J Appl Soc Psychol. 2020;00:1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jasp | 1 © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 | INTRODUCTION Imagine any group of people that is need of help; these could be peo- ple effected by natural disasters, discrimination—anything that could systematically effect a large group of people. How can these people get the help that they need? One potential answer is that others are likely to provide help when they feel sympathy for them. Sympathy is a strong other-focused motivation that has been found to predict helping behavior toward strangers in need, even when helpers were led to believe that they would experience pain (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981); it even predicts helping behavior toward strangers that are at least superficially very different from helpers (Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002). Indeed, sympathy can be thought of as a desire for helping others (Baldner, Pierro, & Kruglanski, 2019). Immigrants, as a group of individuals who are at least superficially different from natives and are often in precarious situations, represent a group that is in need of help—and thus who could be in need of sympathy. However, as not everyone will feel sympathy toward people in need it is important to investigate how sympathy can occur; these breakdowns in sympathy are sometimes referred to as “empathic failures” (Zaki & Cikara, 2015). In a sense, sympathy is also a form of knowledge—in this case, perceived knowl- edge of the distress felt by someone else. Consequently, we hypothesize that individuals who are gen- erally not interested in taking in new knowledge should express less sympathy toward out-group members, at least in part because Received: 10 September 2018 | Revised: 14 October 2019 | Accepted: 10 January 2020 DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12654 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Sympathy as knowledge of the other in need: An investigation into the roles of need for closure and the moral foundations on sympathy toward immigrants Conrad Baldner | Daniela Di Santo | Alessandra Talamo | Antonio Pierro Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Correspondence Conrad Baldner, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Rome RM, Italy. Email: Conrad.baldner@uniroma1.it Abstract Although sympathy is a powerful other-focused motivation, not all individuals will experience sympathy when it is appropriate. Immigrants, as a disadvantaged out- group, are especially in need of sympathy and, given the tensions of the immigration debate, are at-risk for low sympathy. Indeed, past research has found that sympathy is less likely to be experienced toward disliked out-groups. In the current research, we investigated the role of need for closure (NFC), or the general desire for epis- temic certainty, on the experience of sympathy toward immigrants in Italy, a nation where the immigration debate is becoming increasingly fractious. Consistent with past research on the roles of NFC and the binding moral foundations (i.e., a concern for the well-being of groups) on prejudice toward out-groups, we propose that in- dividuals with a high NFC, and who endorsed the binding moral foundations (i.e., a concern for the well-being of groups), would be particularly likely to have decreased sympathy toward immigrants in Italy. In line with past research and our hypotheses, in three studies we found that the binding foundations mediated the NFC effect on decreased sympathy toward immigrants in Italy. Conceptually, these individuals can strongly adopt traditional cultural norms as a way to acquire stable knowledge; this can make sympathy toward immigrants less likely, as they both stand outside “tradi- tional” morality, as well can threaten the stability of natives’ knowledge.