Empathy and correct mental state inferences both promote prosociality

Abstract

In a world with rapidly increasing population that competes for the earth's limited resources, cooperation is crucial. While research showed that empathizing with another individual in need enhances prosociality, it remains unclear whether correctly inferring the other's inner, mental states on a more cognitive level (i.e., mentalizing) elicits helping behavior as well. We applied a video-based laboratory task probing empathy and a performance measure of mentalizing in adult volunteers (N = 94) and assessed to which extent they were willing to help the narrators in the videos. We replicate findings that an empathy induction leads to more prosocial decisions. Crucially, we also found that correct mentalizing increases the willingness to help. This evidence helps clarify an inconsistent picture of the relation between mentalizing and prosociality.

Figure 1

Results for prosocial decisions. Small dots represent individual data points, and dots with error bars show point estimates for the mean of the respective condition with 95% confidence intervals. Boxplots depict condition medians along with interquartile ranges, while shaded areas at the right of condition means show smoothed density distributions. (A) There was an increase in prosocial decisions following emotional vs neutral videos. (B) The interaction between accuracy (correct vs incorrect) and question type (factual vs mentalizing) on prosociality was significant (indicated by upper asterisk). Follow-up Bonferroni-corrected t-tests (lower asterisk) revealed an increase in prosocial decisions after correct vs incorrect mentalizing, whereas no difference in prosociality was observed after correct vs incorrect factual reasoning. *** indicates p < 0.001.

Figure 2

Scatter plots depicting interindividual differences. Grey-shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals. (A) Relationship between valence ratings and prosocial decisions for the two video conditions (neutral vs. emotional), respectively. (B) Relationship between prosocial decisions and mean accuracy of the inference questions for the two question types (factual reasoning vs. mentalizing), respectively. rs: Spearman correlation coefficient, rt: Kendall’s tau correlation coefficient.

Figure 3

Result of the intraindividual correlations between valence and prosocial decision. Small dots represent individual data points. Boxplot depicts the correlation median along with interquartile ranges, while the shaded area at the right of the mean shows a smoothed density distribution.

Figure 4

EmpaToM trial sequence. In each trial, the participant is presented with an autobiographical narration that could vary on two dimensions (emotionality of the video: neutral vs. emotionally negative; ToM requirement: videos with and without ToM demand). After each video, participants rated their own affect (valence rating) and their compassion for the person in the video. This is followed by, a question either requiring mental state inference (for videos with ToM demand) or factual reasoning (for videos without ToM demand), and a prosociality rating (adapted from Kanske et al.). Note that the exemplary images depicted in this figure are not based on the original video stimuli used in the EmpaToM task but, due to license restrictions, have been replaced with re-staged images showing (a meanwhile much younger version of) one of the authors.