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Sympathy and Altruism in Response to Disasters GORDON W. RUSSELL ROBERT K. MENTZEL Department of Psychology University of Lethbridge

ABSTRACT. Canadian students provided ratings of the degree of sympathy they felt for those involved in each of 20 world disasters. Playing the role of taxpayer, they also apportioned monies from a disaster relief fund to assist in such emergencies. A single dimension, Culpability, was found to underlie the sympathy ratings. Sympathy was related to giving aid only in the case of female subjects. Women also expressed greater sympathy and recommended more financial aid than did men.

AT A TIME when a start has barely been made on developing a North-South dialogue between the affluent and Third World nations, futurists offer their readers incomprehensible scenarios of impending calamities, some of which are already occurring. For example, the World Health Organization has conservatively estimated that 42,000 children worldwide die each day of starvation and its complications (Eckholm, 1982). The numbing statistics associated with this and other recurring disasters may portend tragedies on a scale that few of us can comprehend (e.g., Higgins, 1980). The response of affluent nations to large-scale tragedies has been generally one of compassion and generosity. Certainly, the hapless victims of domestic disasters are assisted, although aid to disaster victims in other nations is provided with less regularity. Additionally, private organizations and individual celebrities have enjoyed notable success in recent years in their efforts to raise funds on behalf of people in desperate circumstances both at home and abroad. However, the considerations that move a government to take hu-

Requestsfor reprints and correspondence should be sent to Gordon W. Russell, Department of Psychology, University of Lx&bridge. L.ethbridge, Alberta, Canado TlK 3M4. 309

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manitarian action are not necessarily those that prompt a like response from their constituents. It might be anticipated, for example, that government decision makers would assign different weights to geopolitical and other considerations in their allocations of relief funds (Taormina & Messick, 1983). Appeals by organizations and individuals may similarly emphasize attributes and circumstances of victims that differ from those that commonly motivate the general public to acts of altruism. Although sympathy and charitable acts may be causally connected in the public mind, the literature on prosocial behavior has not strongly supported this connection. A small-scale review of investigations of empathy and prosocial behavior concluded that the two variables were unrelated (Underwood & Moore, 1982). However, the results of meta-analyses that include more recent data suggest that the strength of the relationship falls in the low to moderate range, its magnitude being influenced by the means used to assess empathy/sympathy (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987). The concept of sympathy is central to a major motivational model of help-giving. Weiner (1980) proposed that a three-step process underlies the response to someone in need. Thus, being confronted by someone in need prompts initial attempts to determine the cause of his plight (e.g., whether the causal factors were internal or external and controllable by the actor). If the observer attributes the victim’s plight to uncontrollable factors, positive affect (e.g., sympathy) is likely to result. On the other hand, if the observer ascribes the actor’s condition to internal, controllable factors, a negative emotional response (e.g., anger, disgust) is likely to occur. The emotional response of sympathy leads to helping behavior, whereas anger/disgust leads to avoidance or neglect. Although theorists have drawn a number of distinctions between sympathy and empathy, researchers have frequently ignored such differences and used the terms interchangeably (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Wispe, 1986). In the context of the present paradigm, sympathy has been investigated as a common response to distant disasters, referring as it does “. . . to an emotional response stemming from another’s emotional state or condition that is not identical to the other’s emotion, but consists of feelings of sorrow or concern for another’s welfare” (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987, pp. 91-92; see also Eisenberg et al., 1989). The present study attempted to identify the aspects of disasters that evoke a sympathetic response. Additionally, the relationship between subjects’ sympathy and their altruism is examined. The approach to these questions uses a version of role-playing in which subjects first judge the amount of sympathy they would feel upon learning of a disaster and then indicate how they as present or future taxpayers would like to see federal assistance distributed. Although sympathy and assistance ratings are not assumed to be isomorphic with comparable real-life judgments by taxpayers, a persuasive case

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can be made for a reasonable correspondence with actual behavior (Cooper, 1976). The resources of a federal government are obviously finite and subject to a variety of competing demands. Moreover, not everyone would agree that the use of tax dollars to help people in distress is an important spending priority or even a responsibility of their government. Therefore, a measure of altruism based upon subjects’ support for a federal program’s “present” level of funding was provided. Method Subjects

