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 phy