How to Teach Children to Feel Empathy Toward Outgroup Members

Source: Ahmed Akacha/Pexels

By Shira Ran and Eran Halperin

Imagine you are picking up your child from daycare or school. You ask your child how her day was and maybe talk about plans for the rest of the day. Suddenly, you hear on the radio an interview with someone from another social group who was hurt or injured. It could be an immigrant, a refugee, or a victim of the current escalation in Ukraine. "Mom? What are they talking about?" your child asks from the back seat. What do you answer?

Do you want your child to empathize with the victim, or maybe not so much? Do you expose your child to the story or prefer to keep silent? You may encounter an inner tension between wanting your child to be empathic and not wanting to upset her over something complex and disturbing. At any rate, your response will likely shape the way she perceives the event and feels toward its victim.

Empathy, or the ability to take the perspective of the other and feel in a way that is compatible and appropriate to what the other person is feeling (Batson, 2009), is a central emotion in intergroup contexts. Studies have shown, for example, that heightened empathy promotes reconciliation between lifelong enemies (Hasson et al., 2019). However, despite its positive consequences, people tend to feel less empathy toward those from other groups (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014).

According to recent research, feeling less empathy toward people from other groups is not a spontaneous and automatic reaction but is rather affected by how much empathy we want to feel. This means that we have an inner mark of how much empathy we want to feel, and then we work on ourselves emotionally to feel more or less empathy until we hit the mark (Porat et al., 2016).

The process in which we make ourselves experience higher or lower levels of emotions is called emotion regulation. Interestingly, parents don't just regulate their own emotions, but also their children's (Gross & Thompson, 2007). Parents do it to make their child feel better or experience emotions parents believe are socially desirable. Evoking empathy is no exception. For example, many parents encourage their child to take the perspective of another kid, maybe someone he hurt or left out of a game. But what do parents do when the person who was hurt was an outgroup member?

In a series of recently published studies conducted in Israel, we examined how mothers feel and react when their child is exposed to an incident in which an outgroup member is hurt (Ran, Reifen Tagar, Tamir, & Halperin, 2022). We found that across political ideologies, mothers did not differ in how much they wanted their children to feel empathy toward others in general. However, compared to mothers who identified as rightists, leftist mothers wanted their children to feel more empathy toward Arabs, indicating that political ideology biases empathy toward outgroup members. We also found that this maternal motivation predicts differences in children's experienced empathy. Compared to children of rightist mothers, children of leftist mothers reported they, too, feel more empathy toward Arabs.

Our next step was to explore what mothers do to make their children feel more (or less) empathy toward an outgroup member. To test this in a way that mimics real-life situations, we ran an observational study in 141 families' houses. After reading an article about an elderly outgroup member who was hurt, mothers were asked to talk about the incident with their children. Mothers were not guided to say something in particular, just hold a normal conversation about the issue.

We found that the extent to which mothers wanted their children to feel empathy predicted how they talked to their children during the interaction. Regardless of mothers' political ideology, we identified two types of tactics mothers use: direct vs. indirect.

It appears that the extent to which mothers wanted their children to feel empathy predicted their use of direct tactics. This could include, for example, actively guiding the child to put herself in the other person's shoes, talking about how unfortunate the situation was, or expressing sadness verbally and non-verbally. For example, one of the mothers asked her child a series of questions that guided the child to take the perspective of the other: "Do you think it would be easy for her at her age to leave her house?... It could be hard for an old woman to move out of the only house she has ever lived in… What if it had happened to us? How would you feel?"

Mothers who did not want their child to feel empathy toward the outgroup also used direct tactics, such as emphasizing where the line was when it comes to empathizing with an outgroup member. This way, mothers can promote empathy in their children, with exceptions toward certain people. For example, another mother said to her child: "It's really an unpleasant situation, like, her house is on fire… You can't see her (in the article), so I couldn't really identify with her. I don't think we should be preoccupied with how poor this woman is…"

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The other type of tactics mothers used was indirect tactics. This includes trying to increase or decrease the child's empathy, but without talking at all about empathy or emotions. Indirectly increasing a child's empathy toward an outgroup could be done by talking about how the incident was not the other person's fault or how your child is similar to the other person.

For example, one of the mothers connected the story in the article to an incident in their family and highlighted that things were similar to what their family members went through. Indirectly decreasing empathy was done by telling the child that the victim is to blame for what happened. As when the mother told her child, "you know, she really brought this on herself."

Further analysis revealed that direct tactics affected the child's prosocial intentions toward the outgroup member more than indirect tactics. This suggests that parents seeking to teach empathy to their children should talk to their children in an emotional language that actively guides the child on how to experience empathy—implying indirectly that someone deserves our empathy as much less effective.

Going back to the car: As a parent, you have the power to teach and practice with your children how to be more empathic toward those who are different from them. Talk to your child to increase their empathy toward people from other social groups. Express your sadness, guide your child to imagine herself in the other person's shoes, talk about what empathy is, and take your child hand-in-hand in the ongoing journey of connecting to others from diverse backgrounds. We owe that to our children and the world they will grow up in.