The impact of increasing diversity and shifting demographics in America
The relationship between hierarchy maintenance and empathic, as well as counter-empathic, emotions
We examine the relationship between personality, ideology, and emotions, arguing that SDO and RWA will predict reduced empathy and increased schadenfreude but towards different groups.
Here, I review two categories of emotional antecedents to hierarchy maintenance – empathic and counter-empathic emotions – which directly impact the cooperative or competitive nature of intergroup relations.
In four studies we test a model in which SDO leads to active harm primarily through feeling schadenfreude while SDO leads to passive harm primarily through not feeling empathy.
In three studies we show that higher levels of social dominance orientation (SDO) is related to the desire and choice to feel less empathy and schadenfreude toward low-status targets.
SDO is negatively related to empathy and positively related to counter-empathy in general. When group boundaries are made salient, the relationship between SDO, empathy, and schadenfreude become stronger for out-group targets, even in a novel groups paradigm and only when groups are competing.