Sadness empathy facilitates prosocial lying

Abstract

We investigated whether sadness empathy influences prosocial lying. The 139 participants were randomly assigned based on gender to 2 groups according to the event that they read about—sadness empathy priming or neutral—and they then completed a deception game and 2 empathy scales. The results showed that participants' prosocial lying frequency was higher in the sadness empathy-priming condition than the neutral event condition. The perspective-taking component of trait empathy moderated the event's main effect; however, there were no significant gender differences in prosocial lying frequency, and both men and women who experienced another's sadness told prosocial lies to show benevolence. The facilitating effect emerged only in those who had a greater ability to take another person's perspective. The findings indicate that people with sadness empathy, especially those with a strong perspective-taking ability, express their kindness by means of prosocial lying when they communicate with a sad person.