Abstract: Sharing others’ emotional experience through empathy has been widely linked to prosocial behavior, i.e., behavior that aims to improve others’ welfare. However, different aspects of a person’s welfare do not always move in concert. The present research investigated how empathy affects tradeoffs between two different aspects of others’ welfare: their experience (quality of life) and existence (duration of life). Three experiments offer evidence that empathy increases the priority people place on reducing others’ suffering relative to prolonging their lives. Participants assigned to high or low empathy conditions considered scenarios in which saving a person’s life was incompatible with extinguishing the person’s suffering. Higher empathy for a suffering accident victim was associated with greater preference to let the person die rather than keep the person alive. Participants expressed greater preference to end the lives of friends than strangers (Experiment 1), those whose perspectives they had taken than those whom they considered from afar (Experiment 2), and those who remained alert and actively suffering than those whose injuries had rendered them unconscious (Experiment 3). These results highlight a distinction between empathy’s effects on the motivation to reduce another person’s suffering and its effects on the prosocial behaviors that sometimes, but do not necessarily, follow from that motivation, including saving the person’s life. Results have implications for scientific understanding of the relationship between empathy and morality and for contexts in which people make decisions on behalf of others.
Discussion
People are often encouraged to cultivate empathy toward others because doing so is expected to be better for those individuals. The present research explored the question, “better” in what sense? Participants faced hypothetical tradeoffs between two aspects of another person’s welfare: the quality and the duration of the person’s life. In otherwise identical situations, social distance and lower empathy were associated with greater preference for a suffering person to be rescued from an accident and continue to live. Social closeness and higher empathy were associated with greater preference for the victim to die on the spot, reflecting a greater desire to extinguish the victim’s suffering. These results caution against an oversimplified view of empathy in which it leads to better outcomes for a target person in a general sense. Instead, these results support the view that empathy motivates behaviors that are better in the specific sense that they aim to improve the target’s psychological experience—something that often, but not necessarily, goes hand in-hand with other desired outcomes.
More broadly, the current findings highlight the importance of distinguishing proximate from ultimate levels of explanation [59] when considering the motivational consequences of empathy. From an ultimate or evolutionary perspective, elevated empathic responses to the suffering of close others could serve adaptive functions by prompting actions that, on average, keep close others alive [1,14,60]. Because psychological suffering can often serve as a useful proxy for damage to other aspects of a person’s welfare, a person’s motivation to reduce close others’ suffering might, on average, have the effect of prolonging the lives of individuals who could propagate that person’s genes (e.g., children, siblings) [1] and/or reciprocate by helping the person survive some future mishap (e.g., friends, neighbors) [60], thereby increasing fitness. Yet, if, at a proximate level, empathy operates on psychological experience, then empathy will not necessarily lead to typical helping behaviors on any given occasion. In particular, elevated empathic responses to close others could appear to be maladaptive in instances when behaviors that would promote the other person’s existence and experience are misaligned.
These findings demonstrate that empathizing with another person can have detrimental effects on aspects of that same person’s welfare, joining other findings that empathizing with one person can have detrimental effects on the welfare of other people [61,62]. Specifically, past research has shown that empathizing with one person can lead the empathizer to privilege that person’s welfare over the welfare of other individuals with whom one has empathized less [63]. Whereas those studies suggest that empathy can motivate decisions that violate group-based moral principles (e.g., fairness), the current studies suggest that empathy can also motivate decisions that violate individual-based moral principles, at least as they are typically understood, including avoiding harm [64,65]. At the extreme, the current results suggest that empathy sometimes increases preferences for ending a person’s life. On some views, this would mean that empathy can increase people’s preference that the ultimate form of harm (death) befall the target of empathy him- or herself.
The current findings accordingly inform the relationship between empathy and morality. In past research, a role for harm aversion in moral decisions has been discussed at length [66–68], but whether empathy selectively increases an aversion to certain types of harm has not characterized. The current results help to clarify the scope of empathy-related harm aversion by suggesting that empathy may increase people’s aversion, first and foremost, to others’ affective or psychological harm—i.e., their pain and suffering. To the extent that empathy sometimes does motivate life-saving, it could be the case that empathy primarily increases the aversion, not to death itself, but to the suffering that often precedes it.
