Impact and collective empathy

Empathy: Victim Impact Panels and DWI Offenders

A Victim Impact Panel (VIP) is one of many intervention methods implemented to reduce DWI recidivism. While other sentences focus on tangible punishments and rewards, a VIP provides emotional motivation to change one’s behavior and attitudes towards drinking and driving. In study one, I assessed the relationship between VIPs and empathy. Sixty-one participants attending a Victim Impact Panel co...

A Theory of Collective Empathy in Corporate Philanthropy Decisions

Prevailing perspectives on corporate philanthropy are predominantly rational and limit decision making to the executive suite. Recently, however, recognition has grown that employees are also important drivers of corporate philanthropy efforts and that their motives may be more empathic in nature. Integrating arguments from affective events theory, intergroup emotions theory, and affect infusio...

Empathy or Antipathy? The Impact of Diversity

While the enormous costs of ethnic and class divisions are depressingly familiar (William Easterly and Ross Levine, 1997; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, 1997; Paolo Mauro, 1995; James M. Poterba, 1997; Alberto Alesina et al., 1999), much less is known about the impact of various policies designed to ameliorate conflict between groups. Different countries have followed very different polic...

The Impact of Gender on Empathy

The neural underpinnings of empathy and their relevance for collective emotions

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, is a crucial component of successful social interaction. Recent models of empathy originating from the field of social neuroscience propose that different components contribute to the experience of empathy. These include a) a sensory-driven component that can entail an automatic experiential sharing of the affect of ot...