2012/03/08 by Ed O’Brien, Phoebe C. Ellsworth · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · doi:10.1177/0956797611432179
openalex publication_date 2012/03/08 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
What people feel shapes their perceptions of others. In the studies reported here, we examined the assimilative influence of visceral states on social judgment. Replicating prior research, we found that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold (Study 1), and participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst (Study 2). However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held political views opposing their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain. Our findings reveal the need for a better understanding of how people's internal experiences influence their perceptions of the feelings and experiences of those who may hold values different from their own.