Perceptions of Empathic Norms are Overly Negative in Intergroup Contexts

Groups influence empathy; people empathise less with outgroup members than with ingroup members, or in more extreme cases, even take pleasure in outgroup suffering. One way to encourage empathy for outgroups involves portraying intergroup empathy as normative, but little is known about people’s unaltered perceptions of empathic norms in intergroup contexts, which arguably provide the basis for most normative effects outside the laboratory. In three experiments, spanning ethnic, political, and minimal intergroup contexts, participants were asked to report how much empathy they assumed average ingroup and outgroup members would feel for a range of own-group and other-group empathic targets. We found that perceptions of empathic norms were overly negative, with people assuming that others would show more intergroup empathy bias than they themselves showed and overestimating the bias actual ingroup and outgroup members showed. In real-world, but not minimal intergroup contexts, we observed empathic norm perception asymmetry, wherein outgroup members were assumed to discriminate more than ingroup members in their empathy, especially when empathic targets’ group membership was made salient by their emotional experiences or experimental manipulations. Perceptions of empathic norms were reliably predicted by same-direction perceptions of prejudice, pointing to the possibility that people rely on their perceptions of group relations to make specific social predictions in novel circumstances. Taken together, these findings document people’s tendency to overestimate intergroup antagonism in the domain of empathy and highlight the need to expand models of intergroup social perception to include perceptions of group relations in addition to groups’ traits.