What Is Empathy? You Thought You Knew

Just in case you don’t remember the anecdote about the blind men and the elephant: Several blind men touch the elephant but on different parts of its body, and each thinks they are touching a completely different object. The man touching the leg thinks it’s a tree, the one touching its side thinks it’s a wall, and so on.

What does this have to do with empathy? In our version, the parable is reversed: the blind men are all touching different things, yet they all proclaim, “It’s an elephant!” Empathy fits this version of the story. Researchers have long complained that there are too many different behaviors, attitudes, values, emotions, physiological reactions, and skills that are all called “empathy.” Yet experts continue to argue and, worse, bicker over different definitions. (See our previous Character and Context blog, “Empathy: A Word with Too Many Meanings,” Sept. 24, 2019.)

We discovered that, remarkably, researchers have not asked regular people—by which we mean non-researchers—how they define the term, even though the concept is important to and used frequently by many people, researchers and non-researchers alike. But researchers don’t know what regular people mean when they use the word “empathy.”

One might ask how researchers could not know how ordinary people define empathy when dozens of measures of empathy have been administered to many thousands of people. The answer to that question is easy: the measures of empathy used in research do not ask people how they define empathy, and the items on such measures almost never include the word empathy or empathic. Instead, people are asked to rate or describe themselves (or, sometimes, another person) in various ways that the researcher believes reflects the person’s level of empathy. Moreover, different researchers’ measures don’t always cover the same ground, although they are all called empathy.

So, we asked over 500 people, both college students and community people who were recruited online, how they personally define empathy. Some of these research participants were asked to tell us in their own words, in an open-ended manner, what empathy was to them. These responses showed us, first, that people’s definitions differed greatly. This is important: there is no lay consensus on what empathy is.

Second, the landscape of definitions was similar to the landscape of researchers’ definitions. For example, perspective-taking (seeing the world through other people’s eyes), sharing others’ emotions, and being prosocial (behaving in helpful or kind ways) were the most frequently mentioned features of empathy, and these concepts have also been frequently called empathy by researchers.

Third, while the landscape was similar, there were also notable differences between laypeople’s definitions and researchers’ definitions of empathy. Not a single person in our sample spontaneously suggested that “anxious reactivity”—feeling upset and not very capable in stressful situations—was empathy, but this definition is commonly used in research. Furthermore, a sizeable minority of people defined empathy as relating, connecting, and bonding with other people; this social aspect of empathy is seldom mentioned in published studies.

All of our research participants were asked to rate a list of specific behaviors and tendencies, adapted from standard measures of empathy, for how well each one matched their personal definition of empathy. The items fell into four groups or factors: being prosocial, being interpersonally perceptive (such as judging another person’s emotions correctly), taking other people’s perspectives, and experiencing anxious reactivity. People differed in how much they regarded each of these things as “empathy.”  

In general, endorsement of any one kind of empathy was only weakly related to endorsing another kind, with the exception of a strong tendency to view empathy as involving both interpersonal perceptiveness and taking other people’s perspective. But, overall, the four definitions didn’t seem to converge on the same general idea. Overall, the results paralleled the open-ended answers. Participants were most likely to say that taking others’ perspective was empathy, while anxious reactivity was endorsed the least (and to a very small degree).

To circle back to our version of the parable, we knew from our earlier study that researchers are touching different things and calling them all an elephant—or, in our case, empathy. This study now shows that regular people are also touching different things and calling them empathy. There is little general consensus on what empathy is, whether you ask researchers or regular people.

It is not our goal to endorse any particular definition of empathy. Rather, our goal is to call attention to the fact that definitions of empathy vary a great deal, both for regular people and for researchers. This finding is important to encourage clearer scientific discussion among researchers and to caution the public that what they think “empathy” is may not match what a researcher means, or what their friends, lovers, and co-workers think it is. Given that the empathy concept encompasses a vast terrain with many competing and conflicting definitions, clarity could often be achieved by sidestepping the term completely. All of us, researchers and non-researchers alike, should be more exacting and talk about the specific behaviors, emotions, values, skills, or tendencies that we are interested in. “Empathy” is just too vague.


For Further Reading

Hall, J. A., & Schwartz, R. (2019). Empathy present and future. Journal of Social Psychology, 159, 225-243.

