An Open Mind or a Big Heart: Possible Routes to Reducing In-Group Bias

People have a well-known proclivity to prefer members of their in-group over members of their out-groups. Contemporary political decisions in democratic countries often revolve around racial/ethnic as well as national identities, and elections create competition around political parties, which can stoke out-group hostilities and reduce people’s willingness to listen to those with whom they disagree. We study ways to reduce this in-group bias. In Study 1, we find scant evidence that perspective taking motivates the typical partisan to be more empathetic and charitable toward an out partisan. At best, only those partisans who tend to be reflective are capable of taking the perspective of an opposing partisan. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that perspective taking is not sufficient for engendering warm feelings toward others. Instead, people need to be motivated to feel compassion for others. Consequently, in Study 2, we investigate in a preregistered experiment whether compassion training can encourage people to be less hostile toward out-partisans as well as individuals from racial out-groups and migrants. We find that compassion training has consistently small, but individually statistically insignificant, effects on positive feelings toward out-group members. We conclude with a discussion about the implication of these findings for designing deliberative institutions as well as avenues for future research.