Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 291

that the perception of victims' responsibility yields different effects, depending on
the different groups considered.
In sum, the idea that people's affective responses to a person are shaped by the
attributions they make regarding the people's plight found great empirical support
(Batson et al. 1997; Weiner 1980 , 1995 ). However, the direction in which this
relationship develops has yet to be clearly defined: in line with Cameron's theory
( 2012 ), empathy, for example, may or may not represent a response to a story , and
empathic reactions may depend on the kind of inferences this story can elicit.
In this study, participants are required to express their evaluations on a series of
different inferences related to a short text describing the difficult experience of a
person who entered a new sociocultural context. Such a situation may activate some
conflictual dynamics between the “dialogical self” (Hermans 2001) of the story's
protagonist, who must integrate her memories of the past with the difficulties of
her present. According to us, type and level of empathy that may be activated by
a specific story may be predicted by the inferences and judgments related to the
truthfulness of the story, the social desirability of an empathetic answer, and the
induced emotional impact.
These three “ways to identify” have different valences and justifications. The
more general but, at the same time, more strict connection is the one between
empathy and truthfulness since this dimension is related to the relationship between
“heads and texts” (Mininni 2010 ). A person's truthfulness depends on the sense
making produced by the “texts” with which a person may be identified. Truthfulness
is a “socioepistemic rhetoric” that is extremely relevant because it may be seen
as a precursor of trust considered to be the starting point of all interpersonal and
intergroup relationships. The construct of “socioepistemic rhetoric” (Berlin 1993)
individuates a series of expressive routines that point out belief systems and values
that can legitimate individuals' or groups' choices. Truthfulness is a sort of cultural
meta-rhetoric in the sense that it defines the specific conditions that make texts
coherent, valid, and reliable, for what concerns “what it says” and “how it says it.”

15.4 Aims and Method

The present study provides answers to the questions regarding whether and how
empathic emotions are affected by social attribution processes . In particular, the
assumption that different types of emotions trigger different reactions for the first
time, the roles of truthfulness, social desirability, and emotional impact on empathic
reactions were simultaneously analyzed.