People are more willing to empathise with groups of people rather than individuals, a study suggests.
Empathy – a person's ability to understand and share the feelings of another – is also viewed as "distressing" when compared with remaining neutral, researchers said.
The study, led by scientists in Sweden and published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology, involved 296 people.
They underwent a test involving two blocks of pictures, one of individuals and the other of groups of people.
They were also presented with two decks of cards, one of which asked them to try to empathise and the other which asked them to remain neutral.
When given a picture to react to, the participants were asked to write down three keywords to describe the feelings of the people in the images or their appearance.
They were also asked to rate how much effort empathising took, or if they found the process distressing.
Researchers found people chose to stay objective to individuals compared with when they were faced with a group.
In both situations, empathising was also rated as distressing and more effort.
Dr Hajdi Moche, of Linkoping University in Sweden, said: "People's willingness to empathize is different depending on who the target is: a single individual or a group of people.
"Specifically, people were more willing to empathize with a group than an individual, although empathising was rated as more effortful and distressing compared to staying objective – for both the individual and the group."
Empathy for group
When faced with images of an individual, people chose to empathize 34% of the time, researchers found.
However, during the block of group pictures, people empathised 53% of the time.
This happened even though empathising was rated as harder and more distressing than remaining objective.
Dr Moche added: "The task of trying to share the internal experiences of the other requires more effort, imagination and understanding of what the person might feel compared to describing external features like hair colour.
"To share in the internal experiences might be especially hard when the information at hand is only a neutral facial expression without any body language or background context."
Dr Moche suggested further studies could pit images of individuals and groups against each other to see which people would prefer to empathise with.
"In this way, we would have a direct comparison in willingness to empathise when the target is an individual versus a group of people," she added. – dpa
