Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive states: Neural evidence of an empathy gap

Abstract

Empathy facilitates prosocial behavior and social understanding. Here, however, we suggest that the most basic mechanism of
empathy—the intuitive sharing of other’s emotional and motivational states—is limited to those we like. Measuring electroencephalographic
(EEG) alpha oscillations as people observed ingroup vs outgroup members, we found that participants showed similar activation patterns when feeling sad as when they observed ingroup
members feeling sad. In contrast, participants did not show these same activation patterns when observing outgroup members
and even less so the more they were prejudiced. These findings provide evidence from brain activity for an ingroup bias in
empathy: empathy may be restricted to close others and, without active effort, may not extend to outgroups, potentially making
them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.

Full text

Intergroup differences in the sharing of emotive
states: neural evidence of an empathy gap
Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada
Empathy facilitates prosocial behavior and social understanding. Here, however, we suggest that the most basic mechanism of
empathythe intuitive sharing of others emotional and motivational statesis limited to those we like. Measuring electroence-
phalographic (EEG) alpha oscillations as people observed ingroup vs outgroup members, we found that participants showed
similar activation patterns when feeling sad as when they observed ingroup members feeling sad. In contrast, participants did not
show these same activation patterns when observing outgroup members and even less so the more they were prejudiced. These
findings provide evidence from brain activity for an ingroup bias in empathy: empathy may be restricted to close others and,
without active effort, may not extend to outgroups, potentially making them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.
Keywords: empathy; prejudice; EEG; frontal asymmetries
INTRODUCTION
Prejudice is an ongoing problem in human societies, with
humans committing some of the most hateful acts because of
their prejudices, including acts of discrimination, segrega-
tion and even wars and genocides. At the same time,
humans are truly empathic creatures: one-day old babies
cry when they hear other babies cry (Sagi and Hoffman,
1970) and the recent discovery of the so called ‘mirror
neuron system’ (Rizzolatti et al., 1996) revealed that we in-
tuitively ‘catch’ and ‘match’ other’s emotions and actions by
mere observation. Humans, it appears, have a natural in-
stinct to connect with others and to share their emotions.
We wonder, however: does this natural tendency to share
others’ emotions occur for our social outgroups? Here, we
propose that although people can easily pick up others’ emo-
tions and thereby empathize with them, they are less likely to
do so when that other belongs to an outgroup. By looking at
prefrontal alpha asymmetry in response to ingroup and out-
group member’s negative emotions, this study investigates
whether people resonate less with members of social out-
groups than ingroups and whether this bias in empathy is
intensified by increasing levels of prejudice. First, we define
what we mean by empathy.
The nature of empathy
Empathy is the ability to share others’ emotions (Batson
et al., 1981; Preston and de Waal, 2002), or more specifically,
an affective response more appropriate to another’s situation
than one’s own (Hoffman, 2000). Note though, that emo-
tional sharing seems to be only the first step of the full
blown empathic response, which requires at least minimal
realization that the emotions one is feeling are caused by the
other (Decety and Jackson, 2004). The initial undifferenti-
ated vicarious experience of the other’s emotionalso called
emotional contagionnonetheless, is essential for and closely
related to empathy (Singer and Lamm, 2009).