The subjects were male (n = 104) and female (n = 157) introductory psychology students at the University of Lethbridge; participation was voluntary and earned a 2% research-participation bonus. The mean age of the men was 21.39 years (SD = 7.38), and that of the women was 21.60 years (SD = 7.83). Visiting foreign students were excluded from the analysis in order to provide a more homogeneous (Western) Canadian perspective. The study was conducted in 1984-l 985. Procedure

Twenty disasters were chosen to ensure variability along all possible dimensions that conceivably could emerge in a multivariate analysis. Among the dimensions represented were the age, sex, race, and affluence of the victims. Attributes of the disasters included their agent (man-made vs. natural), duration (short vs. protracted), familiarity (unknown vs. famous), locale (foreign vs. local), recency (recent vs. historical), and scale (large vs. small). The details of each disaster were presented to small groups of subjects in the form of a dated news release (descriptions can be obtained from G. W. Russell). Each communique contained specific information on the circumstances surrounding the tragedy. An example follows: Santiago, Chile (1857) “Church of La Compania” A fire swept through the Church of La Compania during the Immaculate Conception celebration, killing 2,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 20. The victims were members of Santiago’s elite families and were crowded into the church during the last day of the celebration. Only one of seven doors was not locked. The fire spread quickly from one of the hundreds of lamps, easily igniting the muslin draperies and wooden structure of the church.

A 7-point scale anchored by no sympathy and extremely sympathetic accompanied each description. Several random orders were created and counterbalanced to offset order effects. Instructions to the subjects were as follows:

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The disasters described below have actually occurred. We have written news service releases briefly describing the essential aspects of each event. Please read each news release carefully and indicate on the accompanying scale how much sympathy you feel for those involved. Try to put yourself in the position of having heard about the event for the first time and rate how much sympathy it would arouse in you personally. Following completion of the sympathy ratings, subjects were asked to apportion money from a disaster relief fund to assist in each of the 20 disasters. They were instructed as follows: For the moment ignore the fact that some of the disastersare historical examples and assume that the Canadian government has a disaster relief fund to assist in such emergencies. As a Canadian taxpayer, how would you divide up that money to help in each of the disasters listed below, that is, what Percentage of the fund would you give Co assist in each tragedy (the Percentagesshould total loo%)? Subjects were next presented with the measure of altruism. This item provided them with the option as taxpayers of recommending that a percentage of the total relief funds be withdrawn and used for other government purposes (e.g., defense, transportation, etc.). The intercorrelation matrix of sympathy ratings for the 20 disasters was subjected to principal components analysis with varimax rotation. The diversionary items tapping altruism and subjects’ ages and sex were included as marker variables. A similar analysis of the relief fund allocations would be inappropriate, given the ipsative properties of the measure (Hicks, 1970). Results and Discussion The means of the sympathy ratings for male and female subjects and their allocations of relief money are presented in Table 1. Preliminary analyses revealed a significant relationship between the women’s overall ratings of sympathy and their percentage of allocations from the disaster fund, r( 18) = .405, p < .05. For the men, the relationship was not significant, r(18) = .238, ns. Moreover, the women expressed greater sympathy for the plight of victims, t(19) = 12.248, p < .OOl, and recommended that less money be diverted from the disaster fund than did men, t( 19) = 9.5 1, p < .OOl . The measure of altruism was unrelated to the ages of both the men, r(102) = - .058, ns, and women, r(155) = .115, ns. These results generally support the findings of previous studies (Eisenberg & Lennon, 1983; Eisenberg et al., 1989) showing sex differences in sympathy/altruism. As presented in Table 2, a single dimension (accounting for 67.1% of the variance) reasonably interpretable as Culpability was found to underlie subjects’ ratings of sympathy. The second dimension accounted for only

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TABLE 1 Mean Ratings of Sympathy and Assistance

WvaW Disaster Aberfan (Wales) slide Paraplegic bus drownings (Quebec)

Illinois nursing home fire Indiana tornado Chicago airline crash Frank (Alberta) slide Pakistan cyclone Vesuvius destroys Pompeii China famine Bangkok, Thailand, drownings Ohio prison fire Vietnamese boat people Quesnel, BC, car crash Chilean church fire The Black Death Australian bridge collapse Titanic sinking Rhode Island race track fire US canier fire Oregon tidal wave

Women M SD 6.35 6.15 6.00 5.91 5.90 5.88 5.88 5.85 5.77 5.71 5.70 5.60 5.55 5.54 5.48 5.24 5.15 4.77 4.68 3.37

