Empathy as a Mediator of Attitudes Toward Infidelity Among College Students

Abstract

This study examined attitudes about infidelity among college students. Due to increased sexual opportunities and normalization of casual sex in the college campus environment, commitment level is generally more likely to be lower than for post-college-aged individuals. While lower commitment may contribute to infidelity among college students, we aimed to more closely examine the relative role of individual characteristics. The literature has shown that individuals with certain personality traits, such as narcissism and an insecure attachment style, are more likely to commit infidelity, but less is known about the interaction between sex and these traits and about possible underlying mechanisms that account for why some people resist the temptation to be unfaithful and others don't. Working under the assumption that higher empathy might be the underlying mechanism that enables individuals to resist the temptation to be unfaithful, we demonstrated that empathy partially mediates the relationship between sex, narcissism, entitlement, attachment style and attitudes toward infidelity in college students. Thus, college students who are securely attached, low in narcissism, and high in empathy are more likely to oppose sexual behavior outside of their dating relationships despite the fact that their commitment level may be relatively low.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Bernie Gorman, PhD, for lending his time and expertise for the statistical analyses—perhaps especially so for helping us grapple with a new procedure for assessing mediation.

Notes

We also ran an analysis using Baron and Kenny's (1986) procedure, yielding similar results. When empathy was controlled for, sex and narcissism were no longer significantly predictive of attitudes toward infidelity, yet avoidant attachment still had a unique impact. The Sobel test was used to determine whether empathy could be said to have a mediating effect on the relationship between each predictor and attitudes toward infidelity. Empathy significantly mediated the effect of sex (z = −2.68, SE =.04, p <.05), narcissism (z = 2.06, SE =.004, p <.05), entitlement (z = 2.10, SE =.01, p <.05), and avoidant attachment (z = 2.06, SE =.002, p <. 05) on attitudes toward infidelity. Since anxious attachment was not significantly correlated with either empathy or attitudes toward infidelity, empathy could not be considered to mediate the relationship between anxious attachment and attitudes toward infidelity, and therefore the corresponding analysis was not performed.

We ran an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine whether being high or low on the personality variables of empathy, attachment style, narcissism, and entitlement might interact in such a way so that some combination of variables might be a stronger predictor of attitudes toward infidelity than each variable individually. We found no significant interactions among these variables.