According to the perception–action model of empathy
(Preston and de Waal, 2002), empathy is based on neural
simulation. Merely seeing others doing something or ex-
pressing their emotions engages the same neural networks
necessary for the execution of the same behavior or the ex-
perience of the same emotions in the observer. This vicarious
activation of similar neural networks then elicits the asso-
ciated autonomic and somatic responses, thereby allowing
the observer to share the target’s motivational and emotional
states (Decety and Jackson, 2004). Empathy, thus, comes to
us naturallywe ‘catch’ the other’s emotionsand this vic-
arious experience helps us to gain an intuitive understanding
of them.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a
growing body of literature has now found considerable evi-
dence for what researchers are calling ‘perception–action-
coupling’ (Decety and Jackson, 2004) that, the perception
of a given behavior or emotion in another individual acti-
vates one’s own neural representations of the same behavior
or emotion. Such neural simulation processes have been
found for a number of processes, including intentional
actions (Rizzolatti et al., 1996), disgust (Wicker et al.,
2003), touch (Keysers et al., 2004), facial expressions (Carr
et al., 2003) and pain (Singer et al., 2004). Importantly,
recent evidence indicates that this perception–action-
coupling is associated with empathy the more people show
Received 7 November 2010; Accepted 25 April 2011
Advance Access publication 23 June 2011
This research was supported by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Ministry of
Research and Innovation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to Michael Inzlicht. We
thank Jason Plaks, Elizabeth Page-Gould, Alexa Tullett, Sonia Kang, Jacob Hirsh, Rimma Teper, and Shona Tritt
for valuable insights. We also thank Pranavi Ravichandran and Suleiman Furmli for their assistance with data
collection.
Correspondence should be addressed to Jennifer N. Gutsell, Department of Psychology, University of
Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada. E-mail: jennifer.gutsell@utoronto.ca
doi:10.1093/scan/nsr035 SCAN (2012) 7, 596 ^603
ßThe A uthor (2 011). Published by Oxford Univer sity Pres s.F or Permission s, please e mail: journals.p ermissions @oup.c om

evidence of neural simulation to others’ actions and emo-
tions, the higher their levels of trait empathy (Hooker et al.,
2010) and the better they perform on tasks that are contin-
gent on emotional empathy (Pineda and Hecht, 2009).
Empathy and its limits
Although perception–action-coupling and its accompanying
empathic states may be unconscious, there is growing evi-
dence that they are not automatic, subject to top–down in-
fluences. One such influence is group affiliation, with
research suggesting an ‘empathy-gap’ where we are less
likely to catch and match the actions and emotions of the
outgroup (vs the ingroup). For example, people are less likely
to help outgroup than ingroup members in need (Gaertner
et al., 1982; Saucer et al., 2005; Kunstman and Plant, 2008)
and less likely to value the lives of outgroup members as
much as ingroup members (Pratto and Glasford, 2008).
Evidence from the social neurosciences suggests that
group-affiliation similarly exerts a top–down influence on
perception–action-coupling. A recent fMRI study, for
example, found that people show more neural activation in
pain circuits when observing the painful penetration of the
face of ethnic ingroup members than of outgroup members
(Xu et al., 2009) and when they see people in distressing and
emotionally painful situations (Mathur et al., 2010).
Moreover, such differences in empathy-related neural activa-
tion predict costly helping behavior (Hein et al., 2010). Using
transcranial magnetic simulation (TMS), Avenanti et al.,
(2010) found less corticospinal muscle inhibition when par-
ticipants observed ethnic outgroup members receiving pain-
ful stimuli than when observing the same thing happening to
ingroup members. Finally, using electroencephalographic
(EEG) indices of primary motor cortex activity, Gutsell and
Inzlicht (2010) found less neural simulation of action for
outgroup members than ingroup members.
Rather than reflecting innate ingroup preferences, how-
ever, such ingroup biases may occur as a function of cultur-
ally learned prejudice (Chiao and Mathur, 2010). For
example, people high in social dominance orientation
(Pratto et al., 1994; Sidaniusand Pratto, 1999), a personality
trait that is strongly related to higher levels of prejudice,
show less activation in neural areas for pain when they see
people in painful situations (Chiao et al., 2009). In an inter-
group context, high-prejudice people are specifically likely to
show diminished perception–action-coupling to the out-
group, be that diminished motor cortex activity (Gutsell
and Inzlicht, 2010) or reduced corticospinal inhibition
(Avenanti et al., 2010). Furthermore, the reduction in
perception–action-coupling in these two studies was particu-
larly acute for culturally disliked outgroups, so South Asians
in Canada (Gutsell and Inzlicht, 2010) and Blacks in Italy
(Avenanti et al., 2010). Together, these studies suggest these
brain effects are more a function of culture than innate
preference.
