In this review, we examine relationships between empathy, prosocial behavior, and moral judgment. We focus on recent evidence for these relationships, with a focus on motivated empathy regulation as an important process that shapes empathic and moral outcomes. In particular, we highlight tradeoffs in contexts that involve competing victims with different needs, such as in large-scale suffering situations and sacrificial moral dilemmas, as well as on effects on punishment and recursive effects of morality on empathy. Our aim is to integrate motivation frameworks in empathy regulation and social cognition with prosocial and moral judgments.

Empathy regulation, prosociality, and moral judgment.

It has become common practice to conceptualize bias as an automatic response, cultivated through exposure to bias in society. From this perspective, combating bias requires reducing a proclivity for bias within individuals, as in many implicit-bias training efforts common in schools and corporations. We introduce an alternative approach that begins with the presumption that people are inherently complex, with multiple, often contradictory, selves and goals. When the person is conceptualized this way, it is possible to ask when biased selves are likely to emerge and whether this bias can be sidelined—that is, whether situations can be altered in potent ways that elevate alternative selves and goals that people will endorse and for which bias would be nonfunctional. Using both classic and contemporary examples, we show how sidelining bias has led to meaningful improvements in real-world outcomes, including higher academic achievement and reduced school suspensions, less recidivism to jail, and less stereotyping in mass advertisements.

/pdf/sidelining-bias-a-situationist-approach-to-reduce-the-21znaafu.pdf

Sidelining Bias: A Situationist Approach to Reduce the Consequences of Bias in Real-World Contexts

Criminal justice stakeholders have increasingly relied on probation supervision as an alternative to incarceration and yet, probation revocations often result in incarceration. As such, increased understanding of the mechanisms behind revocations and strategies to reduce them is critical. We conduct a rapid review of the literature on factors associated with probation revocations. Specifically, we review 50 articles on how probation officer behavior, officer-client relationships, caseload size, supervision intensity, monetary sanctions, probation client characteristics, or programming and services are associated with probation revocations. Though the literature is limited, and findings are mixed, the most consistent findings indicate that officer-client relationships involving trust, support, respect, and empathy as well as reduced caseload sizes and cognitive behavioral therapy programs are associated with probation success while intensive supervision programs; greater monetary sanctions and nonpayment of those sanctions; and being Black and less educated are associated with poorer supervision outcomes. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed. 

A Rapid Review of Literature on Factors Associated with Adult Probation Revocations

The Role of Perceived Autonomy‐Supportive Communications for Motivating Prejudice Reduction and Avoiding Defiant Backlash Within the Police Force Workplace

Research Summary The United States is at a turning point in the history of corrections. Suddenly and surprisingly, the era of mass incarceration ended around 2010. Since that time, prison populations, public punitiveness, and get-tough rhetoric have declined. A challenging question remains, however: Now what? Doing more of the same is foolish but likely. Prison reform is inhibited by the twin realities that states have limited budgets and have existing prisons that are rarely shuttered. New thinking is needed to move beyond these restrictions. One guide for a cognitive shift is Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now in which he argues that sustained improvement in human well-being in the United States and across the globe is due to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science, humanism, and progress. In this context, an “enlightened corrections” is possible in which policies and practices are evaluated by the four ideals articulated by Pinker. As one example, mass imprisonment is shown to be irrational, unscientific, inhumane, and bereft of a future. By contrast, more promising policies seek to nourish offenders by offering redemption and by using community supervision to build quality relationships that provide a means for targeting risk factors for intervention. Policy Implications The key policy implication is the proposal to place prison reform within the Biden Administration's support for infrastructure improvement. Funded by the federal government, a “Build Back Better Prison Experiment” would be undertaken in which 10 experimental prisons—designed from a clean slate and selected through a competition—would be created and evaluated. The goal is to establish prisons that are rational in their planning, are evidence based, improve offenders’ lives, and foster a new era of progress in American corrections. 

The end of American exceptionalism: An enlightened corrections

Incarceration is a pervasive issue in the United States that is enormously costly to families, communities, and society at large. The path from prison back to prison may depend on the relationship a person has with their probation or parole officer (PPO). If the relationship lacks appropriate care and trust, violations and recidivism (return to jail or prison) may be more likely to occur. Here, we test whether an “empathic supervision” intervention with PPOs—that aims to reduce collective blame against and promote empathy for the perspectives of adults on probation or parole (APPs)—can reduce rates of violations and recidivism. The intervention highlights the unreasonable expectation that all APPs will reoffend (collective blame) and the benefits of empathy—valuing APPs’ perspectives. Using both within-subject (monthly official records for 10 mo) and between-subject (treatment versus control) comparisons in a longitudinal study with PPOs in a large US city (NPPOs = 216; NAPPs=∼20,478), we find that the empathic supervision intervention reduced collective blame against APPs 10 mo postintervention and reduced between-subject violations and recidivism, a 13% reduction that would translate to less taxpayer costs if scaled. Together, these findings illustrate that very low-cost psychological interventions that target empathy in relationships can be cost effective and combat important societal outcomes in a lasting manner.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/14/e2018036118.full.pdf

A scalable empathic supervision intervention to mitigate recidivism from probation and parole.

Communication between police and community is an inevitable part of policing. Core narratives—subjective, internal, sense-making processes that can shape behavior—that police officers hold related to communication can influence police–community interactions. There is no known research on core narratives related to police officer communication. To begin to fill the gap, this paper reports the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted to investigate how police officers understand police–community relations and the nature of encounters with community members. Communication emerged as an important theme. Five communication core narrative themes were identified: communication as central, advocacy, cover, withholding, and connection. Four of the core narrative themes were abstracted into two dimensions along which the characteristics of the communication varied. Understanding the core narratives influencing officer intergroup communication can help researchers and practitioners see the larger implications of communication, an essential component of policing and police–community relationships, and its connection to officer behavior.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13684302221121585

Perfecta Delgado Oxholm

Papers

A scalable empathic supervision intervention to mitigate recidivism from probation and parole.

Goals and outcomes of police officer communication: Evidence from in-depth interviews