A new study highlights how the different ways we experience empathy affect our willingness to help others. (Image credit: Pexels)
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is a trait that can have a positive impact on society. It's no secret that the world today is divisive and lacking in compassion due in some part to political and religious differences, unending war, socioeconomic differences and a number of other factors. While fostering empathy for others may seem like a difficult or impossible endeavor, researchers have released a paper revealing how the different ways we experience empathy affect our willingness to help others.
"Empathy is the ability to understand the situation of another person and is vital for prosocial behaviors. However, we know that empathy isn't just one thing - we can experience it very differently, either as personal distress or compassionate concern for that other person," states McGill psychology professor and co-author Signy Sheldon. Their findings show how another form of empathy, personal distress, is more prominent when imagining those situations and could be a catalyst for looking to help others.
The researchers conducted a trio of online experiments where participants were tasked with truly visualizing themselves in another person's shoes. The results revealed that when people simulated distressing scenarios of other individuals, they felt more personal distress over those that were not simulated. They also found imagining those scenarios in such a way increased the willingness to help that individual. Their findings could bring researchers closer to cracking the code of human behavior and the link between our mental experiences and prosocial actions. It will also bring scientists a step closer to understanding why some situations and people seem more empathetic than others.
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