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Description Understanding empathy as a motivated process is common within psychology today (Zaki, 2014; Cameron et al, 2022). In essence, we tend to empathize more when we have underlying motives to do so. One underlying motive that has been suggested to increase empathy is the social desirability and normativity of empathy (Zaki, 2014; Schumann et al, 2014; Weisz & Zaki, 2017). Empathy’s normativity as underlying motivation to empathize was explicitly tested by Weisz and colleagues (2021) and showed significant effects on several outcome measures. Another motive that has been suggested to increase empathy is to simply inform people that empathy is not fixed and unaffectable, but rather motivated and affectable in several ways. Several studies have demonstrated that presenting empathy as being malleable rather than fixed leads to increased empathic behavior (Schumman et al, 2014; Weisz et al, 2021; Hasson et al, 2022). Recently, Weisz and colleagues and Hasson and colleagues explicitly tested motivation-based interventions on empathic behavior, with mixed results. Weisz and colleagues did not find any difference between their conditions for empathy with outgroup members. Neither did they find any condition-based differences between empathy-related ratings of outgroup members on several items (Weisz et al, 2021). They speculate that their interventions, designed to bolster empathic approach behavior, did not affect typical avoidance behavior, such as avoiding empathizing with outgroup members. However, they point out that their experiment was not designed to characterize underlying intervention mechanisms. Interestingly, Hasson and colleagues tested a kind of malleability intervention, telling people that empathy is not limited but unlimited. That lead to more outgroup empathy towards outgroup members measured on several empathy-related items (Hasson et al, 2022). They even suggest a mechanism for the increase in empathy toward outgroup members: when people no longer believe that empathy is limited but unlimited, they think that they have empathy to spare for outgroup members; whereas when people believe that empathy is limited, they save their empathy for their ingroup members (ibid). Their approach can hence be understood as decreasing avoidance behavior, given that people avoided empathizing with outgroup members due to their belief that empathy is a limited resource best saved for ingroup members. Study 1 In a first study, we will reuse the two interventions Hasson and colleagues used in their second study. We will also create two additional interventions. The first one is based on informing people that we can regulate our empathy, without telling them it is unlimited. The second one is based on informing people about the socially desirable effects of empathy and how it is valued in many communities. A fifth condition will be used as control and be about risky financial investments, not empathy. We will test our interventions online, using Prolific, in a potential outgroup context. Participants will be presented with stimuli consisting of a story about a man, Tyrone in one version and John in the second version and make several empathy-related ratings regarding how they felt about the man while reading the story. Participants will also be offered to make real financial donations to the YMCA, which is an organization the man in the story attends to receive help with basic needs. Prolific registers participants’ ethnicity and in the experiment, we will ask explicitly about how they perceived the ethnicity of the man in the story. By matching participants on ethnicity and expected perceived ethnicity of the man in the story, we will try to create an outgroup measure, where e.g. black participants read about John (more likely to be perceived as white). In effect, we test four motivation-based interventions’ effects on empathy to see if we can replicate previous results obtained by Hasson and colleagues and test how well their interventions perform compared to our novel interventions based on an understanding of motivated empathy.

This project examines the beliefs of physicians, nurses, occupational therapists, dentists, and dental hygienists regarding about the epistemology of their disciplines. Specifically, members of those professions were asked about the characteristics of "science," "proven experience," and "personal experience".

We want to understand the process of visual sampling, and the downstream effect on choice.