Empathy among college students and criminal justice majors: Identifying predispositional traits and the role of education

Abstract

This paper examines empathy among a purposive sample (N = 633) of college and university students in the northeastern United States. Mehrabian’s Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES) was used to measure empathy levels among criminal justice (CJ) and other majors. Descriptive and inferential statistics are used to compare scale and item means across gender, school size and type, grade level, age, and other variables. The authors also examine the relationship in the sample between empathy and attitudes toward punitiveness. Results indicate that male CJ majors possess the lowest levels of empathy, followed by males of other majors, female CJ majors and females majoring in other disciplines. Gender, major, and grade/class level were found to be important in predicting or influencing empathy. Possible explanations for these differences in empathy are offered and the pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

Notes

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, November 1999, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.