Summary: When given the choice, people often avoid feeling compassion because they perceive it as mentally effortful.
Source: Penn State
Compassion helps us connect with others and motivates helping behavior, but a new set of experiments shows many people will choose to avoid feeling compassion when they can.
Across several studies, researchers observed that participants frequently opted out of experiencing compassion and reported that compassion felt mentally demanding. However, when the target of compassion was someone they knew well—such as a family member—participants were more likely to choose compassion and reported it felt easier to experience.
Julian Scheffer, a Penn State graduate and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said these results point to a need for strategies that help people accept the mental costs of compassion, especially during periods of social division or widespread hardship.
“Feeling compassion often leads to a desire to help and improve others’ welfare, but we found that many people are reluctant to experience compassion and find it taxing,” Scheffer said. “Understanding when and why compassion feels effortful can help explain weaker compassionate responses to strangers or large-scale suffering, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Daryl Cameron, associate professor of psychology and senior research associate at the Rock Ethics Institute, noted these studies are among the first to examine the choices people make about whether to engage with compassion at all.
“These choices align with perceived cognitive costs,” Cameron said. “Cultivating compassion for family members often feels easier than for strangers, and that difference may help explain common biases in how compassion is expressed.”
Scheffer suggested one practical approach could be preparing people to handle compassion’s mental demands, which may increase willingness to engage compassionately rather than avoid it.
“People are frequently asked to feel empathy or compassion with the aim of promoting openness, cooperation, and helping behavior,” Scheffer said. “We wanted to see whether people choose to engage these emotional processes or avoid them, and why.”
To study these choices, researchers ran multiple experiments with samples ranging from 62 to 215 participants. They created three virtual card decks that instructed participants how to respond to a person on each card: a compassion deck asking participants to feel compassion, an empathy deck asking them to take on another’s perspective and feelings, and an objective deck asking them to remain detached and describe the person.
While compassion and empathy overlap, the researchers distinguished compassion as feelings of caring and concern, whereas empathy was defined as sharing or taking on another person’s emotional state.
In the first two studies, participants chose between compassion and objective decks or between empathy and objective decks. Participants selected the compassion deck only about a quarter of the time and chose empathy slightly more often, though still less than half the time. When given a direct choice between compassion and empathy, participants tended to prefer empathy. When all three options were available, many participants preferred to remain objective.
“Some have argued that compassion is less demanding than empathy,” Cameron said. “By giving people a choice, we found that for strangers, people generally declined compassion and reported it felt harder than empathy.”
In a later study, the decks featured names of people participants either knew well or only slightly. Participants were more willing to feel compassion for close others than for acquaintances or strangers, and they rated compassion for loved ones as less difficult.
“People were more willing to experience compassion for loved ones, and this choice was linked to reduced perceived difficulty,” Scheffer said. “Compassion directed at familiar people may feel more desirable and less effortful.”
Scheffer hopes the findings—published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General—will clarify why some people resist compassion despite its prosocial benefits.
“As many people become overwhelmed by widespread suffering, compassion can feel particularly hard to approach,” Scheffer said. “Learning how to manage the mental challenges of compassion could help generate more consistent motivation to help, especially during difficult times.”
Michael Inzlicht, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, also contributed to this research.
Funding: The National Science Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute supported this work.
About this psychology research news
Author: Katie Bohn
Source: Penn State
Contact: Katie Bohn – Penn State
Image: The image is credited to Penn State
Original Research: Closed access. “Caring is costly: People avoid the cognitive work of compassion” by Scheffer, J. A., Cameron, C. D., & Inzlicht, M., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Abstract
Caring is costly: People avoid the cognitive work of compassion
Compassion—the warm, caregiving emotion that arises when we witness others’ suffering—has long been viewed as a key moral emotion that motivates prosocial behavior. Some theories propose compassion draws on empathic processes to promote helping, while others separate these processes to examine their distinct roles.
If compassion is a warm and rewarding experience, people should seek it out. Instead, across studies we found people often avoid compassion when given the chance, report it to be more cognitively taxing than empathy or objective detachment, and are less likely to choose compassion to the extent they view it as mentally costly.
Two important boundary conditions emerged. First, people were less likely to avoid compassion for close others than for distant others, and this difference correlated with viewing compassion for close others as less demanding. Second, when participants were presented with richer, emotionally immersive pleas for help, they preferred to escape feeling compassion, though this preference was similar to escaping objective detachment.
These results suggest compassion is not always an easier path to prosocial motivation and highlight the role of perceived cognitive cost in shaping whether people choose to engage compassionately.