Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering.

Abstract

As the number of people in need of help increases, the degree of compassion people feel for them ironically tends to decrease. This phenomenon is termed the collapse of compassion. Some researchers have suggested that this effect happens because emotions are not triggered by aggregates. We provide evidence for an alternative account. People expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming, and, as a result, they engage in emotion regulation to prevent themselves from experiencing overwhelming levels of emotion. Because groups are more likely than individuals to elicit emotion regulation, people feel less for groups than for individuals. In Experiment 1, participants displayed the collapse of compassion only when they expected to be asked to donate money to the victims. This suggests that the effect is motivated by self-interest. Experiment 2 showed that the collapse of compassion emerged only for people who were skilled at emotion regulation. In Experiment 3, we manipulated emotion regulation. Participants who were told to down-regulate their emotions showed the collapse of compassion, but participants who were told to experience their emotions did not. We examined the time course of these effects using a dynamic rating to measure affective responses in real time. The time course data suggested that participants regulate emotion toward groups proactively, by preventing themselves from ever experiencing as much emotion toward groups as toward individuals. These findings provide initial evidence that motivated emotion regulation drives insensitivity to mass suffering.

Lying because we care: Compassion increases prosocial lying.

“…In addition, this research contributes to a growing body of work that highlights how, despite the prosocial benefits it often affords, compassion can sometimes lead individuals to act contrary to what is truly in others' best interests (e.g., Cameron & Payne, 2011;Slovic, 2007).…”

“…Compassion is evoked by witnessing or learning about others' physical or emotional pain (Batson et al, 1997;Condon & DeSteno, 2011;Eisenberg et al, 1989;Stellar, Cohen, Oveis, & Keltner, 2014;Stellar, Feinberg, & Keltner, 2014;Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, & Keltner, 2012;Van Kleef et al, 2008) or victimization (Cameron & Payne, 2011;Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011a), and by viewing depictions of suffering others such as homeless or malnourished people (Oveis et al, 2009;Oveis, Horberg, & Keltner, 2010).…”

Empathic emotion regulation in prosocial behavior and altruism

“…The influence of modulatory processes on emotions evoked in response to another's distress, particularly emotion regulatory processes, may be important for biasing an individual toward a concerned and compassionate response rather than personal distress (Batson et al, 1983;Batson et al, 1987;Eisenberg et al, 1989;Klimecki et al, 2014). However, another threat to a concerned prosocial response is regulation of empathic affect resulting in apathy (Cameron and Payne, 2011). The current studies thus sought to examine the role of emotion regulatory appraisals in promoting prosocial helping behavior, first in a proof of concept test of an empathic emotion regulation task and then in an extension of this concept to extraordinary altruists.…”

“…Cameron and colleagues (Cameron and Payne, 2011) have highlighted that emotion regulation can also inhibit empathy and prosociality, and their "collapse of compassion" studies have found that higher trait emotion regulation skill and also instructed emotion regulation both resulted in decreased concern for multiple victims. Similarly, Lockwood and colleagues (Lockwood et al, 2014) have found that trait empathy only predicts prosocial tendencies for those with low to moderate trait reappraisal tendency.…”

“…Given the approachoriented nature of this reappraisal, and thus its similarity to a compassionate orientation (Goetz et al, 2010), it was expected that this reappraisal may increase positive affect as well. This was contrasted with a distancing strategy like that utilized in many intrapersonal emotion regulation studies, including the "collapse of compassion" studies (Cameron and Payne, 2011), in which participants attempted to decrease negative empathic affect, but reframe the situation in an avoidant way. It was hypothesized that while both reappraisal strategies may decrease negative affect, the hopeful reappraisal would be more successful than the distancing reappraisal in promoting costly helping behavior toward strangers, given its closer association with approach motivation and empathic concern, rather than avoidance of a source of personal distress.…”