Examining the Outgroup Empathy Gap: When Does Perceived Similarity Matter?

Empathy is a social tool highlighted for its role in promoting compassion and understanding for others, including members of the community beyond our close personal relationships. Empathy can increase prosocial behaviour and reduce prejudice, yet there is an observable empathy gap in cross-group contexts. Bridging this gap is critical, especially at a time when group identity is a contributing factor to extreme social polarization. Studies have attempted to increase outgroup empathy, some finding that similarity plays a key role in facilitating it. However, these studies manipulated similarity unidimensionally, either at the level of personal identity or within the broader intergroup context. The current study extends past work by manipulating similarity across multiple levels of identity, examining both the interpersonal and intergroup identities to understand the nuanced relationship between similarity and outgroup empathy. A sample of university students completed an online study that manipulated perceptions of similarity and dissimilarity with an imagined outgroup member across both the intergroup and interpersonal contexts, followed by a measure of outgroup empathy. Results found that outgroup empathy did not significantly differ between different combinations of similarity and dissimilarity at the intergroup and interpersonal levels, raising the question of, 'when does perceived similarity matter'? Further research could shed light on the results of this study by investigating the contexts in which manipulations of similarity are capable of impacting outgroup empathy.