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.