Caring is costly: People avoid the cognitive work of compassion.

Abstract

Compassion-the warm, caregiving emotion that emerges from witnessing the suffering of others-has long been considered an important moral emotion for motivating and sustaining prosocial behavior. Some suggest that compassion draws from empathic feelings to motivate prosocial behavior, while others try to disentangle these processes to examine their different functions for human pro-sociality. Many suggest that empathy, which involves sharing in others' experiences, can be biased and exhausting, whereas warm compassionate concern is more rewarding and sustainable. If compassion is indeed a warm and positive experience, then people should be motivated to seek it out when given the opportunity. Here, we ask whether people spontaneously choose to feel compassion, and whether such choices are associated with perceiving compassion as cognitively costly. Across all studies, we found that people opted to avoid compassion when given the opportunity; reported compassion to be more cognitively taxing than empathy and objective detachment; and opted to feel compassion less often to the degree they viewed compassion as cognitively costly. We also revealed two important boundary conditions: first, people were less likely to avoid compassion for close (vs. distant) others, and this choice difference was associated with viewing compassion for close others as less cognitively costly. Second, in the final study we found that with more contextually enriched and immersive pleas for help, participants preferred to escape feeling compassion, though their preference did not differ from also escaping remaining objectively detached. These results temper strong arguments that compassion is an easier route to prosocial motivation.

Empathy at the Gates: Reassessing Its Role in Moral Decision Making

“…Another crucial point to note is that while critics of empathy usually recognize that empathy is subject to motivational biases, they fail to make the same judgment for compassion. However, results of a recent study support the view that compassion suffers from some of the same biases as empathy, perhaps even to a greater degree (Scheffer et al, 2021). This study indicated that participants perceived compassion as more cognitively costly than empathy, especially when applied to strangers, which is at odds with the view of compassion as less exhausting than empathy and more likely to lead to sustained helping (Bloom, 2017).…”

“…Much of the disagreement surrounding the utility of empathy can be attributed to the nonoverlapping definitions of empathy used in the field. The fuzzy definitions of empathy and compassion have also been pointed out by several different researchers (Neumann et al, 2015;Cuff et al, 2016;Västfjäll et al, 2017;Eklund and Meranius, 2021;Scheffer et al, 2021). Indeed, the lack of a consistent definition of empathy and compassion is a crucial issue which holds back progress in this area of research.…”

“…While empathy is described as having several distinct components, critics of empathy (Prinz, 2011;Singer and Klimecki, 2014;DeSteno, 2015;Bloom, 2017) often equate it exclusively to its affective component and consider compassion a distinct process with the capacity to motivate prosocial behavior in more effective ways than empathy (Scheffer et al, 2021). On the other hand, compassion is considered a sub-facet of empathy by many researchers (Decety and Cowell, 2014).…”

Motivated Down-Regulation of Emotion and Compassion Collapse Revisited

“…C&P interprets these findings as suggesting that the driving mechanism behind compassion collapse is active down-regulation of emotion that only occurs when people themselves expected to help —a finding that supports the motivated emotion regulation account over the affect trigger explanation. While this is only studying one of three studies in the C&P 2011 paper, this particular finding has been cited several times in support of the notion of “empathy/compassion as a choice” ( Zaki, 2014 ; Cameron, 2017 ; Cameron et al, 2019 , 2022 ; Scheffer et al, 2021 ) and is an important contribution for a critical experiment demonstrating a boundary condition for compassion collapse.…”

Outrage fatigue? Cognitive costs and decisions to blame

“…(1 = calm; 9 = aroused), and "How negative/positive do you currently feel?" (1 = negative; 9 = positive) using self-assessment manikins (Bradley & Lang, 1994; a similar approach was used to assess state experiences in Scheffer et al, 2021).…”