The relationship between empathic concern and perceived personal costs for helping and how it is affected by similarity perceptions

ABSTRACT

One explanation for the positive effect of state empathic concern on helping is that such other-focused feelings reduce helpers’ perceptions of their personal costs for helping. Results from an experiment (N = 186) supported these assumptions and showed further that self-focused feelings of personal distress, another form of affective empathy, were a positive predictor of perceived costs. Moreover, I examined whether the strength of the negative relationship between empathic concern and personal costs depends on two forms of perceived similarity between the helper and the target, person similarity and experience similarity. For this purpose, I manipulated person similarity by portraying the target as either similar or dissimilar with regard to essential characteristics, and assessed experience similarity by asking whether or not participants share the target’s negative experience. As predicted, the negative relationship between empathic concern and perceived personal costs was strongest when person similarity was high and experience similarity low.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathic concern
• personal distress
• helping
• costs
• similarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/aw9gm/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/aw9gm/.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

1. Please note that I consider focus of attention as a unidimensional construct with self-focus vs. other-focus as endpoints of one continuum in the present work (see also Brucks & Van Lange, 2007; Siem & Barth, 2019; Van Lange, 1999). I acknowledge that there are alternative approaches assuming that self- and other-focus can be independent from each other. However, these approaches understand low self-focus mainly as being “decentered” and “aware of one’s place in the grander scheme of things” (Nadelhoffer & Wright, 2017, p. 274), while I see low self-focus as a reduced attention to self-targeted information, cognitions, and feelings. I thus felt justified to use the terms “increasing self-focus” (or “decreasing self-focus”) and “decreasing other-focus” (or “increasing other-focus”) interchangeably.

2. Please note that the study contained additional items to measure participants’ perceived personal costs for helping in the form of psychological aversion. Specifically, they were presented with three items measuring subtly aversive feelings (uneasiness, tension, and insecurity; Cronbach’s = α = .79), and were asked to report their negative interaction expectancies with regard to the upcoming interaction on three items (“I think that the interaction will be rather ardous for me.”, “I think the interaction will be rather stressful for me.”, and “I think that the interaction will be rather unpleasant for me.”) by using 7-point scales from 1 (not true at all) to 7 (completely true) (Cronbach’s α = .79). To reduce the complexity of the presentation, I focus on participants’ blatantly aversive feelings in the paper as the measure with the highest face validity and internal reliability (Cronbach’s α = .92). The results from analyses considering all three personal costs indicators simultaneously as mediators are reported in the Supplemental Material and can be summarized as follows: Including subtly aversive feelings and negative interaction expectancies as additional mediators in the repspective analyses, did not change the mediational role of blatantly aversive feelings. Moreover, the expected mediational role of blatantly aversive feelings could be replicated for negative interaction expectancies. It could not be replicated for subtly aversive feelings, though, perhaps because feelings of uneasiness, tension, and insecurity simply reflect feelings people commonly experience when about to meet a stranger, and are not specifically linked to the perception of personal costs for helping.

3. Please note that I presented the items measuring perceived person similarity, personal distress, and empathic concern as well as the items measuring personal costs for helping intermixed with a number of filler items. Had I presented participants only with “matching” responses (i.e., perceived person similarity after receiving the similar or dissimilar profile of the partner; empathic concern and personal distress items after receiving the message describing the partner’s predicament; personal costs items after receiving the message describing the partner’s suggestion for the upcoming interaction), this might have raised their doubt about the authenticity of their interaction partner and her or his messages.

4. A possible explanation for this unexpected finding could be that the study setting was somewhat ambiguous regarding how easy it would be to escape the situation, resulting in some participants perceiving it as an “easy escape” situation and others perceiving it as a “difficult escape” situation. Importantly, personal distress has been shown to be a positive predictor of helping in “difficult escape” situations, but a negative or non-significant predictor in “easy escape” situations (e.g., Batson et al., 1983). This might have resulted in the overall non-significant relationship between personal distress and helping intentions observed in the present study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Birte Siem

Birte Siem is a Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology of Social Work at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her research interests include prosocial emotions, prosocial behavior, intergroup relations, and social inequality.