“I’ve Been There Too”: Adversity-based Identities & Prosocial Parochialism

Open Access
- Author:
- Hadjiandreou, Eliana
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- August 24, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Daryl Cameron, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jessica Lynn Matsick, Committee Member
Andrew High, Committee Member
Kristin Ann Buss, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- adversity
parochial empathy
intergroup relations
suffering
compassion
outgroups
common ingroup identity model
communal coping model - Abstract:
- Social psychologists and moral philosophers have shunned parochial empathy as a biased process that hurts intergroup relations. We integrate the communal coping model and the common ingroup identity model literatures to examine whether people exhibit beneficial parochial empathy for others who are considered fellow sufferers. Study 1 presented a political outgroup suffering either from a shared or non-shared adversity compared to the one that participants reflected on. Study 2 followed the same structure but removed the intergroup component to study the parochial empathy effect in isolation. Participants responded with high levels of compassion and felt similarity across the shared and non-shared adversity conditions (Study 1) and differed significantly only from the pure control condition that had no adversity content (Study 2), indicating that prosociality was felt in response to adversity more broadly, as opposed to shared adversity specifically. The reported severity of participants’ own adversity moderated the effect of condition on felt similarity with suffering target (Study 2), suggesting that adverse experiences promote commonality at higher levels of impact. Potential implications as well as future directions are discussed.