Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Cottrell, Catherine

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Prejudice intervention focuses on decreasing prejudice and discrimination through means such as raising empathy and perspective taking. However, a person’s empathy may not extend to everyone. For example, the in-group empathy hypothesis states that individuals showcase more empathy toward members of their in-group than toward members of their out-group. In this study, I used eye tracking to explore how the in-group empathy hypothesis relates to participant behaviors when viewing racial microaggressions directed towards members of their racial in-groups and out-group. I operationalized various eye tracking metrics to measure allocation of attention and interest when participants watched clips with a target of their racial in-group compared to a member of their racial out-group. I hypothesized that greater means for each eye tracking metric would be positively correlated with trait empathy score, particularly among matching participant and target ethnic comparisons. With a sample size of n= 24, (9 identified as Asian American and 15 identified as a different ethnicity) results did not support the hypotheses. Given the small sample size, I could not draw adequate conclusive results. Nonetheless, this study created a strong foundation for further research about responses to microaggressions and the implications of empathy as an intervention targeting these interactions.

Download

Share

COinS