TY - JOUR
T1 - Empathy as a foot in the inter-ethnic door
T2 - Facilitation of positive bilateral perception among Jewish and Arab students in Israel
AU - Yehuda, Limor
AU - Wolf, Yuval
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Limor Yehuda, Yuval Wolf.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - A heavy load of blame, hostility, and violence typifies the relationships between Jews and Arabs in Israel for nearly two centuries in a row. The present study is an exploratory experimental attempt, within the framework of Functional Measurement, to examine the viability of empathy as a means to facilitate a positive shift in functional cognitive schemata of helping. The participants, 143 Jewish and Arab (57 and 86, respectively) female students, were sampled from an Israeli academic college, where the Jews-Arabs ratio is nearly 50-50. Each Participant met individually 4-8 times, once a week, with a same sex and same age experimenter (another student). Each experimental session included a conversation where the experimenter approached the participant empathetically for approximately 15-20 minutes and asked her repeatedly to imagine a series of meetings between two female students (Jews and Arabs in all combinations) where one such protagonist attempts to receive form the other (Jew or Arab) lesson notes. This manipulation was arranged within the framework of a bi-factorial model, that is, the level of needs of both protagonists (3 x 3). In each such encounter the participant was asked to estimate the likelihood that the imagined request will be fulfilled. The results show that serial exposure to empathy affected positively mainly Jewish students. The relevance of the findings to the notion of 'functional social cognition' and to the body of knowledge which deals with majority-minority relations is pointed at.
AB - A heavy load of blame, hostility, and violence typifies the relationships between Jews and Arabs in Israel for nearly two centuries in a row. The present study is an exploratory experimental attempt, within the framework of Functional Measurement, to examine the viability of empathy as a means to facilitate a positive shift in functional cognitive schemata of helping. The participants, 143 Jewish and Arab (57 and 86, respectively) female students, were sampled from an Israeli academic college, where the Jews-Arabs ratio is nearly 50-50. Each Participant met individually 4-8 times, once a week, with a same sex and same age experimenter (another student). Each experimental session included a conversation where the experimenter approached the participant empathetically for approximately 15-20 minutes and asked her repeatedly to imagine a series of meetings between two female students (Jews and Arabs in all combinations) where one such protagonist attempts to receive form the other (Jew or Arab) lesson notes. This manipulation was arranged within the framework of a bi-factorial model, that is, the level of needs of both protagonists (3 x 3). In each such encounter the participant was asked to estimate the likelihood that the imagined request will be fulfilled. The results show that serial exposure to empathy affected positively mainly Jewish students. The relevance of the findings to the notion of 'functional social cognition' and to the body of knowledge which deals with majority-minority relations is pointed at.
KW - Empathy
KW - Helping
KW - In-group/out-group
KW - Reconciliation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85009807640&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.11144/Javeriana.upsy15-3.efid
DO - 10.11144/Javeriana.upsy15-3.efid
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AN - SCOPUS:85009807640
SN - 1657-9267
VL - 15
JO - Universitas Psychologica
JF - Universitas Psychologica
IS - 3
M1 - 13
ER -