Empathy or Counter-Empathy? The Victims’ Empathic Response Toward Offenders Depends on Their Relationships and Transgression Severity

Meiqi Yu, Xu Li, Jiamei Lu, Shuyin Wang, Lihui Zhang, Qiong Ge School of Education, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Jiamei Lu; Xu Li, School of Education, Shanghai Normal University, 100 Guilin Road, Shanghai, 200234, People’s Republic of China, Email lujiamei@vip.163.com; lxuthus@shnu.edu.cnIntroduction: Empathy facilitates prosocial behaviors, whereas counter-empathy harms others. The question that remains unanswered is: when and for whom do people show different empathic responses? This study aimed to explore the effects of transgression severity and interpersonal relationships on victims’ empathy or counter-empathy toward an offender.Methods: Before and after experiencing a slight or serious transgression, 42 college students were asked to imagine that they had different relationships (ie, intimate, strange, or bad) with a person and then report their empathy or counter-empathy toward that person from cognitive and affective aspects.Results: The results showed that, in the affective aspect, the participants’ empathy for the intimate friend decreased after a slight transgression and even disappeared after a serious transgression. For strangers, empathy transformed into counter-empathy after the transgression, and its intensity increased with the transgression’s severity. For a person in a bad relationship, the participants felt counter-empathy before the transgression, and its intensity increased with the transgression’s severity. In the cognitive aspect, participants’ counter-empathy toward the stranger and the person in a bad relationship increased with transgression severity.Discussion: These results suggest that interpersonal relationships and transgression severity can change the type and degree of a victim’s empathy toward the offender. Our findings not only deepen our understanding of the cognitive aspect of counter-empathy but also provide insights for handling interpersonal conflict.Keywords