Article Review Assignment 1 Article Review Assignment “Attending live theatre improves empathy, changes attitudes, and leads to pro-social behavior.” Rathje, S., Hackel, L., & Zaki, J. (2021). ARTICLE REVIEW ASSIGNMENT 2 The main hypotheses being tested in the article (Rathje et al., 2021) are whether attending live theatre can increase empathy, change attitudes, and promote pro-social behaviour. The authors also aimed to address the limitations of past research, which mainly relied on self-reported measures and lacked experimental control that would determine causality. The authors conducted two studies, with the second being pre-registered, one of the best strategies to strengthen the claims of the current paper and increase replicability. In Study 2, they recruited 160 randomly assigned participants to either attend a live theatre performance or a control group. The key variables were empathy, attitudes toward social issues, and pro-social behaviour, and the authors operationally defined these key variables using well-established scales and tasks. Empathy was measured using the Empathic Concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), attitudes toward social issues were assessed using a 10-item scale, and pro-social behaviour was measured using a donation task. The findings suggest that attending live theatre can increase empathy towards the specific topic of the play, which can lead to more positive attitudes towards outgroups (in this case, samesex parents). Additionally, empathy significantly predicted donating behaviour, indicating that attending live theatre may indirectly lead to more pro-social behaviour. These findings align with the theme "Power of the Situation" as it suggests that the atmosphere of live theatrical performances can significantly impact a person's emotional state and capacity for empathy. That is likely due to the ability of viewers to relate to and identify with the characters on stage and to explore feelings and viewpoints that may differ from their own in a safe and supportive setting. Attending live theatre may be a powerful tool for promoting empathy and emotional reconnection. The question for authors is if they could have done a perfect experiment and removed all the limitations, which would they first remove, and how would they conduct the perfect experiment?
