Associations between empathy and altruistic sharing behavior in Chinese adults

Abstract

Previous research has shown that affective empathy, rather than cognitive empathy, significantly predicts people’s altruistic sharing behavior in economic games. However, most of these studies were conducted in Western populations. There might be cultural differences in the relations between empathy and altruism due to different levels of empathy between Western and Asian individuals. In this study, we measured different aspects of empathy in Chinese adults as well as their allocation offers in the dictator and ultimatum games. We found that cognitive empathy, but not affective empathy, was a significant predictor of adults’ altruistic sharing behavior in the two economic games. Subjective family income was also revealed to be a significant predictor of individuals’ altruism in the ultimatum game, such that people with lower subjective family income tended to be more generous. Potential implications of our findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Affective empathy
• altruism
• cognitive empathy
• dictator game
• ultimatum game

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, [2018M633484] and National Social Science Foundation of China [14ZDB161].