cs.CLOct 21, 2026

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

Authors: Yu Hou, Hal Daumé, Rachel Rudinger

Organizations: University of Maryland

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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, commenters are more likely to provide a Not the Asshole verdict and show greater text-based understanding as measured by LLMs. We also observe that older commenters behave differently from younger ones. Furthermore, in a subset of posts where the gender and age of the other party in the conflict are explicitly mentioned, we find that commenter-poster ingroup effects are moderated by the group relationships between the poster and the other party when commenters make social judgments. Our work highlights the importance of intergroup context and social group nuances in understanding online discourse.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: Example post and comments from r/AmItheAsshole, including user gender and age. We use self-reported gender and age to study ingroup behaviors. In this example, the poster is a 29-year-old female in conflict with her fiancé (the other party; a 28-year-old male). The commenters include a 27-year-old male and a 32-year-old female.
Figure 2: Distribution of commenter age and age ratios for the final 126,716 comment-level interactions. We note that a large portion of users belong to younger groups and interact with others of relatively similar generations.
RomanceFamilyFriendshipWorkPublicSociety
10,10217,7165,0881,6901,50265
Table 1: Post topic distribution across 36,163 posts. Work is short for work/school, and Public refers to public strangers. We merge Public and Society into one topic during the regression analysis, given the small predicted portion overall.
 Commenter: MCommenter: F
Poster: M8,69134,778
Poster: F15,26367,984
Table 2: Counts of comment-level gender interactions (M=Male, F=Female). The diagonal represents ingroup cases. We note that female-female interactions make up the majority. To account for this, we include commenter and poster gender as controls, so the ingroup gender variable captures effects beyond baseline gender differences.
Figure 3: Distribution of social judgment outcomes (NTA: N=88,977; YTA: N=37,739) across text-based empathy dimensions: emotional reactions EE , interpretations II . Top [ // ] represents the percentage of comments predicted as 11 on that dimension, while bottom [×] represents those predicted as 00 (lacking expressed empathy). YTA comments generally contain fewer emotional reactions and empathetic interpretations. The variance within both judgments (NTA or YTA) highlights the importance of analyzing comment language features in addition to final verdicts.
Figure 4: Estimated overall gender and age ingroup effects (in percentage points) on social judgment and two text-based empathy dimensions. Positive effects indicate that when the commenter and poster share the same gender or are similar in age, commenters are more likely to give an NTA verdict or express greater empathy in their comments. 95% confidence intervals are reported. Significance: *** p<0.001p<0.001 , ** p<0.01p<0.01 , * p<0.05p<0.05 .
Figure 5: Estimated age ingroup effects on social judgment and two text-based empathy dimensions (Emotional Reactions and Interpretations) for commenters aged 20, 26, and 38. Results indicate that older commenters exhibit weaker ingroup bias in social judgments but stronger ingroup bias in expressed text-based empathy compared to younger commenters. 95% confidence intervals are reported. Significance notation: *** p<0.001p<0.001 , ** p<0.01p<0.01 , * p<0.05p<0.05 .
Figure 6: Gender and age ingroup effects on social judgments (NTA/YTA) moderated by the relationship between the poster and the other party. When the poster and the other party are of different genders or have a large age gap, the observed average ingroup effects, modeled between the commenter and poster, are larger and significant. 95% confidence intervals are reported. Significance: *** p<0.001p<0.001 , ** p<0.01p<0.01 , * p<0.05p<0.05 .

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