Racial Bias Reduces Empathic Sensorimotor Resonance with Other-Race Pain

SummaryAlthough social psychology studies suggest that racism often manifests itself as a lack of empathy [1 and 2], i.e., the ability to share and comprehend others' feelings and intentions [3, 4, 5, 6 and 7], evidence for differential empathic reactivity to the pain of same- or different-race individuals is meager [8 and 9]. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, we explored sensorimotor empathic brain responses [10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15] in black and white individuals who exhibited implicit but not explicit ingroup preference and race-specific autonomic reactivity [16, 17, 18, 19 and 20]. We found that observing the pain of ingroup models inhibited the onlookers' corticospinal system as if they were feeling the pain [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21 and 22]. Both black and white individuals exhibited empathic reactivity also when viewing the pain of stranger, very unfamiliar, violet-hand models. By contrast, no vicarious mapping of the pain of individuals culturally marked as outgroup members on the basis of their skin color was found. Importantly, group-specific lack of empathic reactivity was higher in the onlookers who exhibited stronger implicit racial bias. These results indicate that human beings react empathically to the pain of stranger individuals [3, 4, 5, 6 and 7]. However, racial bias and stereotypes may change this reactivity into a group-specific lack of sensorimotor resonance [1, 2, 3, 9, 23 and 24].

► Observing the pain of a model inhibits the corticospinal motor system of an onlooker ► This so-called sensorimotor contagion indexes a basic form of empathic reactivity ► Sensorimotor contagion is not found for the pain of different racial group models ► Higher reduction of sensorimotor contagion parallels stronger implicit race bias