Empathic concern and prosocial behaviors: A test of experimental results using survey data☆
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.
Section snippets
Review of the literature
Most psychological research treats empathy as a mental state, having both an emotional and a cognitive component. Scientists doing this sort of research manipulate experimental conditions to generate thoughts and feelings of empathy in a subject, and see whether high-empathy conditions are more likely to induce helping. The work of Batson, 1991, Batson, 2002 follows this strategy, as well as much of the work of Eisenberg (Eisenberg, 2002, Eisenberg et al., 1989, Eisenberg and Fabes, 1998,
Data and methods
This study uses data from the 2002 National Altruism Study, which was administered as a module of the General Social Survey (GSS), and was given to a randomly selected half of the 2765 respondents to the GSS. The 2002 GSS had a response rate of 70.1%, and the data set includes weight variables to account for non-response, which were used in this study. The 2002 GSS measures 15 different pro-social behaviors, three of which are formal actions taken through institutions, and 11 of which are
Discussion, limitations, and conclusion
While some of the hypotheses received at least partial support by the data, the most important finding was the overall weakness of empathic concern as a predictor of real-life helping behaviors. The first hypothesis, that empathic concern would better predict spontaneous than planned helping decisions, was only partially supported. Some spontaneous face to face helping decisions correlated relatively strongly, such as allowing someone to cut in line and giving money to a homeless person, but
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The author thank Steve Nock, Bradford Wilcox, Tom Guterbock, Sarah Corse, and John Nesselroade for comments on and assistance with this article.