The Experience of Empathy in Everyday Life

Abstract

We used experience-sampling to examine perceptions of empathy in the everyday lives of a group of 246 U.S. adults, quota-sampled to represent the population on key demographics. Participants reported an average of about 9 opportunities to empathize per day, with these experiences being positively associated with prosocial behaviour; a relationship not found with trait measures. While much of the literature focuses on the distress of strangers, in everyday life, people mostly empathize with very close others; and they empathize with positive emotions three times as frequently as with negative emotions. Though trait empathy was only negatively associated with well-being, empathy in daily life was generally associated with increased well-being. Theoretically distinct components of empathy—emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion—typically co-occur in everyday empathy experiences. Finally, empathy in everyday life was higher for women and the religious, but not significantly lower for conservatives or the wealthy.

Cognitive Effort for Self, Strangers, and Charities

“…Although the costs and benefits of prosocial effort are often fixed, self-other overlap is malleable. Changing perceptions of self-other overlap could therefore reduce prosocial apathy and increase empathy for others, which could increase well-being for everyone involved (Depow et al, 2021). Our findings suggest avenues for intervention, but further work should evaluate their external validity and generalizability (Lin et al, 2021;Yarkoni, 2020).…”

“…In the lab, people will even endure physical pain to avoid cognitive effort (Vogel et al, 2020). However, in daily life people sometimes exert effort to help others for no obvious gain to themselves (Depow et al, 2021).…”

Investigating Adult Age Differences in real-life Empathy, Prosociality, and Well-being using Experience Sampling

“…These advantages may be particularly important for lifespan developmental studies, as recall bias [44] and intra-individual variability [45] have been shown to be subject to age effects in different behavioral contexts. Unfortunately, and to the cost of external validity, to date only a small list of studies [4,46,47] examined empathy and prosociality using EMA, with most of them not focusing on adult age differences. With the current study we aimed to fill this gap, by leveraging the advantages of EMA, and investigating daily empathy, prosociality, and wellbeing under real-life circumstances, repeatedly per day within person.…”

“…With the current study we aimed to fill this gap, by leveraging the advantages of EMA, and investigating daily empathy, prosociality, and wellbeing under real-life circumstances, repeatedly per day within person. To this end we analyzed smartphone based experience-sampling data recently published by Depow and colleagues [47] , to examine age effects with regards to daily empathy, prosocial behavior, and well-being, which were not part of their initial study. Separating contributions of within-from betweensubject variability, we aimed to investigate whether age influences daily empathy, prosocial behavior and well-being, as well as their interactions.…”

“…Only the questions, relevant for the current study, are depicted here. For further details, and a full study protocol, see Depow and colleagues [47] . Note that empathy (level 2) was assessed as an umbrella term, thus, questions about the subcomponents emotion share, perspective take, and compassion (level 3) were only rated if the participant indicated to have experienced empathy on level 2 of the survey.…”