If empathizing with another person can have detrimental effects on that person’s welfare, why have these effects been mostly absent in past research? One possible explanation is that past research has predominantly studied decisions in which one course of action is uniformly better for the target person and another course of action is uniformly worse [69]. In these situations, benefits to the quality and duration of a person’s life move in tandem, and a motivation to improve another’s experience could bring with it benefits to the person’s existence. In contrast, the current studies focus on decisions in which the quality and duration of a person’s life are in conflict, suggesting that the link between empathy and the motivation to engage in prototypical helping behaviors (like saving another’s life), may hinge on the extent to which those behaviors are compatible with improving the person’s experience.
The use of hypothetical scenarios in the present work brings with it several limitations on generalizability. First, these scenarios were not meant to reflect decisions that typical individuals are likely to face in everyday life but rather to isolate certain factors in a way that made it possible to illuminate the consequences of empathic motivation. Just as individuals in daily life rarely name the color of ink in which a word is written, as they do in the Stroop task, or flip train switches, as they do in trolley dilemmas, participants are unlikely to find themselves in a position of deciding whether someone in a burning building should be rescued or die on the spot. By their extreme nature, these scenarios enabled us to create conditions in which extinguishing a person’s suffering and prolonging his or her life were incompatible, making it possible to capture shifts in people’s preferences toward one outcome at the cost of the other. Second, the current studies deliberately did not ask participants what they would do if they were personally involved in the situation. Additional research is needed to understand how the observed effect of empathy on participants’ preferences to end a suffering person’s life interacts with other motivations that guide behavior, including the motivation to be a moral person, to follow through on responsibilities, to avoid guilt, to abide by the law, and others.
Future research is needed to explore implications of the current findings for domains in which people regularly do make decisions on behalf of others, including medical decision-making, where a need for empathy is often cited [70–74]. In particular, if empathy increases the priority placed on a person’s experience, empathy may be more beneficial in some kinds of medical situations than in others. For example, empathy might help a physician perform an injection carefully or convey bad news sensitively; in cases like these, there is little conflict between behaviors that promote the quality and duration of a patient’s life. However, empathizing with a patient in a tradeoff situation between his or her experience and long-term health may tug physicians toward maximizing the quality of the patient’s experience in the moment rather than the number of moments in the patient’s future. This possibility is broadly consistent with past research on end-of-life decisions demonstrating that family members and nurses are more inclined to end the life of a terminally ill patient when the person has intractable pain [75] or is unable to carry out valued life activities [76]. In turn, these results suggest the tentative prediction, open to future research, that physicians with lower trait empathy might be more inclined to take courses of action to prolong a suffering patient’s life.
In interpreting these findings, it is worth noting that our experiments measured empathic emotion, or “affective empathy” [21]. As such, we anticipate that these findings will apply to other situations in which individuals empathize with a suffering person, as characterized by experiencing an affective state congruent with that person’s situation [9,15,16]. A subset of those experiences may also be accompanied by feelings of empathic concern—feelings of caring, compassion, or pity for the other person [47]—which could combine with the phenomenon observed here to guide a perceiver’s ultimate decision about which course of action to pursue [50]. Relatedly, future research will be needed to characterize more precisely the respective contributions to decision-making of (i) the strength of the empathic response to another person’s suffering itself and (ii) the strength of the motivation to help a suffering person with whom one has empathized.
These findings do not necessarily challenge the overall observation that empathy motivates improving others’ welfare. However, they do help to specify the kind of welfare that empathy motivates improving and point to some of the potential consequences of that motivation. In the realm of individual decision-making, it is well known that people’s affective responses can lead them to pursue immediately desirable psychological states (e.g., the pleasure of chocolate chip cookies) at the expense of other goals (e.g., maintaining a svelte figure). Similarly, empathizing with the affective experiences of other people might boost one’s motivation to prioritize the quality of those people’s internal states at the expense of other aspects of their welfare—including, at the extreme, the durations of their lives.
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