The role of empathy in intergroup relations

• People show more empathy for others they categorize as ingroup (vs. outgroup) members.
• Training people how to increase empathy for the outgroup may reduce prejudice.
• Intergroup counter-empathy or schadenfreude most often occurs in competitive contexts.
• We mimic people in the ingroup more readily than those in the outgroup.
• Brain areas involved in interpersonal empathy also underlie biases in intergroup empathy.

Intergroup empathy — feeling empathy for a person or persons on the basis of group memberships — has been, until lately, relatively neglected by researchers and its mechanisms are poorly understood. What is well established is that people typically display a group bias, such that they more readily have empathy for the pain and suffering of ingroup members than they do for outgroup members. I review current research that attempts to answer four main questions about intergroup empathy: (a) what is the role of empathy in prejudice and prejudice reduction? (b) What are the causes and consequences of counter-empathy? (c) How do mimicry and the mirror neuron system play a role? (d) How does the brain produce intergroup empathy? This review draws mainly from studies in social psychology, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience, reflecting a variety of behavioral and neuroscience measures to examine the interplay between prejudice, empathy, counter-empathy, and mimicry, as well as the brain regions that underlie these processes.