Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effect of Empathy on Public Opinion on Immigration

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This project studies the impact of empathy on individual information processing and opinion formation on immigration policy. The researcher focuses on empathy and immigration for three reasons. First, immigration as a policy area is unresolved, is extremely salient, and influences the lives and quality of life of millions of people. Second, much of public opinion on immigration is divided along party lines, which presents a difficult test case for learning and opinion change. If empathy affects the motivational, learning, and opinion change processes on immigration opinion, its potential impact may be even greater in policy arenas that are not as divisive. Third, this project fills major gaps in scholarly work on emotion and immigration opinion. To date, scholarship has only explored the effects of anxiety, threat, anger, and enthusiasm on political opinions. This project advances knowledge by providing first-cut research into the impact of empathy on immigration opinion. In addition, this research explores how empathy affects not only immigration policy preferences but also the considerations (e.g., beliefs about immigrants) that people draw upon to form policy opinions. The project addresses three chief research questions. How does empathy towards immigrants affect information seeking, political learning, and opinion change? Are these effects moderated by ethnicity and partisanship? How long and to what extent do these empathic effects endure? To assess these questions, the researcher conducts an experiment to measure the effects of increased feelings of empathy toward undocumented immigrants on individual learning, reason giving, and immigration policy opinion. The project uses real-world news articles to increase subject empathy and survey self-report questions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the effects of this understudied emotion on the issue of immigration. The expectation is that that empathy motivates information-seeking behavior, enhances the prospects for political learning, and ultimately changes even hardened opinions such as those on immigration. It is also posited that the effects of empathy depend on a person's race and partisanship. This project innovates by using a survey to follow up on its experiments in order to estimate whether the immediate impact of specific emotions on opinion are temporary or has more lasting effects. This research makes several broader contributions. The project sheds light on how citizens think about divisive issues. Moreover, the project enhances understanding of the impact of emotion on public opinion.