I agree that this is a worthy area of inquiry. If you're interested in data, I highly encourage this type of research - and the data is probably out there to do

I agree that this is a worthy area of inquiry. If you're interested in data, I highly encourage this type of research - and the data is probably out there to do this. I do data analysis on news coverage, and there's data to show that we have a predilection to hear about the West (even compared to other geographically close regions): https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html As you point out, hard to determine how much of this predilection is due to economic similarity or geography versus cultural/racial/religious. Beyond that, my gut is that we can actually derive empathy scores across countries or races based on data like this.