The empathy gap may be part of a broader bias in per-
ceptual processes whereby we are less receptive to outgroup
members more generally including their emotions. The fMRI
studies, for instance, reveal less neural activity in areas for
social perception and social cognition in response to out-
groups than ingroups (Harris and Fiske, 2006; Van Bavel
et al., 2008). Similarly, people have greater difficulty to rec-
ognize outgroup member’s faces and to interpret their facial
expressions and voices relative to the ingroup (Sporer, 2001;
Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002). There seem to be differences in
not only how sensitive people are to the emotional expres-
sions of outgroup members, but also differences in how they
react to these emotions. For example, fear and happiness ex-
pressed by outgroup faces elicit the opposite emotional reac-
tion in the observer (Weisbuch and Ambady, 2008).
Moreover, people show greater amygdala response in re-
sponse to fearful ingroup compared to outgroup faces
(Chiao et al., 2009), possibly because the amygdala is sensitive
to motivational relevance (Cunningham et al., 2008) and fear
in ingroup members is more likely to signal danger to one’s
self than fear in outgroup members. Noticing the fear of
someone from one’s own ingroup, therefore, becomes rele-
vant to one’s own safety. The point here is that the emotions
expressed by ingroups and outgroups may be perceived and
reacted to differently.
The current study
All told, our social biases act as top–down influences and
interfere with perception–action-coupling when it comes to
outgroup members, and research on social perception sug-
gests that other basic perception processes are equally biased
against social outgroups. The suggestion, here, is that people
are less able to catch and match the emotions of other people
when those other people come from an outgroup. To our
knowledge, no one has actually examined the sharing of
emotions with the ingroup vs outgroup on a neural level.
Previous studies have focused on basic motor and sensory
processes such as motor activity or the sensation of pain
(Xu et al., 2009; Avenanti et al., 2010; Gutsell and Inzlicht,
2010; Mathur et al., 2010), but empathy also involves the
sharing of basic emotional and motivational states (Levenson
and Ruef, 1992; Hatfield et al., 1994). It is unclear from past
research, therefore, if there is an empathy gap in the actual
sharing of emotions. To further investigate this specific issue,
we need to measure emotional processes more directly. In
the current study, we measure prefrontal alpha asymmetry as
an index of emotional and motivational states (Davidson
and Tomarken, 1989; Davidson, 1992; Harmon-Jones,
2003) to reveal possible ingroup biases to the extent
to which people intuitively catch the emotions of other
people.
We used EEG to measure the relative activation of the
right and left prefrontal cortices; prefrontal cortical areas
being essential for processing of reward and punishment
related information (Davidson, 2004). Studies have
Intergroup differences in emotive states and empathy SCAN (2012) 597

consistently associated activity in left prefrontal cortex with
the expression and experience of approach-related motiv-
ational and affective states, such as happiness but also
anger, while activation of the right prefrontal cortex has
been shown to be related to the expression and experience
of withdrawal-related motivational and affective states such
as fear or sadness (Davidson, 1995; Harmon-Jones and
Allen, 1998; Peterson et al., 2008). These differences in func-
tionality have often been measured using relative EEG activ-
ity in the alpha band (8–13 Hz) in electrodes over left and
right prefrontal cortex (for a review, see Davidson, 1995).
For instance, higher activation of right prefrontal cortex, as
indicated by relatively lower alpha at right prefrontal elec-
trode sites, is associated with, depression (Allen et al., 1993),
a general trait-like negative emotional style (Wheeler et al.,
1993), and with negative emotional responses to films
(Davidson et al., 1990). In contrast, higher activation of
left prefrontal cortex is associated with approach-related
positive affect (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2008) and
approach-related anger (Harmon-Jones and Sigelman,
2001). Importantly, the prefrontal cortex is involved in
the experience and expression of emotions, but not in
the perception of emotions (Davidson, 2004). Hence,
measures of prefrontal alpha asymmetry during observation
of an object other provide a measure of vicarious emotions
free from confounds due to the mere perceptions of
emotions.