1.00 1.05 1.30 1.11 1.24 1.09 1.29 1.30 1.32 1.27 1.28 1.53 1.22 1.34 1.46 1.19 1.48 1.76 1.42 1.48

Assistance (%) Men

M

SD

Women

Men

5.63 5.59 5.42 5.05 5.29 5.13 5.11 4.49 5.12 4.90 5.48 4.74 4.95 5.24 4.52 4.70 4.55 3.67 4.15 2.70

1.41 1.17 1.23 1.35 1.40 1.25 1.50 1.67 1.56 1.51 1.40 1.70 1.21 1.17 1.64 1.34 1.47 1.82 1.36 1.50

5.66 5.25 5.44 5.65 4.28 7.67 6.50 5.42 8.78 2.61 3.95 8.93 2.20 3.37 9.05 3.09 3.45 2.51 2.90 3.29

5.59 5.11 4.01 5.13 4.10 9.68 7.66 4.16 10.65 2.17 3.47 10.73 2.12 2.90 11.39 2.14 2.71 1.47 1.83 2.98

9.1% of the variance and was largely uninterpretable. The order and distances of disasters along the continuum reflects the degree to which authorities or the victims themselves could be seen to have invited the tragic outcome. Sympathy for the victims of the Oregon tidal wave (.64), the church fire in Chile (. 62), and the sinking of the S . S . Titanic (AN) was generally withheld. These tragedies might have been averted but for the poor judgment exercised by the authorities or the victims themselves. Many of those swept away by the tidal wave, for example, had gone down to the beach to watch it come in, despite earlier warnings by officials. The emergence of culpability as the single, dominant dimension underlying sympathy is consistent with the attitudinal dynamics associated with belief in a just world (Lemer, 1980). The overriding tendency of subjects to predicate sympathy on the degree to which the victims by their actions courted their fate has its counterpart in the tendency of people generally to assign blame to victims as a means of restoring their belief in a just world. Those who suffered misfortune got only what they deserved; the world, therefore, remains a just and orderly place.

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TABLE 2 Rotated Factor Loadings on Dimension of Culpability (including marker variables) Disaster

Culpability

Paraplegic bus drownings (Quebec)

64 62 60 46 39 38 37 31 27 22 19 19 17 17 14 13

China famine Rhode Island race track fire Illinois nursing home fire Ohio prison fire

07 05

Oregon tidal wave Chilean church fire Titanic sinking US carrier fire Bangkok, Thailand, drownings Quesnel, BC, car crash .4berfan (Wales) slide Frank (Alberta) slide Vietnamese boat people Australian bridge collapse Chicago airline crash Vesuvius destroys Pompeii

Indiana tornado The Black Death Pakistan cyclone

Diversion of funds Age of subjects Sex of subjects

11 10

-01 00 - 16

The culpability dimension is also consistent with the findings of victim research. For example, Calhoun, Selby, and Warring (1976) investigated the influence of rape victims’ behavior on attribution of responsibility for the act. Women who placed themselves at risk were judged more harshly and were generally held to be responsible for their rape. Similarly, victims in the present study who deliberately placed themselves in harm’s way or whose misfortune could otherwise have been avoided were denied sympathy. In general, help is more forthcoming for those whose plight was caused by factors beyond their control than for those whose situation was of their own making (Berkowitz, 1969, 1973; Schopler & Matthews, 1965). The present results generally confirm the attribution-affect-action linkage proposed by Weiner (1980). Subjects withheld sympathy from those involved in tragedies with high loadings on the culpability dimension. Those who went to the Oregon shore to see the tidal wave did so of their own voli-

