Summary: People are more likely to choose to empathize with groups than with individuals, even though they rate empathizing as equally difficult and emotionally taxing in both situations. In an empathy-selection card task, participants elected to empathize on 53% of trials showing groups, compared with 34% for trials showing single individuals.
Researchers propose that group images supply more contextual cues, which can make empathy feel more intuitive, meaningful, or achievable. Although empathizing was experienced as effortful and sometimes distressing, participants reported greater perceived effectiveness when empathizing with groups, which likely increased their willingness to engage.
Key findings
- Empathy preferences: Participants chose the empathy option substantially more often for group targets (53%) than for individual targets (34%).
- Emotional cost: Empathizing was rated as cognitively demanding and distressing in both conditions, yet participants still preferred empathizing with groups.
- Role of context: Groups appear to offer more cues and situational information, improving perceived ability to understand others and making empathy feel more rewarding.
Source: Frontiers
Why do we choose to care about others?
A team led by Dr. Hajdi Moche at Linköping University investigated when and why people choose to engage in empathy. Their study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, shows that willingness to empathize varies depending on whether the target is a single person or a group. Participants were generally more willing to take on the emotional and cognitive cost of empathy for groups, despite rating empathy as more effortful and distressing than staying objective in both scenarios.
Defining empathy and its cost
The researchers defined empathy as the capacity to understand, feel, and share another person’s emotional experience while retaining the awareness that those feelings are not one’s own. Empathy can be costly: it consumes time, attention, and emotional resources, and sharing others’ pain can itself be uncomfortable. The study explored whether people are more or less likely to “pay” those costs for a single individual versus a group.
Although laboratory tasks cannot mirror every real-world choice, understanding how empathy differs for groups and individuals can shed light on behavior in collective crises, disasters, or conflicts, where decisions about whether to respond emotionally can matter for aid, solidarity, and policy.
Method: the Empathy Selection Task
The experiment involved 296 participants who completed an Empathy Selection Task. In each trial, participants chose between two decks of cards: one required them to engage empathically with the people in a photograph, the other instructed them to remain objective and describe external features. Choosing the empathy deck counted as an empathy choice; choosing the objective deck indicated a decision to avoid taking on others’ emotions.
Task details
Each participant completed two blocks of 20 photographs: one block featured single individuals and the other featured groups. The images were stock photos chosen to show diverse subjects with generally neutral expressions and plain backgrounds. After selecting a card, participants viewed the assigned image and either wrote three keywords describing the people’s likely feelings (empathy condition) or three words describing external features like hair color or clothing (objective condition). Participants then answered questions about how effortful and distressing they found the task and how effective they felt.
Results showed a clear divergence in choice behavior: when images depicted individuals, participants opted to empathize only about one-third of the time (34% on average). For group images, participants chose to empathize in more than half the trials (53%). This pattern held despite participants reporting higher cognitive effort and distress associated with empathizing in both conditions.
Interpretation: context, confidence, and effort
The researchers offer several possible explanations. Group images may provide richer contextual information—multiple faces, interactions, or collective cues—that make it easier to infer emotions and thus reduce uncertainty. Participants also reported higher perceived effectiveness when empathizing with groups, which could increase confidence and make the emotional cost feel more worthwhile. Conversely, neutral individual faces with limited body language or contextual background may leave participants uncertain about internal states, making the emotional investment seem less productive.
Participants additionally rated the descriptive task (staying objective) as harder for groups than for individuals, suggesting that the presence of multiple people can raise the cognitive demands of non-empathic tasks and thereby shift the balance toward choosing empathy.
Next steps
The authors suggest future studies could give participants a direct choice between an individual and a group—to indicate which they would prefer to empathize with and which they would prefer to remain objective toward—to obtain a more direct comparison of empathy willingness across target types. Manipulating facial expressions, body language, and background context could also clarify which cues most influence empathy choice.
About this empathy and social neuroscience research news
Author: Angharad Brewer Gillham
Source: Frontiers
Contact: Angharad Brewer Gillham – Frontiers
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“To empathize with a group or an individual? Investigating the role of cognitive cost and distress in empathy choice” by Hajdi Moche et al., Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
To empathize with a group or an individual? Investigating the role of cognitive cost and distress in empathy choice
People sometimes avoid empathy when it feels costly. This study extends previous work by testing whether the choice to empathize differs for groups versus individuals. In a within-subject design (N = 296), participants repeatedly chose whether to engage in empathy or remain objective for images of a single person and for images of groups. Participants also rated perceived cognitive cost and distress for each option. Results showed that participants tended to remain objective more often for individual targets, rating empathy as effortful and distressing, while they more often chose to empathize with group targets despite similar cost ratings. The findings point to contextual information as a key driver of differences in empathy choice between group and individual targets.