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Two competing views implicate interdependence in empathy. One suggests that interdependence may generally enhance empathy (Woltin et al., British Journal of Social Psychology 50:553–562, 2011), whereas another suggests that interdependence enhances empathy for targets with whom one is in a relationship, at the cost of decreasing empathy for strangers (Markus and Kitayama, Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(4):420–430, 2010). Here, we show evidence in support of the latter account. We observed that trait-level interdependence positively correlated with trait-level empathic abilities in perspective-taking and empathic concern. However, using an empathy for social exclusion paradigm, we found that neural responses to a friend’s compared to a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion) differentially related to interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. During the …