Group-Level Perspective-Taking Effects on Injustice Standards and Empathic Concern When the Victims Are Categorized as Outgroup Versus Ingroup

Abstract

Abstract We investigated the effects of group-level perspective taking when the target is an outgroup versus an ingroup. Men and women adopted the perspective of women suffering from wage inequality or remained objective. Men set lower injustice standards (i.e., required less evidence to conclude that gender inequality was unfair) and experienced higher empathic concern for women when they adopted women’s perspective. For women, these perspective-taking effects were similar if they imagined the situation of an outgroup (Experiment 2) but were small or negligible when they imagined the situation of an ingroup (Experiments 1–4). Results suggest that group-level perspective-taking effects on empathic concern and injustice standards require the perception of a distinction between the group-level self and the target group.