17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Robert Klemmensen
Discussant/s:
Rosalind Shorrocks
Meeting Room O

Pirmin Bundi, Sean Mueller
Political Culture(s) Under Threat? How Language Influences Public Attitudes toward Multilevel Governance

Adeline Lo, Jonathan Renshon, Lotem Bassan
Praise from Peers Promotes Empathetic Behavior

Mónica Ferrín, Gema García-Albacete
Which interests? An experimental study of gender differences in political interest

Robert Klemmensen, Stig H. Jensen
Voters, elites and punishment of moral transgressions

Nils Steiner
The issue basis of citizens’ left-right orientations: Differences across cohorts in Europe
Praise from Peers Promotes Empathetic Behavior
Adeline Lo, Jonathan Renshon, Lotem Bassan
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Empathy can be a powerful and positive tool for shaping and changing policy preferences, encouraging cooperative or inclusionary behavior, and warming attitudes towards others. Yet, recent work has shown that engaging in empathy is costly. We investigate what those costs are --- whether they are emotional or cognitive --- and propose and test an intervention designed to lower the barriers to empathy. In our first study, we verify the cognitive costs of empathy and further harness an incentive-compatible reservation wage design to estimate a monetary price to the cost. We then propose peer praise as an effective and light-touch approach to overcoming such costs and promoting empathetic behavior, developing a second study with an intervention that generates naturalistic peer praise. In a third study, we employ a randomized experiment with natural peer praise (elicited in Study 2) and demonstrate that some of the costs of empathy can be overcome by receiving praise for empathetic behavior from peers. Finally, we propose and test potential emotional mechanisms that might be at play in making peer praise an effective empathy promoter and offer preliminary empirical evidence of such.