Study: Liberals Claim to Value Empathy, But Have None For Conservatives

About a decade ago. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt did a series of studies that showed that conservatives and moderates are quite good at anticipating the values and priorities of liberals, but liberals are quite bad at understanding how conservatives think. 

Other studies show that conservatives have a more grounded understanding of the news than liberals, who have a much larger bias than conservatives when interpreting the news. 

Now yet another study has shown that conservatives have much more empathy for their political opponents who are experiencing difficulties or pain than liberals do. 

Liberals, who base their entire moral philosophy on claims to being empathetic and even on weaponizing empathy to get what they want (give me your money to help the homeless and building an entire industry around NOT helping the homeless), are generally unsympathetic to conservatives experiencing pain or trouble. 

Study finds liberals show less empathy to political opponents than conservatives do | Mane Kara-Yakoubian, PsyPost

In today’s polarized political landscape, the ability to understand and empathize with those across the aisle has reached concerning lows. New research published in… pic.twitter.com/TgzwKjzQGX

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) April 4, 2025

Study finds liberals show less empathy to political opponents than conservatives do | Mane Kara-Yakoubian, PsyPost

In today’s polarized political landscape, the ability to understand and empathize with those across the aisle has reached concerning lows. New research published in Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin reveals an asymmetry in this empathy deficit: liberals consistently show less empathy toward their conservative peers than vice versa.

President Joe Biden’s inaugural call to “stand in the other person’s shoes” highlighted empathy as crucial for healing national divisions. Yet many people find it hard to feel for political opponents. Empathy—defined as sympathy for and understanding of another’s suffering with the aim of reducing it—is widely seen as essential for improving intergroup relations, but tends to diminish when directed toward those outside one’s political or social group.

James P. Casey and colleagues conducted four preregistered studies examining how political ideology shapes intergroup empathy bias and why such differences arise. The researchers recruited 4,737 participants, roughly evenly split between liberals and conservatives, from online platforms including Prolific, CloudResearch, and MTurk.

Study 1 involved 549 U.S. participants, while Study 2 included 958 U.K. participants. Study 3 and Study 4 sampled 1,372 and 1,874 U.S. participants, respectively, with recruitment spanning both conservative and liberal administrations to account for political context.

In each study, participants read a short scenario describing a person undergoing a mild hardship (e.g., a sprained ankle). The person was identified as politically conservative, liberal, or neutral. Participants then rated their emotional responses using several scales: empathic concern (e.g., sympathy), perspective-taking, empathic intentions (e.g., willingness to help), and empathic avoidance.

Mediating variables included perceptions of the target’s morality, likability, similarity to the self, and, in later studies, the perceived harm caused by the target’s political group. Ingroup political power was also measured to assess whether the party in power influenced empathic responses.

Across all four studies, participants consistently showed lower empathy for political outgroup members than for ingroup or neutral targets. However, this bias was not symmetrical. Liberals exhibited significantly less empathy for conservatives than conservatives showed for liberals. In Study 1, this asymmetry was driven by liberals’ stronger negative judgments of conservatives’ morality and likability. Conservatives’ empathic responses remained relatively stable regardless of the target’s political affiliation.

Study 2 confirmed these findings in the U.K. sample, where British liberals also exhibited stronger empathy bias against conservatives, mediated by perceptions of morality, likability, and similarity. Study 3 demonstrated that even after the shift to a Democratic administration in the U.S., liberals continued to judge conservatives as more harmful and immoral, leading to reduced empathy. Study 4 further validated this pattern with a larger sample, strengthening the evidence for the link between perceived group harm and diminished empathy.

Read more: https://psypost.org/study-finds-liberals-show-less-empathy-to-political-opponents-than-conservatives-do/

There are, I suppose, some conservatives out there who would be surprised by this finding, but I certainly don’t know any of them. 