Hall, J. A., Schwartz, R., & Duong, F. (2020). How do laypeople define empathy? Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
 

Judith A. Hall is University Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology, at Northeastern University. Her research interests are interpersonal communication, especially nonverbal communication, and interpersonal accuracy, and she has pursued these interests in the laboratory as well as in the context of medical care. She has been an author or editor of several books on these topics, as well as numerous empirical articles and meta-analyses.

Fred Duong is a doctoral student at Northeastern University in the Department of Psychology. His research interests are in emotions and their effects on moral judgment, decision-making, and behaviors.

Rachel Schwartz is a health services researcher and communication scientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on clinician wellness, physician-patient communication, and medical education initiatives that provide support for navigating the psychosocial aspects of the clinical encounter.

Trusting Groups: Size Matters

By Stephen La Macchia

How do you decide whether to approach a group of strangers for help, whether to sign a contract with one company or another, or whether to be fully honest about your abilities and interests when answering questions from a job interview panel?

There are a range of everyday interactions in which an individual must make decisions about how much to trust a group of people. These decisions are sometimes based on limited information and made with little or no previous contact with the group. So how do we decide whether the group is trustworthy?

Despite a vast research literature on the psychology of trust, relatively little is known about how people generally assess the trustworthiness of groups. To date, research has mostly focused on how people judge the trustworthiness of individuals.

In fact, the nonverbal cues of individuals’ trustworthiness are so well established that researchers can easily generate an image of a trustworthy face, and have been able to successfully program a robot to look and act trustworthy [i]! When it comes to the subtle cues or attributes that make a group look trustworthy, however, the picture is a lot less clear.

In a recent research article published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin [ii], my co-authors and I shed some light on how people judge groups’ trustworthiness, examining how this is influenced by one basic attribute of groups: their numerical size.

Every type of group can vary in size; there are small and large families, work teams, audiences, organizations, towns, countries. The basic or relative size of any particular group is one of the most readily perceived and easily defined attributes, so it makes sense that a group’s size would be one of the cues people use to judge its trustworthiness. A number of psychological theories indirectly suggest this possibility, but previous research has not directly and thoroughly tested it.

In our article, we present seven studies showing that all else being equal, people trust smaller groups more than larger groups.

Most of these studies were experiments in which we manipulated whether a hypothetical group was relatively small or large given the context, and had participants answer questions regarding their trust, expectations, and approach intentions towards the group. We found a subtle but consistent smaller-group trust preference across a range of contexts. This preference emerged in both abstract judgments and specific interaction scenarios involving large-scale groups (e.g., organizations and towns) and small-scale groups (e.g., decision panels), and both positive and negative potential outcomes.

For example, one study had participants contemplate a trust-sensitive financial decision involving a group (e.g., signing a contract with a company, waiting for people in a town to hand in your lost wallet). Participants trusted the group significantly more if they were told it was relatively small (e.g., one third the size of similar companies or neighboring towns) than if they were told it was relatively large (e.g., three times the size of others), and this positively influenced their willingness to take the corresponding risk towards the group.

In two other studies, participants imagined facing a disciplinary panel (e.g., for having committed academic plagiarism). Participants indicated significantly more trust of the panel and expected significantly less severe punishment when the panel consisted of three people compared to when it consisted of ten people.

So why is it that people take smaller group size as a cue to group trustworthiness?

Well, in two of our studies we measured perceptions of the groups’ warmth and competence (two basic dimensions of group perceptions and stereotypes). In these studies, we found that warmth perceptions (but not competence perceptions) positively mediated the smaller-group trust preference.

In another study, we asked people why they trusted smaller groups more than larger groups (once they had already indicated that they did), and they indicated that small groups are more close-knit, accountable, easy to influence, and evocative of intimacy groups (i.e., family or friends).

Altogether, these results point to the apparent “small = trustworthy” heuristic arising from small group size reminding people of their own intimacy groups and thus evoking perceptions of communal traits such as warmth and accountability. More pragmatically, the tentative finding that people see small groups as easier to influence than large groups—consistent with social impact theory—may partly explain the expectation of more favorable outcomes from a smaller group in a trust interaction.

