The Role of Empathy and Race in Attitudes Toward the Poor

People in poverty have often been looked down upon and viewed by some as lazy, at fault for their circumstances, or deficient in some way compared to people outside of poverty. Historically, these attitudes have been exaggerated for Black Americans of any socioeconomic status. While this represents one way that people develop opinions about the poor, empathy has been shown by other studies to also play a role in people's attitudes toward those in poverty. Those with higher empathetic competence tend to have more positive opinions of people in poverty. Using this preestablished relationship, the goal of this research is to determine if empathy alone influences people's attitudes toward people in poverty or if some socially constructed groups such as race, political orientation, or socioeconomic status play a role in combination with it. In this study, participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, an empathy questionnaire. After viewing a picture of either a Black man or a White man and reading an accompanying vignette that describes the man as a person in poverty, participants were asked to complete two poverty questionnaires that measured their attitudes toward the target himself and people in poverty generally. Demographic information was also collected. The results indicated that participants with higher empathetic competence had more positive attitudes toward people in poverty and the target. Results also showed that when controlling for political orientation, there were differences among participants' attitudes toward the target and toward people in poverty depending on which race target they were exposed to. The data also showed an interaction between empathetic competence and the race of the target; empathetic competence more strongly predicted attitudes toward the target and the poor when the participant was exposed to the Black target than when exposed to the White target. These findings indicate that empathy alone cannot explain all opinions about people in poverty; varying perceptions and attitudes toward people in poverty can also be related to broader societal factors and the characteristics held by those in poverty.