Nora Huth-Stöckle, Boris Heizmann; Are there limits to empathy? A survey experiment on empathic concern and perspective-taking as bases for attitudes towards different groups of refugees. European Societies 2025; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/euso_a_00022
Empathy in the form of empathic concern and perspective taking can provide an important potential avenue for addressing intergroup differences. However, it is unclear whether these mechanisms can be seen as a universal, or whether they are limited to outgroups with characteristics that are similar to those of the ingroup.
To address this question, the authors took a survey-experimental approach. Using the GESIS panel, they tested the influence of empathic concern and perspective taking on two types of attitudes towards refugees. These refugees were randomly characterized via vignettes defined by the four combinations of Christian/Muslim and High-skilled/Low-Skilled. The results reveal that both aspects of empathy have a notable influence on such attitudes. However, based on a multiverse analysis with more than 300 models and a replication with another dataset, this influence does not differ across the four groups of refugees, suggesting that these positive outcomes linked to empathy may indeed unfold in a universal way.