Intergroup Bias Predicts Expressions of Social Judgment and Empathy in the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community

arXiv:2610.29254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People share and understand others' experiences differently based on their social identities; often, people empathize more when the other person belongs to their ingroup compared to an outgroup. While this intergroup empathy gap is well-studied in social psychology, it remains unclear how it manifests in naturally occurring online social interactions. To this end, we measure how commenters express social judgments, as an indirect outcome of their understanding towards the posters, and empathy in text, based on whether commenters share the poster's gender or are of similar ages. We focus on posts where the poster self-reports these demographics, and analyze 126,716 comments associated with 36,163 posts from 18,111 commenters in r/AmItheAsshole, while controlling for commenter and poster group identities, post features (topic, length, and score), and both commenter- and post-level variance. Our results show that when commenters and posters are ingroup, in either gender or age,…