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Empathy, Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment

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Abstract

Online perspective-taking experiments have demonstrated great potential in reducing prejudice towards disadvantaged groups such as refugees or Roma. These experiments trigger the psychological process of empathy and evoke feelings of compassion. Meanwhile, a growing literature argues that compassion towards the poor is an important predictor of support for social welfare. This paper bridges these two literatures and predicts that perspective-taking with the poor could increase support for welfare assistance. This hypothesis is tested in a pre-registered experiment conducted on a large and diverse online sample of US citizens (N = 3,431). Our results suggest that participants engaged with the perspective-taking exercise, wrote essays expressing strong emotions, but perspective-taking had no meaningful causal effect on general attitudes towards social welfare. We can confidently rule out effects exceeding 2 points on a 100-point scale. These results indicate that perspective-taking with a poor, deserving individual does not necessarily reduce stereotypes about the poor in general; nor does it change views towards redistributive policies.

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Data and Code Availibility

All experimental materials, data and computer code necessary to replicate or reproduce our analyses are available at the following Open Science Foundation repository: https://osf.io/fmjph/.

Notes

  1. Note that classic works in the perspective-taking literature (e.g. Batson et al., 1997) define empathy analogous to what we call compassion (for a discussion see Goetz et al. 2010). We find it more fruitful to define empathy broadly, as feeling others’ feelings, which may include compassion, but also other emotions not associated with help like anger or sadness. We reserve compassion for feelings inducing a motivation to help.

  2. Interestingly, the first famous perspective-taking study relied on a heavy dose of deservingness cues upon describing their target individual, Katie Banks, who “was desperately trying to take care of her surviving younger brother and sister while she finished her last year of college ... [after her] parents and a sister had recently been killed in an automobile crash” (Batson et al., 1997, 753)

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Neil Malhotra, Kristina Jessen Hansen, Claire Adida, and Michael Bang Petersen for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Alexander Bor

  2. Department of Political Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Simonovits

  3. Rajk College for Advanced Studies, Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Simonovits

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Bor, A., Simonovits, G. Empathy, Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment. Polit Behav 43, 1247–1264 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09728-4

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