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tion. Their actions were controllable and clearly attributable to an internal cause (e.g., poor judgment). Victims of the Chilean church fire and the sinking of the Titanic were similarly denied sympathy for reasons of poor judgment by those in authority. Church leaders created the conditions for a deadly inferno, and those in command on the bridge of the Titanic failed to heed earlier warnings of icebergs in the ship’s path. Again, the actions of the principals were readily attributable to internal, controllable factors and led to a nonsympathetic emotional response by the subjects. The second hypothesized link between affect (e.g., sympathy) and action (e.g., assistance) received partial support. The women’s ratings of sympathy were related to their allocation of assistance across all disasters. For the men, however, the relationship fell short of significance. To summarize, the present finding of a weak relationship between expressions of sympathy and help-giving is generally in accord with the conclusions of reviews (e.g., Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Eisenbcrg et al., 1989). However, the relationships may be underestimated, inasmuch as altruism was operationalized as a recommendation to government for allocating assistance. It might be argued that in their role as taxpayers, students were unduly influenced in their decisions by the geopolitical considerations that normally guide government officials. A possibly stronger relationship between sympathy and help-giving might be found by using measurement procedures that have a more direct and immediate effect on subjects’ wallets. As an applied matter, appeals that simply dramatize the desperate plight of disaster victims with a view to engendering sympathy and evoking assistance may be missing the mark. Other strategies to increase prosocial behavior may prove to be more effective. For example, empathy, generally defined as ‘I . . . an affective state that stems from the apprehension of another’s emotional state or condition, and that is congruent with it” (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987, p. 91), bears a strong relationship to altruism (Batson, O’Quin, Fultz, & Vanderplas, 1983; Toi & Batson, 1982). In an experiment by Toi and Batson, subjects instructed to imagine how a victim felt were subsequently more empathetic and exhibited increased helping behavior. Finally, messages that highlight similarities between potential donors and those in need may also increase helping behavior (Taormina & Messick, 1983). Thus, on an international scale, appeals that emphasize a common humanity transcending national and cultural boundaries may prove an effective strategy for increasing altruism over the long run. However, Taormina and Messick identify an important proviso. For any strategy to be effective, potential helpers must have confidence that their aid is actually going to reach the victims and improve their circumstances. If they believe their assistance is likely to be siphoned off or otherwise ineffective in helping those in need, aid is less likely to be forthcoming. Indeed, evidence on this point may be the most important element in any appeal to altruism.

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REFERENCES Batson, C. D., O’Quin, K., Fultz, J., & Vanderplas, M. (1983). Influence of selfreported distress and empathy on egoistic versus altruistic motivation to help. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 706-7 18. Berkowitz, L. (1969). Resistance to improper dependency relationships. Journal of Experimental

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Berkowitz, L. (1973). Reactance and the unwillingness to help others. Psychological Bulletin, 79, 310-317. Calhoun, L., Selby, J., & Warring, L. (1976). Social perception of the victim’s causal role in rape: An exploratory examination of four factors. Human Relations, 29, 517-526. Cooper, J. (1976). Deception and role playing: On telling the good guys from the bad buys. American Psychologist, 31, 605-610. Eckholm, E. (1982, August-September). Environment and the global underclass. UNESCO Courier, pp. 27-29. Eisenberg, N., & Lennon, R. (1983). Sex differences in empathy and related capacities. Psychological Bulletin, 94, 100-13 1. Eisenberg, N., & Miller, P. A. (1987). The relation of empathy to prosocial and related behaviors. Psychological Bulletin, IOI, 91-119. Eisenberg, N., Miller, P. A., Schaller, M., Fabes, R. A., Fultz, J., Shell, R., & Shea, C. L. (1989). The role of sympathy and altruistic personality traits in helping: A reexamination. Journal of Personality, 57, 41-67. Hicks, L. E. (1970). Some properties of ipsative, normative, and forced-choice normative measures. Psychological Bulletin, 74, 167-184. Higgins, R. (1980). The seventh enemy. London: Pan Books. Lemer, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world. New York: Plenum. Schopler, J., & Matthews, M. W. (1965). The influence of the perceived causal locus of partner’s dependence on the use of interpersonal power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2, 609-612. Taormina, R. J., & Messick, D. M. (1983). Deservingness for foreign aid: Effects of need, similarity, and estimated effectiveness. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 13, 371-391. Toi, M., & Batson, C. D. (1982). More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 281-292. Underwood, B., & Moore, B. (1982). Perspective taking and altruism. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 143-173. Weiner, B. (1980). A cognitive (attribution)-emotion-action model of motivated behavior: An analysis of judgments of help-giving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 186-200. Wisp& L. (1986). The distinction between sympathy and empathy: To call forth a concept, a word is needed. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 314-321. Received

June 27, 1989

Sympathy and altruism in response to disasters.

Canadian students provided ratings of the degree of sympathy they felt for those involved in each of 20 world disasters. Playing the role of taxpayer,...
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