Motivated Empathy and Social Decision-making

During this talk, I will present three studies related to motivated empathy, empathic biases, and prosocial
decision-making. The first study examines how varying levels of compassion influence legal decisionmaking
during asylum-granting proceedings. It was conducted at the Swedish Migration Agency with
case workers who decide whether an asylum seeker will be granted a resident permit or not. The second
study focuses on the intergroup empathy bias. Here, we tried to replicate results from previous work that
used brief empathy interventions that got participants to feel more empathy with outgroup members. We
did not replicate the previously obtained results, and our main positive finding was that participants who
received an empathy-decreasing intervention reduced their empathy. Finally, I will present results from
ongoing work where we look at empathy and direct and indirect helping behavior. We decompose empathy
into three underlying components: experience sharing, mentalizing, and compassion, and examine
how they relate to direct help, helping a target directly, and indirect help, helping people in similar situations
as the target.

Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie bitte: alon.markov-glazer@uni-jena.de