Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: A "Revolutionary Emotion": Empathy, Public Opinion and the March to Equality

本研究探讨了移情在美国政治中的革命性作用。本文主要研究共情对社会群体的影响，特别是对边缘群体个体的共情如何影响主导群体成员对这些边缘群体的态度和行为。这项研究的核心是区分同情和同理心，前者指的是为他人感到难过，后者指的是“设身处地”，感受他人的感受，理解他人的观点。这两种情绪现象可能导致截然不同的政治结果。根据定义，因为移情涉及设身处地为他人着想，它将人们置于一个平等的层面上——至少在精神上——从而提高人们对现有不平等的认识，并希望通过政治手段来纠正这些不平等。同理心是一种革命性的情感。相比之下，在同情中，不会发生转变他人的观点或增加对不平等的认识。相反，观察者原有的世界观仍然存在，虽然她可能会为别人感到难过，想要帮助别人摆脱困境，但这种帮助的类型通常是私人的，不会挑战现状或改变系统性的不平等。可以说，民权运动最伟大的政治成就是1965年的《投票权法案》（Voting rights Act），它只是一个历史例子，表明一个重要的政治结果可能归因于公众的同理心。这项具有里程碑意义的立法的通过通常与当年早些时候在阿拉巴马州塞尔玛发生的“血腥星期日”事件直接相关，当时警察对和平的非洲裔美国抗议者使用极端暴力的画面在全国各地播出，引起了公众的震惊和愤怒，一些人认为这最终提供了通过投票权法案的政治意愿和紧迫性（Lee 2002）。然而，政治学家仍然没有一个理论框架来理解美国白人观点中这种巨大的平等主义转变背后的机制。在政治心理学的子领域，有许多理论是关于群体为什么以及在什么条件下会发生冲突并怀有消极的群体外态度——无论是群体内的偏袒、刻板印象、偏见还是不宽容——特别是关于主导群体成员对地位较低群体的态度。但相对而言，很少有人研究是什么导致了主导群体成员对地位较低群体的好感或平等态度。关于利他主义、人道主义和平等主义等他人价值观的学术研究在某种程度上是一个例外，但为了理解是什么促使人们首先考虑和重视他人的权利和福祉，特别是当这些人属于外群体时，还需要做更多的工作。本文借鉴了心理学和哲学领域关于移情和换位思考的丰富文献，认为移情是一种重要的情感机制，可以解释公众舆论中的平等主义转变，如20世纪60年代白人中发生的这种转变。本课题是本文共情与平等理论的若干检验之一。用最简单的术语来说，这个理论是移情可以通过增加公众对平等的偏好来增加平等，这可能表现为增加对平等主义政策的支持或增加对平等主义价值观的坚持。为了验证这一命题，将在一项针对美国白人（n=1400）的大规模人口调查实验中，外源性地提高同理心。在方法上，这种技术结合了观察和实验世界的优点：代表性调查的普遍性和传统实验的因果推理（Mutz 2011）。2x2研究设计建立在支持主要假设的先导试验中使用的治疗方法的基础上。首先，在实验前一个月进行一项包含情绪特征测量的治疗前调查，以评估个体对移情线索敏感性的差异。在实验中，将对一位单亲母亲和卡特里娜飓风的幸存者进行移情操作，她在一篇虚构的报纸社论中被描述为非裔美国人或白人（随机）。受试者将被随机分配到促进共情的治疗社论或包含相同信息但缺乏共情吸引力的对照社论。在实验之后，将立即进行一项治疗后调查，其中包含对影响卡特里娜飓风幸存者、单身母亲、妇女和非裔美国人（分析中的关键因变量）的政策的偏好措施。OLS回归模型包括治疗虚拟变量、治疗-党派关系相互作用项和标准控制变量，将用于评估共情的总体因果效应，以及它对民主党人和共和党人可能产生的独特影响。这项研究具有广泛的社会价值，因为在包括美国在内的许多社会中，占主导地位的多数人对少数群体的态度决定了社会最终如何对待少数群体，包括公民权利、特权和给予他们的保护水平。优势群体成员对少数群体的平均主义差异对社会是否会产生冲突或和平，不公正或正义，不平等或平等具有重要意义。如果提出的研究能找到支持同理心和平等理论的证据，美国社会可能会发生真正的变化。有了这些知识，政治行为者可以战略性地利用移情呼吁来消除对边缘群体的歧视，并为旨在解决公民生活机会和基本公民权利不平等问题的政策争取公众支持。简而言之，这项研究可以促进减少群体间冲突，并在美国社会中朝着更大的正义和平等迈进。

This research explores the revolutionary role of empathy in American politics. This dissertation is concerned primarily with the effects of empathy across social group lines, and specifically, how empathy for individuals from marginal groups influences dominant group members' attitudes and behavior toward those marginal groups. Central to this research is the distinction between sympathy, which refers to feeling sorry for another, and empathy, which involves "putting oneself in another's shoes," feeling what the other is feeling, and understanding the other's perspective. These two emotional phenomena can lead to very different political outcomes. By definition, because empathy involves putting oneself in another's place, it puts people on an equal plane--at least mentally--and thereby increases awareness of existing inequalities and desires to remedy them using political means. Empathy is a revolutionary emotion. In contrast, in sympathy, no shift to the other's perspective or increased awareness of inequality occurs. Instead, the observer's pre-existing worldview remains, and while she may feel sorry for the other and want to help with the other's plight, the type of help supported is often private in nature and does not challenge the status quo or change systemic inequalities. Arguably the greatest political achievement of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is just one historical example of an important political outcome that may be attributable to public empathy. The passage of this landmark legislation is often linked directly to events that occurred earlier that year in Selma, Alabama on "Bloody Sunday," when images of extreme police violence against peaceful African American protestors were broadcast around the nation, producing public shock and outrage, which some believe ultimately provided the political will and urgency to pass the Voting Rights Act (Lee 2002). However, political scientists still do not have a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms behind this massive egalitarian shift in white Americans' opinions. In the subfield of political