Rhetoric of Truthfulness in the Battle Between Social Attributions and Empathic Emotions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 297

Fig. 15.5 Effects of target's membership on social desirability (from 1 D not at all to
7 D extremely ): mean scores of each target's membership (ingroup vs. outgroup, * p < 0.005;
** p < 0.05)
to some emotions as being consistent with those felt by the victim herself (parallel
empathy), but, unexpectedly, they even seem to refer to a general sympathy and
compassion, in terms of what we have called pure empathy.
In this vein, to verify whether attribution processes (such as those involved in the
perceived truthfulness and emotional impact of the story) and social desirability
simultaneously affect both directly and indirectly empathic reactions toward a
person in need, SEM was employed as a confirmatory approach useful for testing
theoretical hypotheses concerning both direct and indirect structural relationships
between the variables in analyses (Bollen 1989 ). In other words, the SEM approach
compares a theoretically established model with empirical evidence to assess the
degree to which data do not fit a theory, instead of simply deriving a model based
upon empirical evidence.
In the present study, a model is tested where perceived truthfulness is hypoth-
esized to serve as an exogenous variable on the emotional impact of the story,
which in turn causes social desirability . To complete the causal chain leading to
the prediction of empathy, social desirability is expected to be the direct predictor
of the two indexes of pure empathy and parallel empathy. Finally, in the present
model of prediction of empathy, listening to a story evaluated as credible and severe
can elicit comprehension , compassion , and sympathy toward a person in need. As a
consequence, the emotional impact ascribed to the story is expected to have a direct
effect on the pure empathy dimension.
The SEM model was applied on the indexes of truthfulness (one item;
Sect. 15.6.2 ), emotional impact (average value from nine items; see Sect. 15.6.2 ,
Cronbach's alpha D 0.82), social desirability (five items, Cronbach's alpha D 0.75),