We predict that participants will show stronger right pre-
frontal alpha asymmetry, indicating negative, withdrawal-
related emotions while experiencing sadness and that they
will show similar right prefrontal alpha asymmetry when
passively observing ingroup members non-verbally express-
ing sadness. Reflecting an ingroup bias, we expect no such
vicarious right prefrontal alpha asymmetry during the obser-
vation of outgroup members experiencing sadness. We fur-
ther predict that this lack of vicarious emotion when
passively observing the outgroup will be associated with par-
ticipant’s level of prejudice: the more prejudiced people are,
the less they will catch the outgroup’s emotions.
METHODS
Participants
Our original sample consisted of 30 right-handed university
students. Participants were recruited from an introductory
psychology course at the University of Toronto,
Scarborough, and participated in the study for course
credit. Two participants were excluded from our original
sample due to a technical malfunction of the EEG system
and another two were excluded because they self-identified
as Black and mixed-race. Consequently, our final sample
consisted of 26 participants, 10 males and 16 females, from
various non-Black ethnic backgrounds (8 White, 6 East
Asian and 12 South Asian). The participants were in the
age group of18–23 years (M¼18.46, s.d. ¼3.81).
Procedure
Participants were told that the study’s purpose was to inves-
tigate the neural underpinnings of emotions. Participants
read and signed an informed consent sheet and were then
fitted with an electrode cap for EEG recording. EEG was
recorded while participants watched a set of videos.
The videos showed a variety of ingroup and outgroup mem-
bers expressing sadness. At the end of each video set, par-
ticipants completed an emotion induction task during which
they were led to feel sadness by vividly remembering past sad
events in their life. To assess how individual differences in
prejudice and in the ability to empathize with others are
related to differences in the vicarious experience of emo-
tional states, we then had participants complete several
trait measures of prejudice and empathy.
MATERIALS
Symbolic racism scale
Participants completed the symbolic racism scale (Henry and
Sears, 2002) during a mass testing session in an introductory
psychology course at the beginning of the term. The sym-
bolic racism scale is a measure of modern racisma subtle
form of racismthat obscures racist feelings with abstract
values, such as justice and order.
Video manipulation
The study had a one-way within-subject design with three
conditions (self-condition, ingroup condition and outgroup
condition). Figure 1 graphically illustrates the design. For the
purpose of our study, we defined ingroup as people who
shared the participant’s ethnic identity and outgroup as
people who did not. Videos of ingroup and outgroup mem-
bers (White, Black, South Asian and East Asian) expressing
sadness served as the independent variable for the randomly
presented outgroup and ingroup conditions, and this was
followed by the self-condition. The videos depicted the
actors sitting at a table in front of a white wall expressing
sadness. In the outgroup condition, the participant saw four
different actors from each ethnic outgroup. For example, a
white participant would see four different black actors for
20 s each, followed by four different East Asian actors and
four different South Asian actors. In the ingroup condition,
participants saw four different ingroup members, each for
20 s, expressing sadness.
To control for differences besides the ethnicity of the in-
dividual actors, we asked a separate pilot sample of nine
people to rate the videos. Specifically, after viewing each
video, the raters used a 5-point scale to indicate the extent
to which they thought the videoed individual (i) felt sad,
(ii) felt positive, (iii) felt negative, (iv) experienced a
strong emotion, (v) experienced an arousing emotion,
(vi) was likable and (vii) was attractive. Raters further indi-
cated (viii) the overall technical quality of the video and
(ix) the amount of empathy they felt for the actor. Results
revealed no significant differences between ethnic groups on
598 SCAN (2012) J. N. Gutsell and M. Inzlicht

any of these variables, all P’s > 0.16, ns, suggesting that the
actors from each ethnic group were viewed similarly, at least
at an explicit level.
