Exposure to hateful or neutral comments
Pain
In the first part of the procedure, participants in the scanner were exposed to comments (hateful or neutral). The comments were selected based on previous studies on exposure to online hate speechIn the hateful comments condition, the comments included derogatory statements directed against Arab and Muslim immigrants and refugees (e.g., “It is high time. This wall should have been put up a long time ago. We need to defend Europe against the hordes”). In the neutral comments condition, the comments focused on current economic and legal issues, as well as international and domestic politics (e.g., “Is it just me who gets pissed off by this neologism: prosumer? Who came up with something so dumb, and why is everyone using it?”). In both conditions, the affective tone of the comments varied from mildly negative to offensive, but the target was different. Note that the label “neutral” means that the comments were not directed against the Arab outgroup (nor any minority group), and not that they were emotionally neutral. The sample comments page can be seen in Supplementary Information Fig. Each block in this part consisted of 5 pages of comments (on average three per page) displayed in random order, each for 30 s. A fixation cross (+) was displayed for 20 s in between the comments (C) in the following order: CC + CC + C+. Participants were instructed to read the comments that appeared on the screen and to try to remember them as well as possible. Overall each commentary run lasted 3:30 min. Because we had only 30 unique comments divided into 10 pages, each comment was displayed twice (before I and III as well as II and IV runs of the Narrative-based Pain Empathy Task).