p < .05. **p < .001. Note.-Cells which share a common subscript are not significantly different from each other at the .05 level hy the Newman-Keuls test.
This study investigated whether different empathic responses, generated by different observational sets, could mediate the influence of models on helping behavior. One hundred and twenty male college students first listened to a taped conversation between a person in need of help and a potential helper, under instructions to attend to one of the two speakers, either imagining themselves as that particular speaker (imagine-self set) or imagining that speaker's reactions (imagine-him set). The potential helper either did not help; helped, but was not thanked; or helped and was thanked. After filling out a mood questionnaire, subjects were requested to help the experimenter. Most help was received from subjects who observed either the unaided person in need or the thanked helper, while subjects who attended to the potential helper in the no-help condition were least helpful. The mood data suggested that pleasurable empathic experiences had mediated the helping behavior of subjects who attended to the thanked helper, while unpleasant empathic reactions had more strongly motivated the helping behavior of subjects who observed the unaided person in need.
A pair of experiments were conducted using a simulated courtroom trial of a criminal case. In Experiment I subject‐jurors were asked by defense counsel either to imagine themselves as the defendant (empathy‐inducing appeal) or to pay close attention to evidence (nonempathy appeal). Later the judge delivered only general instructions or, in addition, charged jurors to give consideration only to the facts presented. When there was no Fact‐focused judge's charge, juror‐subjects who heard the empathy‐inducing appeal rated the defendant's actions as more lawful and attributed less of the cause for the incident to his personality than did their counterparts in the nonempathy condition. Experiment II included individual differences in the tendency to empathize as an additional mediating variable. The original pattern of effects found for the manipulated variables in Experiment I appeared again, but were overshadowed by the stronger effects of the individual difference variable and of subject sex. Subject‐jurors who scored high on the empathy individual difference measure rated the defendant less guilty, assigned less cause to him, and showed corresponding mood shifts when they heard the empathy‐inducing appeal. In addition, male subjects empathized more strongly with the male defendant and viewed him more favorably.
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