Empathy Ads Fail To Change Policy—They Mostly Move the Already Sympathetic

🧭 What Was Tested

Politicians and activists often use humanizing media to increase empathic concern for out-groups and thereby reduce support for punitive policies. Two experimental studies tested whether media messages that humanize Latinos succeed at (1) raising empathy and (2) changing policy attitudes among different audience segments.

🧪 How Respondents Were Exposed and Measured

The experiments exposed participants to media designed to humanize Latinos and then measured:

• pretreatment attitudes (including antipathy toward the out-group),
• empathic concern in response to the messages, and
• subsequent policy attitudes and affective reactions.

🔍 Key Findings

• The humanizing media successfully made Latinos appear more humanized for participants overall (manipulation check succeeded).
• Empathy increases were largest among respondents who already held the most positive prior attitudes toward Latinos.
• The intended target—the subgroup with the highest pretreatment antipathy—showed a dramatically smaller increase in empathy in response to the treatments.
• A second experiment identified one mechanism behind these differences: unpleasant affect from cognitive dissonance helps explain why strongly anti-out-group respondents resist empathic shifts.
• Across both studies, messages that raised empathic concern produced little or no change in policy attitudes.

⚖️ Why It Matters

Messages designed to “change hearts” by eliciting empathy do not uniformly shift public opinion. They tend to deepen empathy among those already sympathetic while producing limited emotional or policy movement among the most opposed. This pattern—successful humanization without corresponding policy change—highlights the complexity of translating emotional appeals into changed political behavior.