Attentional mechanisms in the generation of sympathy

By Stephan Dickert, Paul Slovic. Judgment and Decision Making, 2009

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Empathic responses, such as sympathy towards others, are a key ingredient in the decision to provide help to those in need. The determinants of empathic responses are usually thought to be the vividness, similarity, and proximity of the victim. However, recent research highlights the role that attention plays in the generation of feelings. We expanded on this idea by investigating whether sympathy depends on cognitive mechanisms such as attention. In two studies we found that sympathy responses were lower and reaction times were longer when targets were presented with distractors. In addition, online sympathy judgments that allow attentional focusing on a target lead to greater affective responses than judgments made from memory. We conclude that attention is an ingredient in the generation of sympathy, and discuss implications for research on prosocial behaviour and the interaction between attention and emotions.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9514cd2dc0a05b094f011cc0be495883d648e53c

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Citations in the corpus

The donor is in the details (2013, unknown): “People report greater sympathy for a victim when that victim is pictured alone compared to when that victim is pictured within the presence of other victims (Dickert and Slovic 2009).”
The socially extended mind (2013, background): “Thus, when information about others is presented in a way that elicits empathic responses, donations are greater in comparison to when this information is processed in a detached, abstract, or intangible way (Dickert & Slovic, 2009).”