The context of empathy: culture,groups, social comparison

Empathy is one of the most peculiar and intriguing phenomena in social life. It is a complex, multifaceted experience, which can be observed in several different contexts and analysed at different levels. In this paper, we focus on empathy as a social experience, dealing with interpersonal and intergroup relationships, culture and the shared representations of the world, with our identities and our ways of comparing ourselves with others. In particular, we aimed to stress the importance of a socio-psychological analysis of empathy; to discuss some studies where empathy is linked to some typical objects of social psychological theory and research; to present one of our studies on empathy and social categorisation. In this experiment, empathy towards a person in need was manipulated by ‘perspective taking’ instructions. Participants (seventy-nine female students) were instructed either to ‘try to be as objective as possible’ about what happened to the person interviewed (Low Empathy condition) or to ‘imagine how the person interviewed may feel’ and to ‘try to identify with her’ (High Empathy condition). The dependent variables were the following: effectiveness of empathy manipulation; scores on ‘Batson’s Empathy Scales’; scores of Self- Other similarity; classification levels; Self-Other merging measures. By both qualitative and quantitative techniques, the connections between empathy, similarity and social categorisation are investigated. The rhetorical dimension of interpersonal similarity is put forward, while the role of social system and culture as crucial components of empathising are underlined.