Further research is needed to replicate this smaller-group trust preference and establish its boundary conditions, as well to investigate possible applied implications. For example, can companies increase their brand trust by making themselves look smaller than their competitors? Can politicians make themselves appear more trustworthy by emphasizing the small towns or organizations they have belonged to? These remain open questions, but our research shows that when it comes to group size and trustworthiness, smaller is generally better.


Stephen La Macchia recently completed his PhD in social psychology at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include trust, group perception, social norms, collective action, and political attitudes and behaviour.

References:

[i] DeSteno, D., Breazeal, C., Frank, R. H., Pizarro, D., Baumann, J., Dickens, L., & Lee, J. J. (2012). Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange. Psychological Science, 23(12), 1549-1556. doi:10.1177/0956797612448793

[ii] La Macchia, S. T., Louis, W. R., Hornsey, M. J., & Leonardelli, G. J. (2016). In small we trust: Lay theories about small and large groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Advance online publication, July 1, 2016. doi:10.1177/0146167216657360

Entering Dystopia: Should Your Face Be the Key to Your Fate?

How would you feel if you were rejected from a job because you didn't look competent enough? Or if you were apprehended at a public place by the police because you looked like a criminal? Although these scenes sound dystopic and generate a sense of fear and anxiety, technology that claims that people's traits can be inferred from their faces already exists and is being used by businesses and governments worldwide.

An Israeli start-up markets a machine-learning algorithm that uses photographs of people's faces to classify them into categories, such as terrorists, academic researchers, gamblers, and pedophiles, to name a few. A smartphone app generates users' personality profiles and tells them how compatible they will be with others based on just a selfie that users upload to the app.

Although personality quizzes and matchmaking may seem like harmless fun, a company claims it can predict how much risk people are willing to take for high-stakes decisions just based on their face. Apart from these examples, academic researchers have also developed machine learning algorithms that claim to predict people's personality and demographic traits from their faces, including sexual orientation, criminality, and openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Not surprisingly, such technologies provoke controversy. People who support these facial profiling technologies argue that these technologies should be welcomed because they can help make our lives:

  • Safer—allowing police to apprehend people with criminal intent,
  • Better—providing personalized treatment guidance,
  • Richer—providing tailored learning opportunities,
  • More fun—providing  personalized entertainment recommendations, and
  • Convenient—allowing businesses to offer targeted products and services.

On the other hand, opponents claim that facial profiling technologies are unreliable and sometimes grossly inaccurate, are based on stereotypes that discriminate against marginalized groups, and often violate people's privacy. For example, Google's face recognition algorithm once classified people of African origin as gorillas.

Despite these concerns, governments and businesses across the world are deploying facial profiling technologies to infer people's traits from their faces. In our recent research, we sought to understand the psychological basis for why people support these technologies. We argued that for people to support the use of facial profiling technologies, they must first believe that a reliable association exists between individuals' faces and their character. In other words, only if people believe that someone's face communicates something hidden about them would they support the use of facial profiling.

Why Do People Think Individuals' Appearance Reveals Their Character?

One's social environment plays a role in whether they believe that people's appearance reveals their character or not. For example, in TV series and movies, heroes look attractive whereas villains are often portrayed as hideous and unseemly. In the movie Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy asks the good witch why she's so beautiful, the good witch replies, "Why, only bad witches are ugly." On the other hand, folklore includes sayings such as "a wolf in sheep's clothing" or "not all that glitters is gold," which suggest that appearances do not reveal character.

Across nine studies conducted with a total of nearly 3,000 participants, we found that the more people believed that individuals' appearance reveals their character, the more they supported adopting such facial profiling technologies. We included extreme uses of facial profiling in our studies, such as allowing the police to apprehend people because the facial profiling software predicts they may be criminals, or putting a student in the remedial track because the facial profiling software ranks them as low in intelligence, or allowing financial institutions to charge higher interest rates to certain customers because the facial profiling software rates them as less trustworthy. We assessed people's support for such severe uses of facial profiling because many people would probably be OK with using a smartphone app to rate their personality using a selfie just for fun. However, in industry and government, facial profiling is moving far beyond these innocuous uses—it is being used to make consequential decisions. The fact that those who believed that people's appearance reveals their character supported such extreme yet realistic uses of facial profiling demonstrate the strong role this belief plays in shaping people's responses on consequential issues. On a positive note, the relationship between the appearance reveals character belief and support for facial profiling disappeared when participants were told that evidence is unclear whether people's appearance can reliably reveal their character traits.

