Media portrayals of crime, natural disasters, and international crises often reflect racial prejudices. These prejudices likely reflect and reinforce the established outgroup bias in empathy. The primary aim of this project is to study whether the way in which media depict the victims of international crisis and natural disasters can influence people’s empathetic responses.

We preregistered hypotheses that photo-journalistic decisions generate empathy for both outgroup and ingroup victims, and that individual differences in disposition empathy and racial prejudice will moderate the effect of photo-journalistic framing. We anticipate that as predisposed empathy increases, participants will be more positive toward outgroup victims, irrespective of photo journalistic framing. As a result, empathy should also moderate downward the positive effects of small group framing. We will explore whether cognitive and affective empathy operate differently. We also anticipate that as explicit racial prejudice increases, participants are more likely to respond negatively to both outgroup refugees and natural disaster victims, irrespective of photo journalistic framing.

Our preregistration detailed an experimental design and an analysis plan that tests whether these hypotheses hold across international and domestic contexts. We collected the data during summer of 2021 and will report the results in our conference paper.