Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-analytic Evaluation of Perspective-taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern

McAuliffe, William H., Evan C. Carter, Juliana Berhane, Alexander Snihur, and Michael E. McCullough. 2019. “Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-analytic Evaluation of Perspective-taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern.” PsyArXiv. March 5. doi:10.31234/osf.io/bwxm9

Abstract: We conducted a series of meta-analytic tests on experiments in which participants read perspective-taking instructions—i.e., written instructions to imagine a distressed persons’ point of view (“imagine-self” and “imagine-other” instructions), or to inhibit such actions (“remain-objective” instructions)—and afterwards reported how much empathic concern they experienced after learning about the distressed person. If people spontaneously empathize with others, then participants who receive remain-objective instructions should report less empathic concern than do participants who do not receive instructions; if people can deliberately increase how much empathic concern they experience, then imagine-self and imagine-other instructions should increase empathic concern relative to not receiving any instructions. Random-effects models revealed that medium-sized differences between imagine and remain-objective instructions were driven by remain-objective instructions. The results were robust to most corrections for bias. Our conclusions were not qualified by the study characteristics we examined, but most theoretically relevant moderators have not yet been thoroughly studied.