Empathy is selectively regulated by cognitive control to specific targets.

Evidence

People are innately equipped with the expressive and receptive biological structures for vicarious activation of emotion. Although they are endowed with the capacity for vicarious arousal, learning experiences largely determine the level and pattern of empathic reactions. Through cognitive regulation, empathy can be elevated, eliminated, and selectively altered according to whose emotional experiences are vicariously arousing for given individuals. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 638

Categorization

• XREF: This selective, cognitively-governed empathy is the crux of the mechanism explaining how people compartmentalize compassion for ingroup members while supporting harmful policy toward outgroups. — connects to: Learning experiences determine empathy’s level and targets; Recognition of shared ordinariness drives empathy more than exotic difference does
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 638