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

Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Perspective Taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern. William H. B. McAuliffe et al. Personality and Social Psychology Review, November 27, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868319887599

Abstract: We conducted a series of meta-analytic tests on experiments in which participants read perspective-taking instructions—that is, 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 upon 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 in a “no-instructions” control condition; 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 remain-objective instructions reduced empathic concern, but “imagine” instructions did not significantly increase it. The results were robust to most corrections for bias. Our conclusions were not qualified by the study characteristics we examined, but most relevant moderators have not yet been thoroughly studied.

Keywords: empathy, perspective taking, altruism, meta-analysis, publication bias


Introduction

Perspective taking, the act of imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, is a common precursor to prosocial behav-ior (Batson, 2011). Researchers have also found that per-spective taking causes empathic concern (an emotion that is congruent with and elicited by perceived suffering), which reflects altruistic motivation (i.e., a non+instrumental desire to improve the welfare of another person). But do people as a matter of course experience empathic concern for needy others they observe?

Here, we present a series of meta-analyses designed to address three questions: (a) Do people spontaneously empathize with those in distress? If so, then (b) could they experience even more empathic concern if they deliberately engaged in perspective taking? Finally, (c) do moderators—such as the identity of the victim or the medium by which participants learn about the victim’s need—affect the extent to which people spontaneously empathize or successfully increase empathic concern via deliberate effort?1 To assess to what extent our answers to these questions depend on specific assumptions about how publication bias affects the primary literature, we compared the results from nine different esti-mators, each of which depend on either a different model of how publication bias works or how to best correct for it.Extant theorizing is divided on whether people will experi-ence empathic concern in response to distressed others in the normal course of experience. On one hand, much research suggests that people avoid empathic concern by default, at least when helping requires a considerable sacrifice (Cameron & Payne, 2011; Zaki, 2014). This tendency might explain why numerous tragedies—especially those involving large numbers of people occurring far away—routinely fail to sus-tain bystanders’ emotional attention (Loewenstein & Small, 2007; Slovic, Västfjäll, Erlandsson, & Gregory, 2017). On the other hand, empathizing may come more naturally in situations where the perceived costs of helping do not overwhelm how much observers value victims. For example, the experiments that established the relationship between empathic concern and altruistic motivation typically had participants learn about just one victim who is a fellow in-group member (Batson, 2011). Another set of experiments found that participants reported the same other-oriented thoughts and feelings upon deliberately trying to take the perspective of a single victim as when they just responded naturally. Thoughts that distracted from focusing on a victim’s needs, such as thinking about her appearance rather than her plight, did not occur naturally. Rather, they were common only when participants deliberately attempted to not consider how the victim felt about her plight (Davis et al., 2004). Notably, participants who tried to emotionally distance themselves from the victim still reported strong other-oriented emotions, suggesting that they found it difficult to respond with apathy.Even if people sometimes do spontaneously empathize with victims, it is nevertheless possible that they have untapped potential for how much empathic concern they could experience. For instance, multiple research groups have found that compassion training—which involves deliberately cultivating concern for others—increases helping of distressed groups relative to control trainings (Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011; Weng et al., 2013). Given that neither research group intentionally recruited participants who were particularly low in trait empathic concern, the efficacy of compassion training implies that normally empathic people could, with effort, experience more empathic concern than they do by default.