Empathy, Perceived Injustice, and Solidarity-Based Action: Observer Responses to War Suffering in Military Conflicts

As global conflicts intensify, observers without direct conflict experience are increasingly exposed to war-related suffering through media coverage, yet little is known about how such exposure shapes emotional and behavioral responses or how support for different victim groups is distributed. This research examines the emotional and cognitive mechanisms underlying solidarity among observers who have not directly experienced these conflicts as combatants, refugees, or residents of conflict zones, focusing on the Ukrainian–Russian and Israeli–Palestinian conflicts. Across four experiments, we tested whether exposure to civilian suffering elicits empathy, perceived injustice, and solidarity-based action intentions. Experiments 1 (N = 225, Irish participants) and 2 (N = 425, diverse European participants) demonstrated that exposure to Ukrainian suffering, relative to a control condition, increased empathy and interpersonal solidarity-based action, with empathy mediating these effects even when controlling for political ideology and European identity. Experiment 3 (N = 496, UK participants) introduced a Palestinian suffering condition and collective solidarity-based action measures, showing that exposure increased empathy and support for the target group, with stronger effects for Ukrainians. In this study, relative empathy mediated these effects. Experiment 4 (N = 349, UK participants, preregistered) employed a fully crossed 2 × 2 design including all four groups, Ukrainians, Russians, Palestinians, and Israelis, and introduced perceived injustice. Exposure to suffering increased empathy, perceived injustice, and collective action, with stronger effects for Palestinian, relative to Israeli, suffering. Cross-conflict interactions further showed that viewing Palestinian suffering increased empathy for Ukrainians, and vice versa. Serial mediation analyses confirmed that perceived injustice and empathy jointly explained support for these groups. Taken together, these findings clarify how observers without direct conflict experience emotionally and morally engage with war and why some conflicts may elicit greater public solidarity than others.