Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 292

15.5 Method

Participants in the study included 66 female students of an introductory psychology
course at the University of Bari receiving credit toward a course requirement.
Participation was by individual appointment. On arrival, participants were escorted
into a small research room and asked to carefully read and fill out a questionnaire.
In a between groups design, participants dealt with the story of a person in need.
The story . 4 The experimenter left the room while participants read a fictitious
interview (all participants read the same exact story). In the text, the interviewee
described her life since she moved to the new city, her sorrow due to the distance
from her family, her own feelings and memories, and the difficulty she had finding
a job in Italy and trying to integrate into Italian society, and so on.
Target's membership manipulation . The target's empathy membership (Italian
vs. African) was manipulated. The stimulus person was presented as being either
a southern Italian girl (Annamaria) or an African girl (Chandah) interviewed in an
Italian city.
Using a randomized-block procedure, participants were equally distributed
between the two different experimental conditions.
Self-reported emotional reaction to target's situation (empathy of the reader) .
Participants completed the Batson Empathy Scales, composed of 24 items (example
of items: “After reading this story, how much do you feel ::: grieved, sorrowful,
compassionate, etc.”). For each item, participants rated the degree to which (1 D not
at all , 7 D extremely ) they experienced that emotion after reading the story.
Perceived social desirability of victim . The questionnaire included five items
used to measure the social desirability of different emotional reactions to the story.
Participants were asked to indicate “how appropriate” it was “to feel concerned
about the girl's situation,” “to help her,” “to be touched by her story,” “to show her
sympathy,” and “to remain detached.” Social desirability items were assessed by a
seven-point scale (1 D not at all , 7 D extremely )
Truthfulness of story . Once these answers were provided, participants also had to
rate the credibility of the story they had read (1 D not at all , 7 D extremely ).
Emotional impact of story . Finally, participants indicated how “alarming,” “inter-
esting,” “worrying,” “touching,” “irritating,” “depressing,” “annoying,” “involv-
ing,” or “extreme” the story they had just read was (1 D not at all , 7 D extremely ).

4 Within this study we aimed at controlling the effects related to the interpretation of the stimulus
story; this, in fact, became an object of different pretested versions. The final version aimed at
presenting a situation of difficulty but not one that was overly dramatic, with no elements of
extreme hardship, i.e. those that underlined the dramatic character of the event and triggered
discomfort and uneasiness, were eliminated. Moreover, since we wanted to stress the difference
between ingroup and outgroup, we “created” a target as far away as possible from the participants'
real world, for example, an African girl.