Ethnocultural empathy

Ethnocultural empathy refers to the understanding of feelings of individuals that are ethnically and/or culturally different from oneself. This concept casts doubts on global empathy, which assumes that empathy is “feeling in oneself the feelings of others” and is not specifically targeting any one group (e.g. age, gender, and ethnicity) or context. Ethnocultural empathy, on the other hand, assumes that empathy toward others probably increases if the other is similar to oneself in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, or cultural background.

Traditionally, empathy is roughly defined as an intellectual ability of taking the role or perspective of another person and/or an emotional response to another person with the same emotional display. As a part of personal traits, empathy has been established as relatively stable and consistent within a certain time period. However, increasing research found that people usually hold different levels of empathy toward different individuals based on perceived psychological similarity. Two primary factors influencing the psychological similarity are ethnics and culture. Particularly, people usually feel more empathetic towards individuals who are in the same ethnic/cultural groups as they are than those who are not.

Quintana defined ethnic perspective taking as a cognitive–developmental ability that could be reached as an individual proceeds through developmental life stages. This development contains five stages of ethnic perspective-taking ability, including (1) physicalistic and observable perspective, (2) literal perspective, (3) non-literal and social perspective, (4) group perspective and (5) multicultural perspective of ethnicity. First, children begin to establish their ethnic identity by distinguishing themselves from other ethnic groups based on physical features. Once children understand the physical differences with other groups, they then are able to become aware of the perspectives, attitudes, experiences shared by other ethnic groups, and finally develop the ability to take the perspective of other ethnic groups.

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