Family First and America Second? Familial Parochial Empathy and its Negative Impact on Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

Empathy has gained a lot of traction in attention and research focus in the past century due to its implications on human motive and behavior. It has been explored as a promising predictor and potentially altruistic motive for altruistic behaviors in the empathy-altruism hypothesis (Batson & Cook, 1981; Batson et al., 1981). In this study, we shift the focus from the motive of the empathy to the target of the empathy; we explore the predictive power of parochial empathy (the difference between empathy towards the in-group and the empathy towards the out-group) on prosocial behavior. Recent studies have found evidence suggesting that parochial empathy predicts out-group altruism over trait empathic concern (Bruneau, in review). Though in some previous studies the in-group and out-group were more broadly defined as people of the same nationality versus foreigners, for this study, we narrow the scope and set the in-group as family members and the out-group as the average American. With these targets of empathy, we examine how parochial empathy affects prosocial behavior in the form support for taxes that benefit the public sector (the average American) but take away resources from the individual or their in-group (family member). Two experiments are run on American participants and reveal that parochial empathy is a better predictor than trait empathy for support for taxes on certain public sectors, but also that trait empathy, on average, is a better predictor for support for taxes that benefit the public sector. Both experiments, however, confirm that parochial empathy and trait empathy are not correlated and are likely measuring different sentiments or aspects of empathy.