Credit: Photo by David Clode on Unsplash |
A new Penn State study led by Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research associate at Rock Ethics Institute, found that the answer is complicated. The findings could have implications for how messaging to the public about issues like new environmental policies is framed, among others.
The researchers found that when people were asked to choose between empathizing with a human stranger or an animal — in this study, a koala bear — the participants were more likely to choose empathizing with a fellow human.
However, in a second pair of studies, the researchers had participants take part in two separate tasks: one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with a person, and one in which they could choose whether or not they wanted to empathize with an animal. This time, people were more likely to choose empathy when faced with an animal than when faced with a person.
Cameron said the findings — recently published in a special issue on empathy in the Journal of Social Psychology — suggest that when people are deciding whether to engage in empathy, context matters.
“It’s possible that if people are seeing humans and animals in competition, it might lead to them preferring to empathize with other humans,” Cameron said. “But if you don’t see that competition, and the situation is just deciding whether to empathize with an animal one day and a human the other, it seems that people don’t want to engage in human empathy but they're a little bit more interested in animals.”