Exploring relationships between racial bias, state empathy, and perceived recovery time following a medical hardship

Abstract

This experiment investigated whether racial biases exist in laypeople's perceptions of recovery time following a common, medically-related hardship and whether these biases can be explained by differential empathy across race. White participants (n=133) read a vignette describing either a White or Black target who experienced a minor car accident. They then rated the amount of time they felt was reasonable for the target to take off from work and normal activities and how much time it would take to recover physically and mentally. Participants also completed measures of state empathy toward the target and their sleep quality. Results showed a significant main effect of target race, such that participants perceived shorter recovery times for the White (relative to Black) target. The predicted mediation through state empathy was not significant, and sleep quality did not moderate recovery time judgements. Current literature related to race and recovery-related perceptions focuses primarily on medical contexts, but little to no work has investigated the perception of medical recovery times in everyday scenarios such as school life, work life, and social life. We addressed this gap in the literature by investigating whether lay perceivers’ predictions of recovery time varied across target races. Understanding lay perceivers’ racialized beliefs about recovery time may have implications across employment (e.g., supervisors determining appropriate time off following hardships), education (e.g., different expectations for students coming back from personal hardships), or social domains (e.g., perceptions of one’s ability to return to normal social life following a hardship). This experiment adds to a better understanding of the mixed findings in the current literature, though further research is needed to clarify whether and why people judge the recovery time of individuals differently based on their race.