psychology, there are numerous theories about why and under what conditions groups conflict and harbor negative out-group attitudes--whether in-group favoritism, stereotypes, prejudice, or intolerance--particularly with regard to the attitudes of dominant group members toward lower status groups. But there is comparatively little about what produces favorable or egalitarian attitudes among dominant group members for lower status groups. Scholarship on the other-regarding values of altruism, humanitarianism, and egalitarianism is somewhat of an exception, but more work needs to be done in order to understand what motivates people to consider and value the rights and well-being of others in the first place, particularly when those others belong to an out-group. Drawing from the rich literatures on empathy and perspective-taking in the fields of psychology and philosophy, this dissertation suggests that empathy is a key emotional mechanism that can explain egalitarian shifts in public opinion, like that which occurred among whites during the 1960s. The proposed project represents one of several tests in the dissertation of the theory of empathy and equality. In the simplest terms, this theory is that empathy can increase equality by increasing public preferences for equality, which may manifest as increased support for egalitarian policies or increased adherence to egalitarian values. To test this proposition, empathy will be exogenously elevated in a large, population-based survey experiment of white Americans (n=1400). Methodologically, this technique combines the best of both the observational and the experimental worlds: the generalizability of representative surveys and the causal inference of traditional experiments (Mutz 2011). The 2x2 study design builds upon treatments used in pilot testing, which supported the main hypotheses. First, a pre-treatment survey containing emotional trait measures will be administered a month prior to the experiment in order to assess individual differences in sensitivity to empathy cues. In the experiment, empathy will be manipulated for a single mother and Hurricane Katrina survivor, whom is described in a fictional newspaper editorial and pictured (randomly) as either African-American or white. Subjects will be randomly assigned to either a treatment editorial that facilitates empathy or a control editorial that contains the same information but lacks empathy appeals. A post-treatment survey containing preference measures for policies affecting Hurricane Katrina survivors, single mothers, women, and African-Americans (the key dependent variables in the analysis) will immediately follow the experiment. OLS regression models that include a treatment dummy variable, treatment-partisanship interaction terms, and standard control variables will be used to evaluate the overall causal effects of empathy, and, also, its possibly unique effects on Democrats and Republicans. This research is of broad social value because, in many societies including the United States, the attitudes of dominant majorities toward minorities shape how societies ultimately deal with their minorities, including the level of civil rights, privileges, and protections they grant them. Variation in dominant group members' egalitarianism toward minority groups has significant implications for whether a society will engender conflict or peace, injustice or justice, and inequality or equality. If the proposed research finds evidence to support the theory of empathy and equality, real changes in U.S. society could result. With this knowledge, political actors could strategically use empathic appeals to erode discrimination against marginal groups and rally public support for policies designed to address inequalities in citizens' life opportunities and basic civil rights. In short, this research could spur reductions in inter-group conflict and advances toward greater justice and equality in American society.