Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 295

Fig. 15.2 Means of self-reported empathy (from 1 D not at all to 7 D extremely ) as a function of
the target's membership

15.7 Social Desirability

The t - test on the measures of social desirability of the empathic reaction pointed
out a significant effect of a target's membership (Fig. 15.5 ) : according to our
participants , it is significantly more appropriate “to feel concerned with” the girl's
situation in the case of outgroup members than in the case of ingroup members
(M outgroup D 4.69 , M ingroup D 3.66 , t 64 D 2.889 , p < 0.005 ).
On the other hand , it is more appropriate “to remain detached” from the
Italian girl (ingroup member ) than from the African girl (outgroup member )
(M outgroup D 2.51 , M ingroup D 3.42 , t 64 D 2.363 , p < 0.05 ).