Empathy & decision-making

 

 

Are people able to forecast their emotional states?

Do inaccuracies in affective forecasting lead to poor decision making?

What is the empathic gap and how does it impact on decision making?

How the perceived similarity between a perceiver and a target can moderate empathy gaps and, therefore, the decision making process?

How situational and personality differences impact on empathic accuracy ?

 

 

Research reveals that people are not very accurate at forecasting their emotional states.

  • For instance, empirical evidence suggests that people tend to overestimate the duration and intensity of their emotional states when imagining future events with positive or negative consequences.

Inaccuracies in affective forecasting can lead to suboptimal decisions because the decision one takes at time t is partly based on the prediction of how good or bad this decision will be assessed at time t+1

  • For instance, Mary may decide not to break up with an affectively abusive partner because she is overestimating how lonely and guilty she would feel after putting an end to the relationship.

 

Unsurprisingly, recent research also revealed that people are also pretty bad at

  • estimating other people's future emotional states and, maybe even more important,
  • predicting how emotional states experienced by others will affect others' behavior.

People underestimate

  • the extent to which people (themselves and others) may occasionally fall prey to their emotions and, in addition to this,
  • people have no direct access to other people's emotional experiences
  • For instance, if Paul has never taken cocaine, how could Paul be expected to figure out John's emotional state as John is craving for his drug.

The latter effect, called empathy gap, can have notable influences for the decision making process

  • For instance, moral judgments or legal sentences pronounced about John may dependent on how large the empathy gap is between John and Paul.

 

Empathy gaps have recently attracted increased attention in decision making research and this topic will be at the centre of our third research program.

Program III.1 focuses on how the perceived similarity between a perceiver and a target can moderate empathy gaps and, therefore, the decision making process. We predict that empathy gaps can be magnified or reduced by subtle context manipulations of self-other similarity (e.g., self-categorization or priming procedures).

Program III.2 examines the impact of both situational and personality differences (i.e., alexithymia and emotional intelligence) on empathic accuracy and will explore the conditions under which a lack of empathic accuracy is associated with more adaptive decisions, both at the intra- and inter-personal levels.

 

Promoters associated to these programs are

 

| contact : Anne-Catherine Defeldre | 4/01/2010 |