Abstract
Empathy enables people to vicariously experience the other’s pain. At the same time, the focus of empathy can be narrow and reserved for a limited number of people. In sacrificial dilemmas, non-empathic people are more likely to sacrifice one person for greater good. However, no study has investigated the role of diminished empathic concern for the victim in utilitarian choices of action. In two studies, we investigated how empathy actually experienced in sacrificial dilemmas affects a decision to perform a harmful action onto the victim. In Study 1 (N = 275), participants were asked to rate the extent to which they were feeling two divergent tropes of affective empathy: other-oriented empathy (empathic concern) and self-oriented empathy (personal distress). Results showed that lower levels of other-focused empathy for the victim predicted utilitarian choices of action. In Study 2 (N = 170), participants were asked to rate the extent to which they empathized with the victim and the saved. We also assessed dispositional empathy and psychopathy to test a hypothesis that psychopathy mediates the relationship between lower empathy for the victim and utilitarian choices of action. Results supported this hypothesis, whereas dispositional empathy was not significantly correlated with utilitarian choices of action. Overall, lower empathy experienced in the dilemma situation was associated with utilitarian choices of action, and this was specific to reduced empathic concern for the victim. People choose to pursue the utilitarian end that accompanies harm onto the other as a mean when the victim is out of their empathic focus.
Highlights
Would you sacrifice an innocent person if it saves a greater number of people? This is a question in moral dilemmas, where harm on a small number of people is a tradeoff for saving a greater number of people
The results of the Shapiro-Wilk test of normality showed that outcome variables: utilitarian choices of action in the footbridge and raftboat dilemmas were not normally distributed
The result showed that people were more likely to sacrifice one person in the raftboat dilemma where their own lives are saved by the utilitarian choice, Z = −8.29, p
Summary
Would you sacrifice an innocent person if it saves a greater number of people? This is a question in moral dilemmas, where harm on a small number of people is a tradeoff for saving a greater number of people. Emotion is a strong motivation for avoiding harm onto the other, and negative emotions and low levels of affective empathy have been found to predict utilitarian judgment [4, 6, 7] When people are less averse to harming others (i.e., under the influence of alcohol), the utilitarian deed is an easy option Those who lack affective empathy (i.e., empathic concern) remain emotionally distant and are increasingly likely to endorse harm in sacrificial dilemmas [10,11,12]. Past studies have shown that utilitarian judgment in sacrificial dilemmas is well predicted by empathic concern, which is one type of affective empathy [10, 13, 20]. One study investigating the relationship between attachment styles and utilitarian judgment in sacrificial dilemmas has shown that an individual who lacks empathy for the identifiable victim or shows greater empathy for the saved endorses harm in sacrificial dilemmas [23]. We predicted that empathic concern, experienced in the dilemma situation affects utilitarian choices of action
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