Shared pain, shared decisions: Effects of empathic engagement on social conformity and decision processes, with physiological and visual-attentional associations

Empathy enables individuals to attune to others' experiences through shared affective, sensorimotor, and neural representations. Although central to emotional understanding, empathic engagement may extend beyond affective resonance to shape higher-level cognitive processes. In particular, empathic engagement may promote social alignment, biasing individuals to adjust their decisions toward others'. However, it remains unknown whether experimentally induced empathic-engagement instructions influence conformity in decision-making and whether conformity under this condition is associated with physiological responses, visual attention, and individual differences in socio-emotional traits. Here, 73 participants completed an empathy-for-pain task and performed a modified random-dot task in which they interacted with empathy targets. Physiological signals were recorded during the empathy manipulation, while eye movements were tracked throughout the task. Using switching rate as a measure of conformity, we found that feedback from empathy targets increased conformity. Computational drift-diffusion modeling showed that the empathic engagement condition was associated with stronger decision bias toward targets and altered drift rate. Depending on the context, visual attention to the eyes and mouth was associated with greater conformity. Larger increases in phasic skin conductance from the detached-observation to empathic engagement condition were associated with greater decision conservatism and reduced decision bias. Finally, alexithymia and autistic traits moderated the relationship between empathy and conformity separately, but not jointly. These findings show that the effects of empathic engagement instructions may extend beyond affective resonance to influence subsequent decision-making. More broadly, they suggest that social alignment may be related to socio-emotional traits, with exploratory associations involving physiological arousal and visual attention.