The Influence Of Intergroup Relationship On Empathy Bias In Chinese Culture Context: The Moderating Effect Of Self-constructing Model

Empathy is the experience and understanding of others' emotions based on distinguishing self and others,and produces an emotional experience that is consistent with others.There are studies that find empathy has obvious ingroup preference and outgroup differences.For example,people are more difficult to empathy with outgroup members compared with ingroup members,and even feel pleasure for outgroup members' pain or feel pain for their pleasure.This kind of empathetic phenomenon,which is asymmetric to ingroup and outgroup,is called intergroup empathy bias.Studies based on American subjects have shown that intergroup relations affect intergroup bias.When two groups were in a competitive,cooperative or mutually independent relation,there would always be intergroup empathy bias.When there is no competition between groups,or even a cooperative relation,why people still show intergroup empathy bias? We considered that cultural plays an important regulatory role in it.Cross-cultural studies have shown that individuals in different cultures have significant difference in the self-construal patterns.For example,the westerners are mainly independent self-construal,the easterners are mainly dependent self-construal.Different self-construal patterns influence people's cognition,emotion and behavior of themselves and other.Therefore,we speculate that the self-construal model based on cultural differences may regulate the influence of intergroup relations on intergroup empathy bias.This study will discuss this problem through three experiments.In experiment 1,we repeated the study of Western scholars to explore whether and how intergroup relations affect intergroup empathy for people in eastern culture.In experiment 2,based on the self-construal scale,two types of college students with independent self-construal and self-construal tendency were selected,and then repeated experiment 1 to investigate whether the self-construal model adjusted the influence of intergroup relations on intergroup empathy bias.In experiment 3,we used the self-construal priming paradigm to explore whether the self-construal initiation adjusted the influence of intergroup relations on the intergroup empathy bias in the college students who had vague self-construal tendency.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)For Chinese subjects,there is no intergroup empathy bias when the groups were in cooperative relation,there was a decrease of negative empathy and counter-empathy bias in competitive and independent relations.Therefore,the intergroup empathy bias only exsited in competitive and independent relations,but not cooperative relation for collectivism individuals.(2)For college students owned independent self-construal,when the groups were in competitive relation,the subjects showed all types of intergroup empathy bias;but for cooperative and independent relations only showed positive intergroup empathy bias.For dependent self-construal students,when the groups were in competitive relation,the subjects showed all types of intergroup empathy bias,and there is no bias in independent or cooperative relation.Therefore,independent self-construal students showed more intergroup empathy bias,and dependent self-construal students showed less intergroup empathy bias.(3)For students primed independent self-construal,when the groups were in competitive and independent relations,they showed positive empathy and counter-empathy bias,but in cooperative relation did not show them.For the subjects primed dependent self-construal also showed positive intergroup empathy bias in competitive and independent relations,showed only positive counter-empathy bias in the competitive relation,but they showed heigher positive empathy for outgroup than ingroup.Similarly,students primed independent self-construal showed negative empathy bias in all intergroup relations,but subjects primed dependent self-construal didn't show negative empathy bias in all intergroup relations.This indicated that Chinese college students primed independent self-construal will show more intergroup empathy bias,and the Chinese students primed dependent self-construal will show less intergroup empathy bias.Conclusions of this study provide a preliminary understanding for the intergroup empathy bias formatted in different social and cultural,which provides a reference for intervening measures of intergroup empathy bias.