Learning empathy by observing empathic reactions in ingroup and outgroup individuals

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Grit Hein
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524342201

Empathy, defined as sharing the others’ affective states, has been shown to increase the willingness to make sacrifices at own costs to help others. There is ample evidence that humans learn from observing others’ reactions, known as observational learning. Observational learning has been linked to the social transmission of fear, as well as changes in choice behaviors and risk preferences. However, it remains unknown whether and how learning from observing empathic or callous individuals alters the processing of empathy in the human brain, and whether these effects are influenced by important social variables such as group membership. To fill this crucial gap, the proposed research systematically investigates the behavioral and neural effects of observational learning from high and low empathic individuals that belong to different social groups. To achieve this goal, the project combines a well-established empathy-for-pain paradigm with an observational learning task and applies computational modelling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to uncover the underlying learning mechanisms. In more detail, while undergoing fMRI, participants observe high or low empathy ratings in an individual from their own social group (ingroup demonstrator) or a different social group (outgroup demonstrator), and, later, provide empathy ratings themselves. Based on previous research, I hypothesize that observing empathic reactions in ingroup and outgroup demonstrators may generate learning signals that differentially affect the subjective and neural empathic responses of the observer. Testing these assumptions clarifies the effect of observational learning from ingroup and outgroup individuals on behavioral and neural correlates of empathy, and can help to specify the conditions under which individuals learn and unlearn empathy by observing others.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants