We Are Still Here: Expanding Empathy Through Humanization and Cultural Appropriation

Abstract

Although empathy has been deemed an innate mechanism and is essential to multicultural interactions, research indicates that many factors inhibit a person’s willingness to empathize with someone, such as how cognitively taxing it can be. This empathy avoidance trend may be more pronounced when targets are outgroup members depicted as suffering due to social disparities (Benally, Ochai, Ciappetta & Soto, 2020; Cho et al., 2019). This can create hostile environments for minorities trying to navigate society, such as Native Americans, who have historically suffered immense social injustices during the formation of America and continue to be negatively impacted by systematic inequalities. The present study uses the Empathy Selection Task (Cameron et al., 2019) to examine whether White students empathize better with visibly distressed Native American individuals when primed with a video intended to increase familiarity with/humanization of Native Americans or a video displaying implicit instances of cultural appropriation of Native American symbols. In the following study we demonstrate that both humanization of Native Americans and depictions of cultural appropriation increased empathy approach with Native American suffering, suggesting that people empathize more with Native American suffering after being reminded either about their common humanity or how this humanity has been stripped away (moral outrage).

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Benally