Charities often tug at your heartstrings when looking for
donations. Each year at the Austin City
Limits music festival, for example, Austin Pets Alive! a local no-kill dog shelter sets up on the
path that people walk toward the entrance to Zilker Park. They bring several cute dogs and encourage
people to come and pet the dogs. They
also ask for donations to help support the shelter’s activities. After playing for a minute with these cute
and loving creatures, it is almost impossible to keep yourself from reaching
into your wallet to support the group.
What is going on here?
There is a lot of research suggesting that empathy increases
people’s desire to help others. Empathy
is the ability to share other people’s emotion. The better able you are to feel
what someone else is feeling, the more likely you are to want to help them when
they are in a difficult situation. This
ability also extends to animals. We are
able to project feelings onto animals like dogs, and that increases our need to
help them.
But, what is it about empathy that promotes the need to
help?
An interesting paper by Louisa Pavey, Tobias Greitemeyer,
and Paul Sparks in the May, 2012 issue of Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin explored this question. They suggest that empathy increases people’s
intrinsic motivation to be helpful.
A theory of motivation called Self-Determination Theory
developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci suggests that people engage in
behaviors for one of two broad reasons.
Sometimes, people have internal or intrinsic
motivation. They simply find these
behaviors desirable. Sometimes people
engage in a behavior because it is expected of them or they will be punished if
they do not perform the behavior. In
this case, they are externally or extrinsically
motivated.
Pavey, Greitemeyer, and Sparks suggest that empathy
increases people’s intrinsic motivation to want to help, and that pushes them
to act. They tested this proposal in two
ways.
In one study, they measured people’s general level of
empathy using a questionnaire. They also
asked a series of questions about why they might help other people. Some of these questions focused on intrinsic
motivations (I help people because I want to).
Other questions focused on extrinsic motivations (I help people because
it is expected of me). They asked people
how likely they were to engage in a series of helping behaviors like donating
money to charity and giving time to the community in the next two weeks. After two weeks, they asked how much people
actually engaged in these behaviors.
As you might expect, people who had high scores on the
empathy scale were more likely to say they would help others and to actually
help others than people low on the empathy scale. Other statistical analyses found that this
difference was best explained because people who scored high on the empathy
scale had a higher level of intrinsic motivation to help others than those who
scored low on the empathy scale. Empathy
was not highly related to extrinsic motivation to be helpful.
Of interest, though, the researchers also found that it is
possible to increase people’s level of empathy.
To do this, they had people read a story about a woman suffering from
depression. Some people were asked to
focus on how that woman must be feeling.
Others were asked to focus on the facts and details of her life. The people who focused on her feelings felt
more empathy than those who focused on the facts. Those with higher empathy also expressed more
intrinsic motivation to be helpful and rated themselves as more likely to
provide help to this woman.
There are two interesting aspects of this research. First, empathy seems to influence behavior by
increasing people’s desire to be helpful.
Second, even people who are not generally high in empathy can be put in
situations that make them more sensitive to other people’s feelings. That is
why the animal shelter was successful.
They helped people to feel empathy for the animals in their care, and
that led to a desire to be helpful.
