Anger at unfair treatment has been called moral outrage. However, moral outrage-anger at the violation of a moral standard-should be distinguished from personal anger at being harmed and empathic anger at seeing another for whom one cares harmed. Across a preliminary experiment and a main experiment, both designed to manipulate the appraisal conditions for these three forms of anger, we found evidence of personal anger and empathic anger, but little evidence of moral outrage. Participants perceived unfair treatment of another, even another for whom they had not been induced to feel empathy, to be as unfair as participants perceived unfair treatment of themselves. But the appraisal conditions that evoked anger were unfair treatment of self and unfair treatment of a cared-for other, not unfairness per se. In the absence of empathic concern, unfair treatment of another evoked little anger. Possible implications for understanding moral emotion and moral motivation are suggested.
Philosophers, psychologists, and religious teachers have suggested that imagining yourself in another's place will stimulate moral action. The authors tested this idea in two different situations. In Experiment 1, participants had the opportunity to assign themselves and another research participant to tasks, with one task clearly more desirable than the other. Imagining oneself in the other's place did little to increase the morality (fairness) of the decision. A different form of perspective taking, imagining the other's feelings, increased direct assignment of the other to the desirable task, apparently due to increased empathy. In Experiment 2, participants confronted a different decision: either accept an initial task assignment that would give them highly positive consequences and the other participant nothing or change the assignment so they and the other would each receive moderately positive consequences. In this situation, imagining oneself in the other's place did significantly increase moral action.
Current need and vulnerability are two different forms of need. Integrating (a) cognitive-appraisal theories of emotion with (b) a view of human parental nurturance as emotionally based and cognitively generalizable, this article proposes that these two forms of need elicit distinct empathic emotions: Vulnerability evokes feelings of tenderness, whereas current need evokes feelings of sympathy. Results of two experiments support this proposal. Vulnerable targets elicited tenderness even when there was no current need; nonvulnerable targets did not. Sympathy was low when there was no evidence of current need but high when there was evidence of current need. Other forms of need and other empathic emotions are proposed, as are motivational and behavioral consequences of the distinction between tenderness and sympathy.
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