Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 293

Debriefing . After participants completed the experimental tasks, the experi-
menter returned and conducted a full debriefing. Then participants were thanked
and dismissed.

15.6 Data Analyses and Results

15.6.1 Batson's Empathy Scales

15.6.1.1 Structure of Empathy

Following Batson's procedure, we created distinct indexes for the different compo-
nents of empathy. To this end, a principal components factor analysis was performed
on participants' ratings on Batson's scales. A t -test comparison between the two
experimental groups (ingroup vs. outgroup) was performed on these two indexes.
In particular, the two experimental groups differ in terms of parallel empathy ,so
that this component was more stressed by respondents in the outgroup (versus
ingroup) condition ( M outgroup D 3.54; M ingroup D 2.76, t 64 D 2.478, p < 0.05) rather
than the ingroup. Along the same line, pure empathy is also stressed toward out-
group members more than toward ingroup members ( M outgroup D 4.1, M ingroup D 3.2,
t 64 D 2.76, p < 0.005) (Fig. 15.1 ).

Fig. 15.1 Effects of target's membership (ingroup vs. outgroup): mean scores of parallel and pure
empathy indexes (* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.005)