title: On reducing an empathy gap: the impact of self-construal and order of judgment.
abstract: Empathy gaps, in which individuals exaggerate self-other similarities or differences, generate errors in social judgments. We investigated whether changing individuals' self-construal may reduce one specific empathy gap: the illusion of courage. Participants primed with independent or interdependent self-construal made judgments about their own and other people's willingness to dance in public. Participants in the interdependence condition showed a reduction of the empathy gap, but only when judging the other first. This finding highlights that simple contextual manipulations have the potential to reduce egocentric biases in social judgments.
authors.affiliation: Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium. karl-andrew.woltin@uclouvain.be
authors.forename: Karl-Andrew
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Woltin
authors.forename: Vincent Y
authors.initials: VY
authors.lastname: Yzerbyt
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Corneille
mesh_terms: D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012649:Self Concept; D012938:Social Perception; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult