Introduction
resultsEmpathy, psychic fatigue, pain, aggression, violent actionsIndeed, ’ pain
COLLAPSE
The spread of hate speech, a derogatory language based on racial, religious, or sexual prejudice, has become one of the key challenges for contemporary societiesAs repeated exposure to violence reduces people’s emotional responsiveness and decreases empathy when observing subsequent violent actionsIndeed, initial survey and experimental resultsEmpathy is a multifaceted construct referring to the human’s capacity to share and understand others' feelings that are induced by the perception of another person's affective state e.g. painAnother stream of research on intergroup interaction has focused on the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge—to ourselves and others, referred to as theory of mind (ToM) or mentalizingLastly, the overexposure to aggression (in e.g. media) and suffering of others may desensitize people to violence as well as to pain of others, leading to compassion collapse—the condition which is marked by psychic fatigue, reduced empathy and feeling detached with othersThese three perspectives offer different predictions about the potential effects of exposure to hate speech on the ability to share and understand the mental states of others. According to the empathic failure model, hate speech should enhance existing biases in empathy by increasing empathy toward ingroup members and reducing outgroup-directed empathy. According to the dehumanized perception model, hate speech should reduce the mentalization propensity toward dehumanized outgroups, but should not affect empathy towards ingroup members. According to the empathic numbing hypothesis, exposure to hate speech should limit the ability to empathize (or/and mentalize) with other people, regardless of their group membership.The behavioral and self-report character of previous studies did not allow the identification of the specific neurocognitive mechanism that would link empathy and/or mentalizing abilities to the use of hate speech. In this study, we seek to answer this question using a social neuroscience approach and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques.Although both empathy and ToM are multidimensional and often intertwined abilities that are jointly required in many social situations, they are rooted in separable brain networksImportantly, a number of studies have shown that people process information about the affective and cognitive mental states of members of distinct ethnic or cultural groups differentlyThese neuropsychological differences in reactions to ingroup and outgroup members' emotional or physical suffering may be further amplified in contexts dominated by hate speech. Surprisingly, no studies we know have directly examined the impact of exposure to hateful statements (hate speech) on the neurocognitive processes.In the present study, we aimed to disentangle three potential consequences of exposure to hate speech (e.g. the empathic failure, the dehumanized perception, the empathic numbing) by examining neurocognitive mechanisms of empathy and ToM. To this end, we conducted a study of Polish individuals and chose Arabs as the outgroup because in recent times, this group has been subject to political attacks in the Polish mediaTherefore, we aimed to test the following hypotheses:H1. According to the empathic failure model, exposure to hate speech leads to decreased brain activity within the AI and ACC in response to outgroup members’ pain or suffering, and increased activity within these areas in response to ingroup members’ pain or suffering.H2. According to the dehumanized perceptions model, exposure to hate speech leads to attenuation of the ToM network in response to outgroup (but not ingroup) members’ pain or suffering.H3. According to the empathic numbing hypothesis, exposure to hate speech leads to decreased activity in the pain matrix and/or ToM network in response to others’ pain or suffering, regardless of their group membership.