CSLS Speaker Series – “How Threat, Apathy, and Antipathy Influence Support for Policies that Harm Low Status Groups”

Featuring Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson, Assistant Professor of Management of Organizations, UC Berkeley

Empathy is often hailed as the emotion to target in intergroup conflicts, as it predicts consequential prosocial behaviors that can help reduce inequality. And indeed, in many social conflicts, people struggle to feel empathy for those not part of their social groups. In this talk I will argue that while empathy is relevant for prosocial and helpful behaviors, it cannot adequately explain why people harm members of other groups. In my work I have developed a model that offers a more nuanced perspective, proposing that we need to incorporate a second, understudied emotion, namely schadenfreude, to understand people’s more nasty, harmful behaviors. Schadenfreude is the good feeling people have in reaction to another person’s pain and is especially likely to manifest when group dynamics are competitive. I suggest that group competition, as embedded within social contexts and within people’s ideologies, is an important motivator for feeling empathy and schadenfreude (or not) towards outgroups and low-status groups. Further, these emotions can help explain individuals’ policy support, such that empathy is the emotion primarily involved in helping other groups while schadenfreude is the emotion primarily involved in harming other groups. I discuss the implications of these findings to the maintenance of unequal social hierarchies.

Cosponsored with the Center for Race and Gender and the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice

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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact csls@law.berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.