Those who ignore the past are doomed to be heartless: Lay historicist theory is associated with humane responses to the struggles and transgressions of others.

When one learns that current struggles or transgressions of an individual or group are rooted in an unfortunate history, one experiences compassion and reduced blame. Prior research has demonstrated this by having participants receive (or not) a concrete historicist narrative regarding the particular individual or group under consideration. Here, we take a different approach. We explore the possibility that everyday people show meaningful variation in a broad lay theory that we call lay historicism. Lay historicists believe that-as a general fact-people's psychological characteristics and life outcomes are powerfully molded by their life histories. We present eight studies linking lay historicism to broad tendencies toward compassion and non-blaming. Collectively, Studies 1-5 suggest that lay historicism affects compassion and blame, respectively, via distinct mechanisms: (1) Lay historicism is associated with compassion because it creates a sense that-as a general fact-past suffering lies behind present difficulties, and (2) lay historicism is associated with blame mitigation because historicists reject the idea that-as a general fact-people freely and autonomously create their moral character. Thus, lay historicism increases compassion and decreases blame via distinct mechanisms. The remaining studies diversify our evidence base. Study 6 examines criminal justice philosophies rather than broad moral traits (as in the earlier studies) and shows that lay historicism is associated with preference for humane criminal justice philosophies. Study 7 moves from abstract beliefs to concrete situations and shows that lay historicism predicts reduced blaming of an irresponsible peer who is encountered face-to-face. One additional study-in our Supplemental Materials-shows that lay historicism predicts lower levels of blaming on implicit measures, although only among those who also reject lay controllability theories. Overall, these studies provide consistent support for the possibility that lay historicism is broadly associated with humane responding to the struggles and transgressions of others.

On shifting the blame to humanity: Historicist narratives regarding transgressors evoke compassion for the transgressor but disdain for humanity.

People respond compassionately to transgressors whose immorality is rooted in an unfortunate life history. But, are reactions to such historicist narratives uniformly compassionate? We suggest not. We propose that historicist narratives also have a dark side. Specifically, they encourage blame shifting, in which negative evaluations of humanity arise hand in hand with compassion for the focal transgressor of the narrative. Indeed, historicist narratives portray the focal transgressor as victimized by multiple others, who destroy her goodness and remove her chance to flourish in life. This destruction of another's potential is itself a profound moral violation and thus activates far-reaching blame responses that feed a disdainful view of humanity. In three studies, we provide evidence that historicist narratives evoke compassion for one but disdain for the multitude. We show that the resulting disdain can diminish prosocial behaviour in unrelated contexts, that it is elicited by both experimenter-provided and participant-generated historicist narratives, and that it is created via blame shifting. Our findings question the assumption that proliferation of historicist thinking would necessarily contribute to creating a more compassionate, humane society.

More than a lack of control: external explanations can evoke compassion for outgroups by increasing perceptions of suffering (independent of perceived control).

People's explanations for social events powerfully affect their socioemotional responses. We examine why explanations affect emotions, with a specific focus on how external explanations for negative aspects of an outgroup can create compassion for the outgroup. The dominant model of these processes suggests that external explanations can reduce perceived control and that compassion is evoked when negative aspects of an outgroup are perceived as beyond their control. We agree that perceived control is important, but we propose a model in which explanations also affect perceived suffering of an outgroup, and that perceived suffering is an additional mechanism connecting external explanations to compassion. Studies are presented that support our integrative dual-mediation model and that pinpoint factors-depth of cognitive processing, expansive sense of identity-that modulate the extent to which the external explanation/perceived suffering mechanism evokes compassion.