Social empathy in public deliberation

Scholars have increasingly turned to empathy to increase the effectiveness of participatory deliberations among individuals with diverse interests and values. However, because empathy is traditionally focused on in-group relations, deliberations in increasingly polarized contexts would benefit from ways to bridge across social groups. To address this, we apply the construct of social empathy. Our study explores social empathy through participatory technology assessment forums and asks: how do we incorporate, measure, and understand social empathy in public deliberations on human genome editing technology? The analysis reveals that by considering social empathy, participatory deliberation forum designers can use “persona” character cards and other forum infrastructure to increase the effectiveness of deliberation across social groups among individuals with diverse interests and values. For future deliberations seeking to cultivate social learning, social empathy—when designed for, integrated in, and measured through deliberations—presents an important mechanism for attention.