Malaysia Empathy - Towards Empathic Design Social Technology: A Preliminary Investigation on Inter-Cultural Empathy of Facebook Users

摘要

Examining inter-group empathy in a multiculturalism environment is crucial to maintain positive relationship and encourage social circle expansion. However, less research focus on inter-group empathy among social media users. This is important for future design of empathic centric social technology development to support inter-group empathy in social network. The objectives of this preliminary investigations are twofold: (1) to capture the demographic information, social media activities and friends network distributions among Facebook users, (2) to assess the empathic level of the Facebook users. A Facebook app named 1 Malaysia Empathy is built for the online survey purpose. A total of 1200 Malaysian Facebook users across different races participated in this study. A descriptive outcomes showed high positive results on the empathic assessment among the female respondents. Whereas commenting/posting/liking is the top Facebook activities among the users and racial bias exists in friends network preferences. Limitations, significance and future directions are discussed.