Why do people engage with the suffering of strangers? Exploring epistemic, eudaimonic, social, and affective motives

Figures & data

Figure 1. Characteristics of the reported situations of suffering, the strangers involved, and the means of accessing the information (Study 1).

Figure 2. Motives to engage with the suffering of strangers (Study 1).

Figure 3. Endorsement of five clusters of motives emerging from PCA (Study 2).

Data availability statement

The studies' materials are detailed in the Supplementary Material. The codebook (Study 1) and the quantitative data (Stusy 2) are available at the Open Science Framework. The raw qualitative data is available upon request.

Ethics approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Faculty Ethics Review Board previous to data collection (Study 1: #2021-SP-13343, April 8th, 2021. Study 2: #2021-SP-14285, January 18th, 2022).

Declaration of contribution

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the studies. All authors contributed equally to the project conceptualisation, methodology, original draft writing, reviewing and editing. Anastassia Vivanco Carlevari contributed with a leading role in data curation, analysis, funding acquisition, project administration, and visualisation. Suzanne Oosterwijk contributed with a leading role in supervision and validation, and supporting role in data curation, formal analysis, investigation, project administration, and visualization. Gerben A. van Kleef contributed with a leading role in supervision, and supporting role in data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, project administration, validation, and visualisation.