Conventional wisdom suggests that empathy lies at the heart of a more prosocial, caring, and responsive society. Numerous books, educational programs, and internet podcasts have all trumpeted the importance of teaching and building empathy. Advice columns are full of calls for greater empathy, while movements like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter do the same. But what if empathy isn't really related to moral behavior? Increasingly, researchers are starting to wonder if that really is the case.
What is Empathy?
It's important to define what we mean by "empathy." In the past, empathy has often been viewed as a single, unitary construct. Recently though, researchers are viewing it as a more complicated phenomenon. We think there are three kinds of empathy:
- The first is known as affective or emotional empathy. This is defined as feeling the same thing that other people feel. So, watching someone crying makes you want to cry too. It is a very visceral feeling that ties a person's emotional responses to those of others.
- The second kind is known as cognitive empathy. This means understanding what other people are feeling. However, empathizing with someone cognitively does not necessarily mean that you will share their feelings. For example, a pickpocket may recognize a tourist as feeling anxious and confused, and may feel a sense of excitement that they can be exploited as an easy target, rather than sharing their negative feelings. This is a very logical, detached, way of understanding others' feelings without necessarily sharing them yourself.
- The third kind of empathy goes by a number of different names. Whether it's called moral empathy, compassionate empathy, or (our preference) sympathetic empathy, it is defined by caring about what someone feels. So, while empathizing affectively means feeling another's emotion and empathizing cognitively involves understanding the other's emotion, sympathetic empathy entails feeling compassion in response to the other's emotion because you care about how they feel. Thus, one might feel like crying when you see your neighbor crying over their lost dog, or one might understand just how sad they are, but sympathetic empathy motivates you to want to actually comfort your neighbor. We believe that this is the kind of empathy that really matters when it comes to behaving in a more prosocial, caring way.
To better understand whether this could be the case, we looked at a sample of 150 adolescents, both boys and girls, with an average age of 15. We chose to look at adolescents instead of adults because adolescence is a period when many moral behaviors and patterns begin to clearly emerge and solidify. Participants filled out questionnaires describing themselves on three kinds of empathy, some general personality traits, a specific personality trait (psychopathy—the tendency to lie, exploit others, act impulsively, and feel no remorse), and their prosocial (helping and sharing) and aggressive behavior tendencies.
What Matches Up with the Three Kinds of Empathy?
Affective empathy correlated with the personality traits of sentimentality, anxiousness, and a desire to connect with others. Seeing as affective empathy means sharing others' feelings, these are not surprising correlates. Given that many other researchers have suggested affective empathy is important for prosocial behavior it was surprising that, when controlling for the other kinds of empathy, it was not linked to more prosocial traits or behavior nor to less aggressive behavior.
We then turned to cognitive empathy. There were no links between cognitive empathy and individuals' personality traits, but it was related to prosocial behavior even when other forms of empathy were considered, suggesting believing that one has the ability to understand other people is related to actually helping other people.
But it was sympathetic empathy that really stood out. It was related to being more modest and humble, sentimental, and connected, as well as patient and forgiving, and having fewer psychopathic traits. Unlike the other two kinds of empathy, it predicted both more prosocial behavior and less aggressive behavior, independent of the other kinds of empathy.
Therefore, it seems that parents, educators, and mental health professionals who wish to promote prosocial behavior and reduce antisocial behavior should be mindful that when it comes to promoting positive behavior and altruism, not all forms of empathy are equal. Sharing and understanding others' feelings are not enough without appreciating the importance of caring about those feelings. Caring is the best predictor of helping others and not harming them, at least according to these adolescents' self-reports.
For Further Reading
Brazil, K. J., Volk, A. A., & Dane, A. V. (2022). Is empathy linked to prosocial and antisocial traits and behavior? It depends on the form of empathy. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cbs0000330
Decety, J., & Cowell, J. M. (2014). Friends or foes: Is empathy necessary for moral behavior? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(5), 525–537. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614545130
Jordan, M. R., Amir, D., & Bloom, P. (2016). Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct? Emotion, 16(8), 1107–1116. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000228
Anthony Volk is a professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. He is a multidisciplinary scholar who studies bullying, parenting, personality, and the evolution of childhood.
Kristopher Brazil is finishing his PhD thesis in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. His doctoral research focuses on studying psychopathy from an evolutionary perspective.
Andrew Dane is the co-Chair of the Department of Psychology at Brock University. He studies adolescent bullying and cyberbullying along with youth mental health.
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