Empathy promotes altruistic behavior in economic interactions

Abstract

What are the determinants of altruism? While economists assume that altruism is mainly driven by fairness norms, social psychologists consider empathy to be a key motivator for altruistic behavior. To unite these two theories, we conducted an experiment in which we compared behavior in a standard economic game that assesses altruism (the so-called Dictator Game) with a Dictator Game in which participants' behavioral choices were preceded either by an empathy induction or by a control condition without empathy induction. The results of this within-subject manipulation show that the empathy induction substantially increased altruistic behavior. Moreover, the increase in experienced empathy predicted over 40% of the increase in sharing behavior. These data extend standard economic theories that altruism is based on fairness considerations, by showing that empathic feelings can be a key motivator for altruistic behavior in economic interactions.

Figure 1. Empathy-induction increased altruistic behavior.

(a) Timeline of the Empathic DG. After seeing suffering others (empathy induction) or others in everyday activities (control condition), participants indicated by button press how many points they wanted to share with the person(s) in the video. A subsequent screen presented the results of the decision. (b) Participants (n = 50) transferred more points following the empathy induction as opposed to the control condition and the standard DG. Asterisks denote levels of statistical significance of pairwise comparisons with ***p < 0.001 and **p < 0.01; error bars denote s.e.m.

Figure 2. Mean increase of self-reported feelings of empathy from control to empathy-inducing videos predicted mean increase in altruistic behavior from control to empathy-inducing videos (n = 50) in the Empathic DG.