Abstract
Feeling empathy for one person in need while being aware of others may increase the motivational ambivalence between the motive of helping the one and the motive of helping the others, and such motivational ambivalence may reduce the helping directed to the person in need. To test these hypotheses we carried out three studies in which participants were faced with a real case of a child in need. In Study 1, empathy, awareness of others and motivational ambivalence were allowed to occur naturally and subsequently measured. In Study 2, empathy and awareness of others were experimentally manipulated, and motivational ambivalence measured. In Study 3, we tested how empathy and motivational ambivalence influenced an actual helping decision. Taken together, the results supported our two hypotheses. The present research offers insight into processes not previously considered in the research, but which may influence decisions about assistance to others in need.
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Notes
The degrees of freedom vary slightly between the different correlations because three participants did not properly complete the questionnaire containing the empathy index, and one participant forgot to answer the question related to the motive to help other children.
With a descriptive aim, we conducted a median split for empathy (MD = 5.12) and motivational ambivalence (MD = 5) and crossed both variables to test the percentage of participants who decided to help the child in each cell. The highest percentage of helping was found among those who reported high empathy and low motivational ambivalence (67%–8 of 12), and the lowest percentage among those who reported low empathy and high motivational ambivalence (10%–1 of 10), followed by those who reported either low or high in both empathy and motivational ambivalence (24%–5 of 21 in both cells). The planned comparisons made by means of loglinear analysis showed that high-empathy/low-ambivalence participants helped more than the other participants either taken together (i.e., 1-versus-3 pattern, χ 2 (1, 64) = 8.70, p < .01) or separately (i.e., 1-versus-1 patterns, χ 2s (1, 64) > 5.38, ps < .04).
An additional issue that deserves attention is the ability to grasp the scope of the problem when one considers a collection of people in need. For example, Kahneman and Ritov (1994) showed that people may underestimate how much it costs to solve a large-scale problem (“Help end hunger in Sudan”) in comparison to a local-scale problem (“Help end hunger in your village”). Consequently, it could be that helping a specific individual who is presented as one among many other individuals diminishes helping because it is no longer clear what one could do to make a difference. Analyzing the combination of this factor with the process of awareness of others should be considered in future research. We thank one of the reviewers of this work for this suggestion.
Up to our knowledge, there are two previous works that used Thompson et al. (1995) approach to address the measurement of motivational ambivalence: Fong and Tiedens (2002) tested whether women in a high status position feel simultaneous desires to build relationships and display power; and Mikulincer et al. (2010) tested whether attachment-anxious individuals exhibited strong motivational ambivalence regarding closeness in romantic relationships.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by PSI2008-04849 (Spanish Ministry of Education and Science). The authors extend their gratitude to Pilar Carrera, Eric Stocks and two reviewers for their helpful comments on a first version of this article, Carlos Oceja for his assistance in editing the stimuli used in Study 2, and Susana Sariego and David Weston for their work in the preparation of the English version.
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Oceja, L., Ambrona, T., López-Pérez, B. et al. When the victim is one among others: Empathy, awareness of others and motivational ambivalence. Motiv Emot 34, 110–119 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9161-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9161-1