Reducing Sex Differences in Children’s Empathy for Animals Through a Training Intervention

ABSTRACT

Humane education programs designed to increase children’s empathy for animals are becoming more common. A quasi-experiment tested the effectiveness of one such program by comparing 80 children who had completed the program with a control group of 57 children who had not. The children read a story involving an injured dog and rated the degree of empathic concern they felt for him. The results showed that girls tended to express more empathy for a dog than did boys, but this difference was not significant for children who underwent an animal empathy training program. This suggests that humane education programs can reduce sex differences by increasing boys’ empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Animals
• children
• empathy
• empathy training
• gender differences

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Lena Almqvist for her help with the principal components analysis.

Notes

1. The emotions intended to measure empathy were presented in Swedish and were back-translated using the method described by Triandis and Berry (1980).

2. Due to the marginally significant correlation between empathy and age, we reran both ANOVAs using age as a covariate. The pattern of results and significance decisions did not change, and since the correlation was not significant and was opposite to what would be expected, we chose not to report the ANCOVA results.