For years, conservatives have endured insults, wishes for our death, threats of many kinds (and worse, as you know if you own a Tesla or work at a Tesla showroom), have watched liberals call Luigi Mangione a hero, and have been harassed at work, on the streets, and watched late-night comics joke about us dying en masse. 

JIMMY KIMMEL PROMOTES DEATH TO UNVACCINATED, CROWD ERUPTS IN CHEERS
pic.twitter.com/3b9qFprhqb

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 9, 2021

Throughout the COVID pandemic, liberals talked about taking away parental rights of COVID vaccine skeptics, putting them in concentration camps, letting them die, and literally chasing them around grocery stores and even assaulting people not wearing masks. The level of rage was off the charts, and not once did it occur to them that they were being evil. 

Columns showed up in papers like the Los Angeles Times calling for the mocking of the deaths of people who did not take the vaccine, which, to be sure, was totally on-brand for liberals. They considered it a positive good–bullying people to “do the right thing” despite the fact that they had no real idea what the right thing really was is typical of the Left. 

Column: Mocking anti-vaxxers’ deaths is ghoulish, yes — but necessary https://t.co/ge7NveMjVq

— Michael Hiltzik (@hiltzikm) January 10, 2022

The study I referred to was not some fly-by-night effort to prove a point–it was actually quite rigorous, although in social sciences these days, it’s pretty easy to poke holes in any study, admittedly. 

But the reality is that this phenomenon is precisely what every conservative I know has experienced in their day-to-day life. When I was taking a break from politics a few years back and dabbling in photography and selling cameras, my colleagues spent much of the day talking about how evil conservatives were. Which, to be honest, seemed really weird to me. It’s not like photography and politics overlapped, but they were obsessed with attacking conservatives without regard to the fact that one was standing right next to them as they were doing it. 

Politics was an essential part–the essential part, it seemed at times–of their identity, and they didn’t have a clue about anything of which they were speaking. 

Obviously, not all liberals are like this, but go on any college campus, and you see the results of this kind of thinking everywhere you look. Students, grad students, and even professors ripping down the flyers calling for Jewish infants to be returned from Hamas captivity still goes on, as does harassing students who try to avoid participating in the “protests” that shut campuses down and sometimes trap Jewish students behind locked doors. 

Vancouver, Canada — A pregnant woman in a Tesla was seriously injured on March 30 when a large rock was thrown at the vehicle, which smashed through the driver’s shield and hit her.

Anyone who witnessed the incident or who might have footage taken on Nanaimo Street, between… pic.twitter.com/gTw55GT7rF

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 6, 2025

Often the “empathy” you see from liberals is abstract–what you might call empathy for groups that can only be described with the definite article “the.” 

The Homeless

The immigrants. 

The blacks, the Hispanics, the Asians. 

And so on… This is why Thomas Sowell doesn’t count as black–because he isn’t part of “the” group as they define it. He is the black face of White Supremacy. 

It is not an empathy directed at individual people, but at vague groups with shared characteristics, but not toward actual people defined by idiosyncratic personalities. It is “I gave at the office” empathy–paying others to take care of a problem. 

We just saw this philosophy play out in North Carolina, where FEMA workers were instructed to not help victims of the hurricane who had Trump signs in their yards. FEMA workers would help people who weren’t obvious supporters of Trump, but ignored the plight of Trump supporters. 

And, of course, everybody remembers the Biden administration’s ignoring the poisoning of East Palestine, OH. Being Vance country, they didn’t deserve the government’s help. 

What is wrong with these people? Simple: they hate us. 

So, it is hardly surprising that when confronted by a situation in which they would be expected to show empathy for a particular conservative, they balk. That person is part of an out-group–“the” conservatives. And conservatives are bad, and not fellow human beings. 

I know a ton of people who think of themselves as Mother Teresa because they are “happy to pay taxes” to deal with some problem, even though the taxes never seem to make a dent in improving that problem. And when it comes to conservatives in trouble…well, they deserve it, don’t they?