Intuition says that people may be hesitant to allow the use of facial profiling on themselves. However, contrary to this expectation, we found that the target of facial profiling did not matter—if people believed that individuals' appearance reveals their character, they supported facial profiling even if they themselves were the target of such profiling. We also examined the underlying reason for this relationship. We found that the more people believed that individuals' appearance reveals their character, the more confident they felt in their ability to infer others' character from their appearance, and thus, the more they supported facial profiling.

Based on the finding, we developed a personality-prediction game that either made participants feel that they, and people in general, were adept at predicting people's personalities from their faces (to bolster their confidence) or made them feel that they (and people in general) were quite bad at guessing people's personality from their face (to reduce their confidence). As expected, high confidence increased people's support for facial profiling.

Artificial intelligence seems to be an essential part of humanity's future. One of its more far-reaching uses is facial profiling—predicting what people are like just based on their faces, and using this information for critical decisions such as whom to arrest and whom to hire. Among the myriad practical reasons why people may support or oppose facial profiling, their beliefs about whether or not people's appearance reveals their character plays an important role.

Next time you encounter a claim to infer people's personality from their picture, think about the story your face can, or cannot, tell. Research shows that people can judge some traits such as extraversion from others' appearance at above-chance levels (i.e., greater than just guessing) but not other traits such as intelligence or trustworthiness. Importantly, although this research has focused on whether character traits can be predicted at above-chance accuracy, research at the heart of facial profiling has claimed that machine learning models (which are often proprietary trade secrets) can assess character traits with near-perfect accuracy. It is an open question whether these claims would hold up to scrutiny.


For Further Reading

Madan, S., Savani, K., & Johar, G. V. (2022). How you look is who you are: The appearance reveals character lay theory increases support for facial profiling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000307


Shilpa Madan is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on people's lay beliefs and cultural differences to enhance individual and societal well-being.

Krishna Savani is a Professor of Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He conducts research on culture, decision-making, diversity, morality, and machine learning.

Gita V. Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. Her research focuses on consumer identity, beliefs, and persuasion.

When People Change their Beliefs about Change

From proverbs to Pinterest, the world seems to be brimming with messages that convey a simple truth about humanity: that people can’t truly change. Oh wait, no. That people can change. Because we all know that leopards can’t change their spots. Well, unless they’re turning over a new leaf. This basic tension between notions of change and stability is even reflected in a song from the Disney Movie “Frozen,” claiming in one line “We aren’t saying you can change him, ‘Cause people don’t really change” yet in another line affirming that “Everyone’s a bit of a fixer upper.”

In light of all of these contradictory cultural messages about change, how do we make sense of the information we encounter about ourselves – and others – over time?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have compellingly demonstrated that people tend to have a favorite go-to belief or implicit theory about change. Can hard work make you smarter, or do you have a certain level of braininess no matter what you try? Is your basic morality – or personality for that matter – set in stone, or can it be altered? Entity theorists believe these traits can’t truly be changed; incremental theorists are confident that attributes are malleable. Even though these implicit beliefs are really just “all in our head,” they affect how we interpret the world, and have dramatic effects on learningmotivation, and judgments.  

Even though it makes sense that people develop these habits of thinking about change or stability, intuitively I can think of cases where my own theories flip-flop. I’m an incremental theorist much of the time, but even though I firmly believe that people can change, I’ve heard myself give the exact opposite advice to a friend who was reconsidering a not-so-deserving ex. Suddenly, I was all about leopards not changing their spots – maybe because this alternate viewpoint better supported my argument.

The idea that people selectively appeal to evidence to support their position isn’t a new one. Ziva Kunda theorized that we often engage in motivated reasoning – that we’ll preferentially seek evidence, search memory, or appeal to causal theories that stack the deck in favor of the conclusion we wanted to come to all along. My colleagues and I wondered if people’s allegiance to implicit theories of change might be subject to change themselves, especially when shifting them could help support a goal.

Beliefs about change and stability matter for how we interpret information about people over time: to what extent is the past a good predictor of future behavior? There’s not always a right answer to that question – but sometimes we definitely have a preferred answer.

