New Vistas for the Relationship between Empathy and Political Ideology.

Abstract

The study of ideological asymmetries in empathy has consistently yielded inconclusive findings. Yet, until recently these inconsistencies relied exclusively on self-reports, which are known to be prone to biases and inaccuracies when evaluating empathy levels. Very recently, we reported ideological asymmetries in cognitive-affective empathy while relying on neuroimaging for the first time to address this question. In the present investigation which sampled a large cohort of human individuals from two distant countries and neuroimaging sites, we re-examine this question, but this time from the perspective of empathy to physical pain. The results are unambiguous at the neural and behavioral levels and showcase no asymmetry. This finding raises a novel premise: the question of whether empathy is ideologically asymmetrical depends on the targeted component of empathy (e.g., physical pain vs cognitive-affective) and requires explicit but also unobtrusive techniques for the measure of empathy. Moreover, the findings shed new light on another line of research investigating ideological (a)symmetries in physiological responses to vicarious pain, disgust, and threat.