Empathy and Biased Helping

The greater a person’s empathy with an individual, the more likely he is to help that individual unfairly:

•  “In one study, participants who were encouraged to feel more empathy towards a fictitious child with a fatal illness were more likely to assign the child to receive immediate help, at the expense of other children who had been waiting for a longer time, were more needy, or had more to gain from the help (Batson et al., 1995)” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).

• “On a larger scale, charitable giving follows sympathy, not the number of people in need. One child who falls down a well, or who needs an unusual surgery, triggers an outpouring of donations if the case is covered on the national news (see Loewenstein and Small, 2007 for a review). Lab studies confirm the relative power of sympathy over numbers: Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007) found that a charitable appeal with a single identifiable victim became less powerful when statistical information was added to the appeal. Even more surprising, Vastfjall, Peters, and Slovic (in prep) found that a charitable appeal with one identifiable victim became less effective when a second identifiable victim was added” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).