The Influence of Trait Empathy on Implicit Altruism

Abstract

The influence of empathy on personal altruism is a hot topic in international research in recent years. Through combing the previous studies on empathy and altruism, it is found that those studies get contradictory results. Therefore, in this study, implicit association text were used to explore whether there are differences in implicit altruism among people with different empathy abilities. According to the average score of Interpersonal Reactivity Index, 67 subjects were divided into high empathy group and low empathy group. The accuracy, response time and IAT effect (response time of incompatible task less response time of compatible task) of the implicit altruism experiment were compared between the two groups. The results showed that compared with the incompatible tasks, the compatible task had higher accuracy and shorter response time. In addition, the IAT effect of the high empathy group was significantly greater than that of the low empathy group, indicating that the higher the empathy was, the more automatic the altruistic tendency was. This study provides some supporting evidence for the promotion of altruistic behavior by empathic education.