Morally Selective Empathy: Children Show Less Empathy Toward Antisocial Puppets Than Prosocial Puppets

• In Event: Who Deserves Moral Concern? The Perception of Humanity and Its Role in Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Adults show less empathy toward immoral individuals’ misfortune than moral individuals’ misfortune. However, only few studies explored children’s empathic responses toward targets with different moral characters (see Mendes et al., 2018; Schindler et al., 2015; Schulz et al., 2013). Here we present the first investigation of both positive and negative empathy of 6-year-old children toward antisocial and prosocial targets. Specifically, we examined the three components of empathy: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern.
Experiment 1 (N = 24) examined negative empathy using a within-subject design based on the methodology of Marshall et al. (2019). Children learned a puppet’s moral characters by watching a video of the puppet’s prosocial or antisocial behavior. Later, children watched the puppet being hit by a hammer. We assessed children’s empathic responses toward the puppet by asking: their willingness to watch the hitting video again (avoidance tendency), feelings after watching the puppet being hit (emotional empathy), evaluation of the puppet’s pain (cognitive empathy), how sorry they were for the puppet (empathic concern), and their liking for the puppet (manipulation check). Children then watched the videos of another puppet with the opposite moral characters to the first puppet and reported their empathic responses by answering the same questions. Experiment 2 (N = 26) examined positive empathy. The protocol is similar to Experiment 1, while the target puppets were tickled by a feather instead of being hit by a hammer. Questions for assessing empathic responses were adapted according to the situation (e.g., for the assessment of empathic concern, we asked children how happy they were for each puppet).
In Experiment 1, children’ feelings were less negative after watching the antisocial puppet being hit than watching the prosocial puppet being hit (see Figure 1). But children did not rate the antisocial puppet less painful or feel less sorry for it. In Experiment 2, children’s feelings were less positive after watching the antisocial puppet being tickled than watching the prosocial puppet being tickled. Children did not rate the antisocial puppet less happy, but children themselves felt less happy for the antisocial puppet than for the prosocial puppet (see Figure 2).
In sum, targets’ moral characters can moderate children’s emotional empathy to misfortune and happiness, but only moderate their empathic concern for happiness. Children’s cognitive empathy does not differ in response to targets’ moral characters. Overall, our findings demonstrate that different components of children’s empathy respond distinctively to targets’ morality. Future work on emergence of this differentiation in development will be discussed.

Authors

• Yiyi Wang, Peking University
  Presenting Author

• Yanjie Su, Peking University
  Non-Presenting Author