False Empathy

No empathy here:

In each study, participants read a short scenario describing a person undergoing a mild hardship (e.g., a sprained ankle). The person was identified as politically conservative, liberal, or neutral. Participants then rated their emotional responses using several scales: empathic concern (e.g., sympathy), perspective-taking, empathic intentions (e.g., willingness to help), and empathic avoidance. Mediating variables included perceptions of the target’s morality, likability, similarity to the self, and, in later studies, the perceived harm caused by the target’s political group. Ingroup political power was also measured to assess whether the party in power influenced empathic responses. Across all four studies, participants consistently showed lower empathy for political outgroup members than for ingroup or neutral targets. However, this bias was not symmetrical. Liberals exhibited significantly less empathy for conservatives than conservatives showed for liberals. In Study 1, this asymmetry was driven by liberals’ stronger negative judgments of conservatives’ morality and likability. Conservatives’ empathic responses remained relatively stable regardless of the target’s political affiliation. Study 2 confirmed these findings in the U.K. sample, where British liberals also exhibited stronger empathy bias against conservatives, mediated by perceptions of morality, likability, and similarity. Study 3 demonstrated that even after the shift to a Democratic administration in the U.S., liberals continued to judge conservatives as more harmful and immoral, leading to reduced empathy. Study 4 further validated this pattern with a larger sample, strengthening the evidence for the link between perceived group harm and diminished empathy.

Empathy is a mixed emotion...