CeDEx Seminar - Tingyan Jia (University of Leicester))

Empathy, Motivated Reasoning, And Redistribution

Through theoretical and experimental analysis, this study explores the role of empathy in economics and its implications for redistribution. Empathy is defined as accurately simulating others’ feelings, distinct from altruism. Self-interested wealthy individuals may choose not to be empathetic towards the poor to justify limited redistribution. However, diverse personal experiences counteract this self-serving motivated reasoning, promoting greater empathy and redistribution. I formalize the mechanism with a model and conduct a laboratory experiment with exogenous variations in experience and information to validate the model’s predictions. Empirical results affirm the motivated reduction of empathy and underscore the mitigating effect of experience.