Empathic concern and prosocial behaviors: A test of experimental results using survey data

Abstract

This study uses survey data to test the correlation between empathic concern and 14 different prosocial behaviors, including informal help to individuals and formal helping through institutions. Statistically significant correlations were found for 10 behaviors, but substantively meaningful correlations were only found for three, all of which were spontaneous, informal helping behaviors, where the individual needing help was directly present. The findings indicate that empathic concern may not be an important motivator for planned helping decisions and decisions to help others who are not immediately present, such as volunteering, charitable giving, and blood donation. The weak correlation between empathic concern and most helping behaviors indicates that individual differences in empathic concern may not play much a role in helping decisions.

Introduction

The last two decades have seen tremendous growth in the study of empathy as an explanation for prosocial behavior. Developmental psychologists have traced how feelings of empathy play a key role in the moral development of children (Eisenberg, 2002, Hoffman, 2000). Experimental psychologists have studied how emotional and cognitive states of empathy, sympathy, and personal distress correlate with helping behaviors in laboratory settings (Batson, 1991, Batson, 2002). Neurobiologists have mapped the brain centers that are activated when feelings of empathy take place, and have studied how empathy is impaired when certain regions of the brain are damaged (Damasio, 2002a, Damasio, 2002b). All of this research holds that empathy is an important component of moral thought and behavior in general, and is an essential component of motivation to perform prosocial or helping behaviors in particular.

Despite the considerable research into empathy in these fields, there has been very little research into whether and how empathic reactions and personal predispositions to empathy predict helping behaviors in non-experimental settings. Most research that does explore this issue has used pseudo-experimental research or retrospective narrative accounts, and has studied small, non-representative samples. Only three studies to date have used large-scale survey research to study the relationship between empathic concern and helping behaviors, and none of these studies has examined how empathic concern may differ in its relationship to a range of helping behaviors.

In this article, I present findings from the altruism module of the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS), which show how individual differences in empathic concern correlate with a range of real-life helping behaviors reported on a survey research instrument. Empathic concern had no significant relationship with some helping behaviors, and a statistically significant but substantively weak (Pearson’s r < .10) relationship with most helping behaviors. Only in informal, spontaneous helping decisions directed towards non-relatives, such as giving money to a homeless person on the street, or allowing a stranger to cut ahead of you in line, was there a statistically significant relationship with a Pearson’s correlation greater than .15. These findings, combined with the findings of other studies of empathic concern and real-life prosocial behaviors, suggest that a reevaluation of the relationship between individual predispositions to empathy and helping behaviors may be in order.