To ensure that participants attended the videos through-
out the whole session, they performed a control task during
the ingroup and outgroup conditions. For this task, the
videos stopped between 2 and 5 times and the screen
turned black for 1 s during each condition. Participants
were asked to count how many times the black screen ap-
peared and to indicate the number of such pauses at the end
of the condition. Participants reported the correct number of
black screens in 83% of all cases indicating that they attended
the videos.
All ingroup and outgroup videos were presented in a
random order, thus the ingroup condition could appear in
any position in the set of videos. The actors in the videos
were male students of the University of Toronto and, there-
fore, were approximately the same age, but not always the
same sex as the participants. Each actor was displayed for
20 s Consequently, we obtained 80 s of EEG data during the
ingroup conditions and 240 s during the outgroup condi-
tions; 80 s during each of the three different ethnic
outgroups.
At the end of the video set, the participants were asked
to experience the emotion of sadness themselves
(self-condition). To facilitate the experience of sadness, par-
ticipants completed an emotion induction exercise, which
consisted of a series of instructions aimed to elicit vivid
memories of past sad events. Participants saw the following
instruction: ‘Please think about a situation in your past,
which made you feel very sad. Imagine the situation as viv-
idly as you can’. After completion of the exercise,
participants continued experiencing the emotion for 80 s
while they looked at a blank computer screen.
Empathy quotient
In order to assess the trait-like ability to empathize with
others, we had participants complete the empathy quotient
(Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004). The empathy quo-
tient is a 60-item forced choice self-report scale that taps into
both cognitive and emotional aspects of empathy.
Reading the mind in the eyes test
We administered a second measure related to em-
pathyreading the mind in the eyes test (Baron-Cohen
et al., 2001)a measure of mindreading and social sensitiv-
ity. Specifically, in this test, participants are presented with a
series of 25 photographs of the eye-region of different faces.
For each photograph, they have to select one of four words
that best describes what the person in the photograph is
thinking or feeling.
EEG data acquisition and processing
To measure prefrontal alpha asymmetries, we recorded the
EEG from 32 Ag/AgCl sintered electrodes embedded in a
stretch-lycra cap. Recordings were collected from the 32 elec-
trode sites according to the 10–20 system with a band pass
filter at 0.1–100 Hz and a notch filter at 60 Hz. The EEG was
digitized at 512 Hz using ASA acquisition hardware
(Advanced Neuro Technology, Enschede, The Netherlands)
with an average earlobe reference. Vertical eye movements
(VEOG) were monitored using a supra- to suborbital bipolar
montage and the continuous EEG recordings were corrected
off-line for eye-blinks using the VEOG channel and the
Fig. 1 Outline of experiment design.
Intergroup differences in emotive states and empathy SCAN (2012) 599

Second Order Blind Identification (SOBI) procedure, which
is a signal processing method for isolating and removing
ocular artifacts (Tang et al., 2005). During recording, the
impedances were kept below 5 kVto ensure a clear and
strong EEG signal. Continuous artefact-free epochs of 2.0 s
from each interval were extracted through a Hamming
window and overlapped by 75% to minimize data loss. As
said above, we recorded 80 s of data for the observation of
each ethnic group. To avoid habituation, however, we calcu-
lated power only for the first 10 s of each actor, resulting in
40 s of data for each ethnic group. For the same reason, we
only included the first 10 s of EEG data acquired during the
self-condition. Power was calculated via fast Fourier trans-
form. Power values (in mV
2
) were averaged across epochs
within each interval. Total power within the alpha band
(8–13 Hz), an inverse indication of cortical activity, was
logarithmically transformed and asymmetry scores were cal-
culated as right-site minus homologous left-site alpha power
for lateral prefrontal sites (F8–F7), which is consistent with
how prefrontal asymmetry is typically calculated
(Harmon-Jones, 2006). Higher scores indicate relatively
greater left- than right-cortical activation indicating more
approach motivation and less sadness/withdrawal.
