The Effect Of Moral Identity On Empathy In The Competitive—Cooperative Relations

Empathy refers to both the capacity to share and understand others' emotion or feeling as well as resonate affectively with their emotions.Empathy is reported to have not only short-term benefits such as enhanced social support,cooperation,and understanding but also long-term benefits such as enhanced friendship,reciprocity,and self-interest.According to the valence of emotions,empathy is divided into positive empathy which refers to vicariously sharing other's positive emotion,and negative empathy which refers to vicariously sharing other's negative emotion.Morality is an important guideline for teaching us how to treat other people,and can encourage people to interact with other people in a friendly way.Many previous studies have examined the effect of different moral levels on empathy in social relations,but there has been no research on the mechanism of morality in social relations.Moreover,previous studies have focused on negative empathy and lack of discussion on the whole aspect of empathy.Competition and cooperation are common social relations in daily life,and competitive relationship can inhibit the mutual affection of individuals,while cooperative relationship can promote individual empathy.Based on the above aspects,this study attempts to explore the influence of morality on the mechanism of empathy in complex social relations.In this study,the empathic objects' moral identity was distinguished by their moral levels.The first experiment built competitive relation through competitive rules in gambling game,and participants were asked to observe their outcomes and the outcomes of the other two competitors who had different moral identities.The whole experiment used event related potential technology to record participants' neural responses.The results showed that moral identity influenced individual's bottom-up emotional empathy process and the top-down cognitive empathy stage.Compared with the moral characters,the participants invested more cognitive resources when they observed the outcomes of immoral characters,and the participants were more concerned about their own interests when facing the immoral person.The second experiment used the same paradigm,and built cooperative relations through changing rules.The participants were asked to observe their outcomes and the outcomes of the other two cooperators who had different moral identities.The results showed that moral identity influenced the top-down cognitive empathy stage,and had no effect on the bottom-up emotional empathy stage.Compared with the moral characters,when the participants observed the outcomes of immoral characters,their cognitive processing is more adequate and more cognitive resources were consumed.We draw the conclusions:(1)Individuals have a higher level of empathy with moral characters.(2)In the competitive situation,moral identity influences the early processing stage of empathy and the later processing stage of empathy,however,moral identity only has an influence on the cognitive empathy stage in the cooperative situation.(3)Individuals are more sensitive to positive empathy,and consume more mental energy.