More Than a Lack of 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.