RESULTS
Results confirmed our hypotheses suggesting an ingroup bias
in emotional sharing (Figure 2). We created index scores of
relative alpha activity for each condition (log right alpha
activity at F8; log left alpha activity at F7); such that more
negative scores reflect greater withdrawal and negative emo-
tionality. Participants’ alpha asymmetry scores when person-
ally experiencing sadness (M¼0.08, s.d. ¼0.17) and when
observing ingroup members (ideographically chosen)
experiencing sadness (M¼0.05, s.d. ¼0.15) did not
differ from one another, t(24) ¼1.28, P> 0.20. This suggests
a similarity in emotional/motivational states when personally
experiencing/remembering sadness and when observing the
ingroup experiencing sadness. In contrast, participants did
not show such prefrontal alpha asymmetry when passively
observing outgroup members: participants had significantly
more alpha asymmetry when personally experiencing sad-
ness than when observing an outgroup member experiencing
sadness, (M¼0.03, s.d. ¼0.14), t(24) ¼2.09, P< 0.05.
Although the difference in alpha asymmetry scores for the
ingroup and the outgroup condition was not significant
t(24) ¼0.99; P¼ns, a within subject ANOVA over the
three conditions (self, ingroup and outgroup) further con-
firmed the distinction between ingroup and outgroup. A
significant linear trend indicated that alpha asymmetry was
highest during personal experience of sadness, followed by
the observation of the ingroup and then by the observation
of the outgroup, F(1, 23) ¼4.37, P< 0.05. These effects
where specific to frontal sites such that alpha asymmetry
scores at posterior lateral sites for all the conditions
were positive (all M’s > 0.05), did not differ from one
another (all P’s > 0.43), and did not show a significant
linear trend F(1, 23) ¼0.64; P¼ns. The implication is that
observing someone from one’s own group who is sad elicits
about the same amount of sadness as feeling sad oneself;
outgroup members, in contrast, elicit significantly less sad-
ness. These findings suggest an ingroup bias in emotional
sharing.
When we break down the omnibus outgroup to specific
ethnicities, we did not find any differences between sub-
groups. So, for example, White participants tended to have
similar levels of brain activity when passively viewing Blacks,
South Asians or East Asians. Once in the outgroup, in other
words, participants stopped differentiating between ethnici-
ties (Gutsell and Inzlicht, 2010).
Our second prediction regarding the role of prejudice was
also supported. The results are depicted in Figure 3 and
Table 1. Prejudice was marginally associated with prefrontal
asymmetry scores in response to outgroup members: the
higher participants scored on the modern racism scale, the
higher their asymmetry score, that is the less relative right
prefrontal activation they showed, r(24) ¼0.37, P¼0.07.
This suggests that the more prejudiced people were, the
less they vicariously felt an avoidant motivational state
when observing outgroup member in distress. The more
prejudiced, the less they caught outgroup members’
emotions.
In contrast, the correlation between prejudice and pre-
frontal asymmetry scores in response to ingroup members
was not significant, r(24) ¼0.32, P¼0.12. However, it is
important to note that these two correlations are not signifi-
cantly different from one another. So while prejudiced
people do not vicariously share emotive states with out-
groups, they may show a (nonsignificant) tendency to not
share it with ingroup members either. This may suggest that
biased attitudes toward outgroups may reflect egocentric
Fig. 2 Alpha asymmetry scores (log right alpha activity–log left alpha activity)
during the experience and observation of sadness as a function of group membership.
More negative scores indicate avoidant, negative affect.
600 SCAN (2012) J. N. Gutsell and M. Inzlicht

biases more generally. For example, research on the preju-
diced personality suggests that people who score high on
prejudice are less likely to be agreeable (Graziano et al.,
2007a). The agreeableness is associated with prosocial behav-
ior (Graziano et al., 2007b) and empathy (Nettle, 2007).
Someone who is prejudiced, therefore, may be less agreeable
in general and show a lack of empathy towards others in
general.
