Induced Emotional Empathy and Contextual Factors Like Presence of Others Reduce the Negative Stereo Types Towards Persons with Disabilities Through Stronger Prosociality

In this paper we focus on how contextual factors like physical presence of other perceivers, and then developed induced emotional empathy towards a person with disabilities, may reduce the automatic negative stereotypes and then response towards that person. We demonstrated in study 1 that negative attitude based on negative stereotypes assessed on ATDP-test questionnaires on five points Linkert-scale are significantly less negative when participant were tested with a group of perceivers and then tested alone separately by applying 3 (positive, indifferent & negative attitude levels) X 2 (physical presence condition and alone) factorial design of ANNOVA test. In second study, we demonstrate, by applying regression analysis, in presence of other perceivers, whether in small group, participants showed more induced emotional empathy through stronger prosociality towards a high distress target like a person with disabilities in comparison of that of other stigmatized persons such as racial biased or gender biased people. Also, in third study we demonstrated that participants showed no or less conformity of negative stereotypes against differently abled person in presence of others. Thus, results show that automatic affective response in form of induced emotional empathy in perceiver and contextual factors like the presence of other perceivers automatically activate stronger prosocial norms and egalitarian goals towards physically challenged persons in comparison of other stigmatized persons like racial or gender biased people. This leads to less negative attitudes & behaviour towards a person with disabilities. This study sheds a new light on stronger prosociality in observer towards differently abled person and, in this context, it opens an area of research regarding interrelations between prosociality and induced empathic concern in presence of contextual factors.