ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on non-affective outcomes, defined as some form of judgment, evaluation, or belief about other people. The studies which have investigated links between dispositional empathy and interpersonal accuracy differ from one another in a number of ways, but all share the common assumption that empathy and accuracy are two distinct constructs. With increases in methodological sophistication, there has been a growing realization that accuracy can be studied in ways which avoid the problems described by Cronbach. In contrast to the rather meager evidence for its influence on interpersonal accuracy, notably stronger associations have been found between empathy and another non-affective outcome: the attributional judgments that observers make about targets. Some of the earliest evidence regarding a link between empathy-related processes and evaluative judgments came from a series of studies which evolved from investigations into the "just world hypothesis". Evidence for the effect of empathy-related processes on evaluative judgments has also come from investigations outside of this Brehm-Aderman series.