Interestingly, people’s general trait-like tendency and abil-
ity to empathize with others and to read their emotions does
not seem to significantly predict alpha asymmetry in re-
sponse to ingroup or outgroup members. That being said,
although the effects were not significant, there is a trend such
that the higher people were in empathy, as assessed by the
empathy quotient (Lawrence et al., 2004), the higher their
asymmetry scores to both ingroup and outgroup. These re-
sults suggest that trait empathy was (nonsignificantly)
related to emotionally resonating with others, be they from
the in or outgroup. Studies with more statistical power
would be needed to assess the robustness of these effects.
Please see Table 1 for a more detailed depiction of these
results.
DISCUSSION
Taken together, our research provides direct evidence that
people are less likely to show prefrontal right alpha asym-
metry when observing sad outgroup others. We take this as
evidence that people generally do not vicariously feel the
emotional and motivational states of those they categorize
as outgroup members. Moreover, the extent of vicarious
right alpha asymmetry in response to sad outgroup members
is associated with level of prejudice. In other words, the more
prejudiced people are, the less likely they will intuitively
catch the emotive states of outgroup members. This bias in
emotional sharing could contribute to an empathy-gap, im-
pairing the experience of empathy for outgroups, which is a
capacity that underlies and facilitates social understanding
and cooperation and fosters helping, morality, altruism and
justice (Batson et al., 1997; Cialdini et al., 1997). Thus, when
people fail to share the emotional and motivational states of
outgroup members they might not be as responsive to out-
group member’s needs and be less likely to help or even to
understand that support is needed. This could be particularly
true for people high in prejudice, opening the door for
discrimination.
It is important to note that our findings do not implicate
any causal direction between the lack of empathy toward
outgroups and prejudice. While it is possible that a lack of
empathy can contribute to prejudice, it is just as likely that
prejudice contributes to a lack of empathy.
Fig. 3 Symbolic racism scores as a function of prefrontal alpha asymmetry scores in the outgroup condition.
Table 1 Correlations among asymmetry scores and individual difference
measures
Alpha-asymmetry
score
Symbolic racism
score
Empathy
quotient
Reading the mind
in the eyes test score
R-value P-value R-value P-value R-value P-value
Ingroup 0.32 0.12 0.33 0.11 0.26 0.22
Outgroup 0.37 0.07 0.27 0.20 0.35 0.10
Note: Higher alpha asymmetry denotes ‘less’ vicarious sharing of sadness.
Intergroup differences in emotive states and empathy SCAN (2012) 601

Maybe both mechanisms are at work, creating a vicious
cycle in which people initially empathize less with outgroups,
which makes them a likely target for prejudice, which then
further restricts empathy toward the disliked group. The
exact nature of the relationship is difficult to determine
and should be addressed by future research.
Finally, we would like to stress that, although, we suspect
that the ease with which we can empathize with the ingroup
may have been biologically hardwired by evolutionary pres-
sures (Wilson and Sober, 1998), we are not suggesting that
people are more or less likely to include or exclude specific
ethnic groups. Indeed, the gap in perception–action-
coupling may be specific to culturally disliked groups that
change from one society to the next (e.g. Gutsell and
Inzlicht, 2010). Instead, the specific coalitional alliances
that populate our ingroup category are likely arbitrary and
can in fact be changed very easily (Turner et al., 1979).
Recent research shows that despite a lifetime’s experience
of race as a predictor of social alliance, minimal exposure
to alternate coalitional possibilities is enough to deflate the
tendency to categorize by race (Cosmides et al., 2003; Van
Bavel and Cunningham, 2009).
Hence, even if we are less likely to simulate the emotions
and actions of the outgroup, these effects may be temporary
and can be erased when we foster empathy toward the out-
group and better yet, include a greater number of people
into our ingroup. One of the means to achieve this goal is
cognitive perspective taking. Taking the perspective of an
outgroup member has been shown to reduce prejudice to-
wards the outgroup (Batson et al., 1997) and this reduction
is mediated by an increase in perceived self-other overlap
(Galinsky and Moskowitz, 2000). By fostering a feeling of
connectedness, perspective taking offers a way to overcome
biases in neural simulation and thereby allows an intuitive
understanding between people whether they share group
membership or not.
Conflict of Interest
None declared.
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