Research
Our Focus
Researchers at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab focus broadly on how people connect with, respond to, and care for each other. Since this topic can be approached from many directions, we research a wide variety of topics.
For an in-depth introduction on the overview of our topic area we would recommend the following papers
Below we highlight some major threads we explore across our research areas.
The Nature and Consequences of Empathy
Audience members’ palms sweat while they watch a tightrope walker teeter over a precipice. Friends wonder how to help each other through struggles, and customers wonder whether a used car salesman is genuinely happy to see them. All of these instances represent forms of empathy: sharing, thinking about, and feeling concern for others’ emotions.
The SSNL studies empathy through a wide range of approaches and methods. We differentiate between different “pieces” of empathy, such as vicariously taking on others’ feelings (emotional empathy), thinking about their experiences (cognitive empathy) and feeling a motivation to improve their well-being (empathic concern, see Zaki, 2016; Zaki & Ochsner, 2016). Our work probes the brain processes that support pieces of empathy, (e.g., Zaki et al., 2016; Morelli et al., 2018), and use computational models to describe how people make sense of others’ emotions based on facial expressions, language and other cues (Ong et al. 2015, 2019; Zaki, 2013). We’re also interested in when and how empathy leads people to accurate, versus inaccurate impressions of what others are going through, with an eye towards improving interpersonal understanding (Zaki & Ochsner, 2011).
Our lab also explores the benefits of empathy, for example in reducing individuals’ stress and in building relationships (Morelli et al., 2015, Zaki, 2016). We are also interested in the noisy, but powerful role of empathy in guiding moral decisions (Zaki, 2016).
Connections and Communities
Empathy is often viewed as residing within individuals, or connecting pairs of people, such as married couples, a parent and child, or doctor and patient. But people of course exist in broader communities, like towns, teams, companies, and schools. Through a collaboration with Stanford, the SSNL is examining the ways that empathy affects these larger groups.
Using a combination of social network analysis, personality measurements, experience sampling, and neuroimaging, our lab has probed how empathy tracks individuals’ position and role in new communities (Morelli et al., 2017) and brain processes involved in detecting people who are central to one’s social group (Morelli et al., 2018). We further find that features of an individual's social "microclimate," such as the connections between people around them, matter for a person's well being (Courtney et al., 2023), and that brain responses to social support track a person's feeling of being socially integrated in college communities (Pei et al., 2023).
Ideological division in the US and beyond has skyrocketed in recent decades. We are interested in how tools from psychology, and especially the science of human connection, can help address growing polarization.
For instance, people's lay beliefs about whether empathy for outgroup members, such as someone you disagree with, is a strength or a weakness. These beliefs, in turn, shape their social and political attitudes in important ways. A line of research in our lab finds that teaching people that empathy is a strength encourages them to lower their animosity towards people they disagree with and communicate more effectively across difference (Santos et al., 2022). We also find that belief in the power of empathy increased people's curiosity and accuracy about the "other side," (Santos et al., in press).
In ongoing work, we are also exploring what allows cross-party conversations to be productive as opposed to toxic, and how people perceive and respond to their own political ingroups.
Building empathy
Caring and understanding often crumble just when they’re needed the most: a problem that characterizes polarized political climates, callous physician-patient interactions, and burnt-out workplaces (Zaki & Cikara, 2015). The SSNL has probed ways to rebuild empathy under these circumstances (Weisz & Zaki, 2017).
Critically, we highlight that empathy is not an emotional reflex, but rather an experience people choose in response to motives that drive them to approach or avoid engaging with others’ emotions (Zaki, 2014; Weisz & Zaki, 2018). This means that by bolstering empathic motives, scientists should be able to “grow” empathy even under hard circumstances.
We have demonstrated that motivation-based manipulations, such as social norms and “growth mindsets,” indeed inspire people to empathize even when they might not otherwise (Schumman et al., 2014; Nook et al., 2016). We have also found that empathy-building interventions built on these principles—at least in some contexts—can improve connection and social well being (Weisz et al., 2020, 2022). Our lab is now exploring a range of interventions, for including virtual reality simulations (Herrera et al., 2018) and engagement with narrative arts (Rathje et al., 2021), that can broaden empathy towards people from different groups.
