Motivated empathy: a social neuroscience perspective

Weisz, Erika; Zaki, Jamil

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.05.005

Cited by 112 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Aggression stemming from socially dissonant responses -e.g., taking pleasure in others' pain or expressing displeasure when seeing others' happinessis more explanatory than traditional empathic explanations (Vachon & Lynam, 2016). Understanding how these antisocial individual differences interact with situational context is imperative for increasing prosocial decision-making (Weisz & Zaki, 2018). Those who bully may be focused on cues and situations relevant for understanding and taking advantage of social hierarchies and maintaining or gaining status within such hierarchies (Volk et al, 2014), explaining why interventions teaching "prosocial ways to gain status" may be particularly useful tools to combat bullying (Ellis et al, 2016;Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Links between adolescent bullying and neural activation to viewing social exclusion

Perino

Moreira

Telzer

2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Neuroscientists studying bullying have primarily focused on the psychopathology of diagnosable offenders or the resulting symptomatology of victimization, with less attention paid to theories suggesting bullying may be an interpersonal strategy. In an exploratory study, we recruited a sample of adolescents (N=24) engaging in high rates of delinquent behavior and collected self-report ratings of bullying behaviors. During an fMRI scan, adolescents observed instances of social exclusion and social inclusion. Adolescents' self-reported bullying was associated with greater ventral striatum, amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and insula activation when viewing social exclusion > social inclusion. Activation in these regions is commonly associated with reward-learning, salience monitoring, and motivational processes, suggesting that bullies show altered processing of interpersonal cues and social dynamic experiences in their environment. Our findings highlight the need for developmental neuroscientists to further explore the role of social motivation in processing socio-affective information, with a particular focus on goal-directed antisocial behavior.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Links between adolescent bullying and neural activation to viewing social exclusion

Perino

Moreira

Telzer

2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…For example, abnormally low empathy helps explain the immoral conduct of psychopaths (Decety, Chen, Harenski, & Kiehl, 2013)-while unusually intense empathy often characterizes the altruism of moral exemplars (Marsh et al, 2014). Furthermore, research has shown that empathy is relatively malleable (Weisz & Zaki, 2018): People who believe they can regulate the scope of their empathy expend greater effort to change in this regard (Schumann, Zaki, & Dweck, 2014). Taken together, these prior findings inspire one of the guiding hypotheses in our present work: that changes in people's moral outlook could result-not expressly from goals to become morally better-but primarily from changes in interpersonal affect (i.e., empathy).…”

Section: Moral Migration: Desires To Become More Empathic Predict Chamentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral migration: Desires to become more empathic predict changes in moral foundations

Hannikainen

Hudson

Chopik

et al. 2020

Journal of Research in Personality

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Many people want to change their personality traits-and research on volitional change has documented their success in doing so. In the present study, we examine whether people also wish to change their levels of empathy, and whether these desires precede shifts in dispositional empathy and morality over a 15-week period. We recorded participants' change goals, followed by weekly measurements of empathic concern and perspective-taking, as well as moral foundations. Results indicated that most participants wished to cultivate empathic concern and, especially, perspectivetaking. Those who sought to develop these qualities tended to actually do so at a faster rate than their peers who did not-and, as a consequence, also drifted toward a characteristically liberal, individualizing morality.

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“…Motivationally targeted campaigns were shown to be more effective when encouraging prosocial behaviour in other domains [72][73][74]. Further, it has been shown that different forms of empathy play a role in defining various forms of prosocial motivation [61,75,76] which should make a difference in the context of data donation. Future research could investigate what personality differences or contextual factors can explain differences in reasons to donate personal data.…”

Section: Predictorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychology of Personal Data Donation

Skatova¹,

Goulding²

2019

Preprint

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Advances in digital technology have led to large amounts of personal data being recorded and retained by industry, constituting an invaluable asset to both governmental and private organizations. The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, including the UK, fundamentally reshaped how data is handled across every sector. It enables the general public to access data collected about them by organisations, opening up the possibility of this data being used for research that benefits the public; for example, to uncover lifestyle causes of health outcomes. A significant barrier for using this commercial data for academic research is the lack of publicly acceptable research frameworks. Data donation - an act of active consent of an individual to donate their personal data for research - could enable the use of commercial data for societal benefit. However, it is not clear which motives, if any, would drive people to donate their personal data. In this paper we present the results of a large-scale survey (N = 1,300) that studied intentions and reasons to donate personal data. We found that over half of individuals are willing to donate their personal data for research that could benefit the wider general public. We identified three distinct reasons to donate personal data: an opportunity to achieve self-benefit, prosocial motive to serve society, and the need to understand the purpose of data donation. We developed a questionnaire to measure those three reasons and provided further evidence on the validity of the scales. Our results demonstrate that these motivations predict people’s intentions to donate personal data over and above generic altruistic motives and relevant personality traits. We show that a prosocial motive to serve society is the strongest predictor of the intention to donate personal data, while understanding the purpose of data donation also positively predicting the intentions to donate personal data. In contrast, self-serving motives show a negative association with intentions to donate personal data. The findings presented here inform the ethical use of commercially collected personal data for academic research for public good.

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Motivated empathy: a social neuroscience perspective

Cited by 112 publications

References 39 publications

Links between adolescent bullying and neural activation to viewing social exclusion

Links between adolescent bullying and neural activation to viewing social exclusion

Moral migration: Desires to become more empathic predict changes in moral foundations

Psychology of Personal Data Donation

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