would relate to the weapon bias affect which is when participants were more likely to assume the object (tool or weapon) was a weapon when primed with an African American face versus when primed with a white face. This is similar to the empathy bias because in order to judge whether you feel empathetic or antipathetic towards someone we first must assess whether they are on our ingroup or outgroup (specifically in terms of race in this case). Cognitively we are quick to assess similarities and differences about someone simply through facial recognition, as seen in the weapons bias. Therefore, we can potentially be affect by empathy bias as quickly as we recognize a face from across the room.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So next time you feel a strong sense of empathy (or maybe antipathy if that\u2019s more your thing), ask yourself whether the person it is direct towards would be your \u201cingroup\u201d or your \u201coutgroup\u201d. Although the empathy bias is socially common and often times unintentional an unnoticed, if people were able to feel more empathetic towards people of their outgroup, this world might be a far more peaceful place for all of us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Cikara, M., Bruneau, E., Van Bavel, J. J., & Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failures and counter-empathic responses. <\/span>Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>55<\/span><\/i>110-125. doi:10.1016\/j.jesp.2014.06.007<\/span><\/p>\n

Drwecki, B. B., Moore, C. F., Ward, S. E., & Prkachin, K. M. (2011). Reducing racial disparities in pain treatment: The role of empathy and perspective-taking. <\/span>Pain,<\/span><\/i> 152<\/span><\/i>(5), 1001-1006. doi:10.1016\/j.pain.2010.12.005<\/span><\/p>\n

Mathur, V. A., Harada, T., Lipke, T., & Chiao, J. Y. (2010). Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation. <\/span>NeuroImage,<\/span><\/i> 51<\/span><\/i>(4), 1468-1475. doi:10.1016\/j.neuroimage.2010.03.025<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember in high school when there was that clique (or whatever the boy-version of a clique would be called) that you absolutely loved to hate and got a sense of personal pleasure when something went wrong for a member of the group? For example, when the fourteen-year-old you watched that annoyingly pretty girl drop her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7333,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,80219,266316],"tags":[266347,130381],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7333"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3164"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3764,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions\/3764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}