The intergroup empathy bias among incoming medical students.

We showed that empathy levels were modulated by group belonging (25% of the variance was explained by group belonging). Post hoc analyses showed that the differences between the peers' and patients' situations tend to reveal an appropriate professional attitude with regard to patients because they displayed: (1) lower scores on personal distress and fantasy; (2) higher scores on perspective taking (as for peers); (3) stable scores on empathic concern in peers' and patients' situations. However, integrating empathy lessons in the educational program of medical students remains a priority. In a long-term perspective, these findings suggest an investigation of the impacts of group belonging on the evolution of students' empathy scores through their medicine studies.