When Empathy for Out-Partisans Fails

Empathy has been lauded as the medicine to affective polarization. However, empathy has different effects on out-partisan hate when an individual is asked about their feelings towards an individual versus a group. We test whether these puzzling research findings can be explained by compassion collapse, a psychological phenomenon where empathy decreases as the amount of people increases. Our pre-registered survey experiment (n=2504) shows that empathy has different effects on an individual versus on a group. People with a higher disposition for empathy reported greater compassion when presented with one person or a small group of out-partisans. However, they did not show greater warmth towards members of the out-party in general. These results contribute to the conversation on the psychological root of empathy’s differing effects on out-partisan hate, reaffirming its differing scopes and suggesting that another phenomenon, such as the entity effect, may explain the divergence instead of compassion collapse.