The role of empathy, responsibility, and motivations to respond without prejudice in reducing prejudice

The current study examined the effect of empathy and responsibility on attitudes towards fat people as moderated by internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice. Previous work has found that evoking empathy towards a member of a stigmatized group generates more positive attitudes to the stigmatized group as a whole (Batson et al., 1997). However, this work did not look at traditional targets of prejudice nor did it consider individual differences. Recent work by Plant and Devine (2001) has found that individuals who are primarily externally motivated to respond without prejudice will comply with external pressure to appear non-prejudiced but will then demonstrate affective and attitudinal backlash in private. Given these findings, it was hypothesized that empathy and responsibility would affect attitudes towards fat people, but only for individuals who are low in both internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. To examine this hypothesis, a study was conducted in which participants who varied as a function of internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice watched an interview of a fat woman describing her life. Participants watched this video with either empathic or objective listening instruction and were told that the woman was either not responsible (i.e., a medical condition) or was responsible (i.e., no medical condition) for her weight. As predicted, a four-way interaction was found such that only for unmotivated individuals (i.e., those low in both internal and external motivation) did the empathy and responsibility manipulations have an interactive effect. These findings indicate that empathy as a prejudice reduction technique may only be effective for a subset of prejudiced individuals and only when responsibility attributions are minimized.