Exploring the relationship between social power and the ERP components of empathy for pain

Commanding or being a simple intermediary: how does it affect moral behavior and related brain mechanisms?

“…Regarding our experimental manipulations, we observed that participants had a higher neural response when they could command a robot compared to when they were intermediary. This result was observed on the P3, but not on the eLPP and the lLPP, which is consistent with another former study manipulating social power (Galang et al, 2021). The literature on the P3 and the LPP does not offer a concrete conceptual distinction between these two components, some authors arguing that the LPP is a simple extension of the P3 (e.g.…”

“…In a former fMRI study (Caspar, Ioumpa et al, 2020), we observed that for the agent directly delivering a shock, obeying orders reduced vicarious activations towards a victim's pain compared to acting freely, suggesting that a reduced decisional power negatively impacted the neural empathic response. This result was also confirmed by another study (Galang et al, 2021), which showed that recalling a low social power situation did not lead to difference in the neural empathic response between painful and non-painful pictures while this difference was significant in a high social power condition. In the present study, when participants were in the role of commander, they had a total social power as they could decide which order to ask an intermediary to execute.…”

“…Similarly to the sense of agency, being in a position of subordinate executing an action commanded by an experimenter reduces the empathic response to the pain of others (Caspar, Ioumpa et al, 2020;Lepron et al, 2015). Another study has shown that being reminded about a situation in which individuals had high social power increased their empathic neural response to painful pictures compared to being reminded about a low social power condition (Galang et al, 2021). These studies do suggest that being in a position with low decisional power impacts also empathy for pain.…”

“…However, these studies never compared directly the positions of commanding or being a simple intermediary in a single paradigm, thus preventing direct comparisons between those two social positions (Caspar et al, 2016(Caspar et al, , 2018Caspar, Ioumpa, et al, 2020;Lepron et al, 2015). Further, in some of those studies, participant's actions or decisions were not measured and participants were simple observers (Galang et al, 2021;Obhi et al, 2012). The present study aimed to fill this gap by comparing how commanding or being in an intermediary position impacts the sense of agency and empathy for pain within a single behavioral paradigm in which participants could decide or had to follow the orders to send or not painful shocks to another participant in exchange for money.…”

“…We therefore used electroencephalography in Study 2, which has a better temporal resolution than fMRI, to investigate the two targeted neuro-cognitive processes in a single paradigm. Based on past literature (Galang et al, 2021;Obhi et al, 2012), we expected that being in a low social power position (i.e., intermediaries) would reduce empathy for pain and the sense of agency compared to a position of higher power (i.e., commanders). This may be even more the case when orders are transmitted to another human compared to a condition in which orders are transmitted to a robot, as responsibility can be diffused between two humans but less in the case of a human-robot interaction (Ciardo et al, 2020).…”