For example, imagine you were advising the owner of a bike shop. A likable fellow, Jack applies with the right qualifications. However, you learn that Jack served time for theft in his early 20s. He has been out of jail for five years. Should you hire him? If Jack is a stranger, your habitual belief in the old adage “once a thief, always a thief” may determine your reaction. Now, imagine that the person in Jack’s position was someone you care about– your brother perhaps, or your son. Then, even if you normally think of moral character as set in stone, you may decide – at least for a while – that people can change and deserve second chances.

In a recent paper (Leith, Ward, Giacomin, Landau, Ehrlinger & Wilson, 2014), we tested the idea that people might temporarily alter their beliefs about change and stability when a different perspective served their motives. First, we know people are often motivated to protect their egos in the face of failure. We threatened people’s feelings of competence by giving them (false) feedback on a test, telling them they’d failed. A comparison group was told they’d done especially well on the test. We then asked people how much they agreed with statements like “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.” Although people in the two testing conditions didn’t differ from one another in their beliefs about intelligence at the start of the session, after getting their score, those who failed were much more likely to start leaning toward the view that intelligence is, in fact, changeable. It’s easier to handle failure when it’s temporary and alterable rather than enduring.

Although people are notoriously motivated to protect and defend the self, it’s not the only time they show their biases. People’s reasoning also gets lopsided when they start talking politics. For instance, voters have to evaluate political candidates by taking into account information about their current, recent, and often distant past. When voters confront the dirt dug up from their favorite candidate’s past, do they activate different beliefs about change than they do when they contemplate the skeletons in the opponent’s closet? To test this we first approached voters shortly before the last Canadian Federal election, when political hackles were naturally raised. Inspired by the content of the attack ads circulating at the time, we compiled a set of unflattering statements that each of the two leading candidates had uttered in the distant past – an average of 10 years earlier. Liberal and Conservative voters read either questionable quotations from the Liberal or the Conservative candidate. Once again, people showed a lot of flexibility in their views of change: the past missteps of their favored politician were forgiven by appealing to a belief in people’s essential malleability. On the other hand, people ensured that past mud continued to “stick” to disliked candidates by highlighting how people’s core characteristics really cannot change.

In real life, people’s beliefs about the nature of change inform their views on crime and punishment, rehabilitation, and recidivism. Once again, though, we wondered how stable those beliefs really were. In a final study, we asked American adults – about half of whom were parents – to review the case of a previously convicted child sex offender who was paroled after showing evidence of rehabilitation. We asked half of our respondents to imagine that the offender would soon be moving to a community 200 miles away; we asked the other half to imagine the offender was moving into their own neighborhood. We thought that parents who contemplated a child sex offender moving nearby would be driven by the urge to protect their family. Regardless of their habitual beliefs, this group of highly threatened parents shifted to endorse the belief that people, at the core, really don’t change. Importantly, the more they came to believe that people can’t change, the less they accepted evidence that this former offender had been rehabilitated. We recognize that this topic is fraught with legitimate ethical complexities about recidivism, public safety, and rights of the former offender, especially in light of the concrete entity assumptions inherent in the National Sex Offender registry. This research can’t directly comment on the wisdom of the registry; however, it can demonstrate a process by which emotional threat can influence policy decisions. Rather than relying on empirical evidence of rehabilitation or actual recidivism risks, people under threat may reframe a debate by shifting their underlying beliefs about whether rehabilitation is even possible.

As Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier have argued, “Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.” Our evidence suggests that one way people may win arguments (with themselves or others) is by selectively appealing to culturally-available beliefs about change and stability in ways that allow them to either disregard the past or affirm its enduring nature. How much does this matter? Short-term at least, it seems to matter a lot. People who even temporarily believed that attributes can change were more likely to agree to retake a test, to forgive a political candidate, and to acknowledge the possibility of criminal rehabilitation. Even temporary fluctuations in people’s beliefs, then, could alter in-the-moment learning, voting, and policy decisions. And conceivably, if these motivated shifts happen often enough, they could form the basis of some of the enduring theories that we come to hold about the nature of change.


Leith, S., Ward, C., Giacomin, M., Landau, E., Ehrlinger, J., & Wilson, A. E.  (2014). Changing theories of change: Strategic shifting in implicit theory endorsement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,107, 597-620doi: 10.1037/a0037699


Anne Wilson is a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on self and identity, psychological time, and motivated social cognition.