Social Value Orientation And Empathy

Empathy,refers to the psychological process in which an individual perceives or imagines the emotions of others and partially experiences the internal state of others(Singer&Lamm,2010).Stereotype content includes two basic dimensions,which are called warmth and competence.Previous studies only considered one dimension of the stereotype content,and haven't consider warmth-competence comparatively.Social value orientation,refers to the behavioral preferences of outcomes distribution between self and others,which can be divided into two types:prosocial and proself.Previous studies have found that prosocials have more prosocial behaviors than those proselfs.Is there a difference in empathy between the prosocial and the proself?How does warm-competence affect empathy?Is there a difference in the empathy between the prosocial and proself when facing a target in different passion-competence dimensions?To answer these questions,we designed these two studies.In study 1,we used a gambler game to create a gain-loss empathy situation,and participants was a bystander of target's gain-loss.participants'social value orientation(prosocial or proself)was measured by three-dominance scale.With reference to Ufkes et al.(2011),a variant of "distant planet paradigm" has been developed to manipulate target person types(warmth-competence),which are mainly divided into:A(high warmth-high competence),B(high warmth-low competence),C(low warmth-high competence),D(low warmth-low competence).Study 2 is similar to study 1,but participant was involved in the gain-loss situation,target's gain means his or her loss,and vise versa.Our study found that(1)the individual's social value orientation had no effect on empathy in the gain-loss situation,there was no difference between prosocials and the proselfs;(2)When an individual is a bystander,target's stereotype(warmth-competence)do have an impact on empathy in the gain-loss situation,specifically only when the target was in high warmth,participants experience high empathy when the target was also high in competence compared to those who was low in competence,which proved an enthusiasm priority effect when empathy happens;When participates involved in the gain-loss situation,self-other comparison changed their emotion from empathy to envy or schadenfreude,specifically there was an consistency impact on feelings of target with different warmth-competence stereotype,when targets in high warmth or competence experience loss,participants reacted with deeper schadenfreude compared to targets in low warmth or competence,when targets in low warmth experience gain,participants reacted with deeper envy compared to targets in high warmth.