Abstract
To what extent can simple mental exercises cause shifts in empathic habits? Can we use mobile technology to make people more empathic? It may depend on how empathy is measured. Scholars have identified a number of different facets and correlates of empathy. This study is among the first to take a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to empathy to determine how empathy training could affect these different facets and correlates. In doing so, we can learn more about empathy and its multifaceted nature. Participants (N = 90) were randomly assigned to receive either an empathy-building text message program (Text to Connect) or one of two control conditions (active versus passive). Respondents completed measures of dispositional empathy (i.e. self-perceptions of being an empathic person), affective empathy (i.e. motivations to help, immediate feelings of empathic concern), and prosocial behavior (i.e. self-reports and observer-reports) at baseline, and then again after the 14 day intervention period. We found that empathy-building messages increased affective indicators of empathy and prosocial behaviors, but actually decreased self-perceptions of empathy, relative to control messages. Although the brief text messaging intervention did not consistently impact empathy-related personality traits, it holds promise for the use of mobile technology for changing empathic motivations and behaviors.
Highlights
In order to develop Text to Connect, we drew on prior empathy intervention research, and on items from empathy and narcissism scales, to write an initial pool of 39 higher empathy text messages and 38 lower empathy ones
Because of our limited sample size and our interest in the effect of empathy training (N = 37) relative to other conditions, we oversampled participants to be in the high empathy condition, and collapsed across the two control conditions (Low Empathy: N = 24; No Message Control: N = 29)
We examined whether there was an effect of condition or gender on the tendency to respond to the hostile text message (1 = yes, 0 = no) sent about 6 months after participants were in the lab
Summary
We aimed to examine the potential scope of Text to Connect by directly assessing different operationalizations of empathy, and by examining broader theoretically relevant outcomes that are known to be associated with empathy
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