Hudson, Gabriel Charles More; (2023) Bounded Empathy: Investigating the Factors that Influence the Strength of an Empathic Response. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Empathy frequently motivates prosocial behaviour but is also subject to considerable bias. Most notably, empathic responses are moderated by factors such as similarity, relationship closeness and group membership. In this thesis, I use social and evolutionary theory to examine what factors influence the strength of an empathic response in adult humans. In my first data chapter (Chapter 3), I derive predictions from evolutionary models of tag-based cooperation to examine linguistic biases in empathy. Across four experiments, using both self-report and physiological data, I present evidence for the presence of accent biases in empathy. In the next chapter, I use a novel methodological approach, using implicit reaction time measures, to examine racial biases in emotion contagion (defined here as affect sharing in the absence of a conscious self-other distinction). In contrast to previous research, I found no evidence for racial biases in emotion contagion despite finding evidence for greater emotion contagion of happiness compared to sadness. I then explore whether latent social group representations formed in the absence of explicit category labels or overt cues to group membership can influence empathy and prosocial behaviour, finding no such effect (Chapter 5). Turning to a direct mechanistic exploration of the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour, I then present the results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled investigation into the effects of paracetamol on empathy for physical and social pain, as well as empathy-motivated prosocial behaviour (Chapter 6). In this study, I did not replicate previous work demonstrating that paracetamol blunts empathy for pain and also found no relationship between paracetamol intake and prosocial behaviour. The results of the four studies combined suggest that there are important limitations with current simulation-based theories of empathy – particularly with regard to the proposed relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour. The results also suggest that previous findings in the literature on empathy may be less robust than previously thought.

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