Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While ample work has examined how to increase empathy within situational contexts, little research has focused on how the language used to communicate with others may elicit empathy. Here, we investigate how (Study 1) the degree of a narrator's culpability and (Study 2) narrative framing of personal narratives (focusing on experienced sensations, emotions, or neither) affects feelings of empathy reported by listeners. Across our two studies, 901 participants read narratives describing common life events, rated their empathy towards the narrator, and were given an option to write a response to the narrator. Our findings indicate that people report less empathy towards narrators that caused their misfortune, although their written responses were more focused on the narrator. By contrast, however, highlighting sensory or emotional details in a narrative did not significantly impact the degree of empathy reported by listeners, yet still affected the language of responses produced by listeners.