High Empathy vs. Low Empathy

Click the link above for a more in-depth discussion. Here are just a few of the different correlates though:

Prosocial

• People scoring high in EC score higher in shyness and social anxiety but at the same time display less loneliness and fewer negative agentic traits (boasting, aggression).
• They are also slightly more emotionally reactive, e.g., feeling a sense of emotional vulnerability, yet higher in self-control.
• Participants who score higher on the EC subscale indicate more continuous volunteer hours per month.
• Are more likely to have returned incorrect change, let somebody ahead of them in line, carried a stranger’s belongings, given money to a homeless person, looked after a friend’s plant or pet, and donated to charity within the preceding 12 months.

Antisocial

• Bullying within youth populations is negatively correlated with IRI.
• Low IRI scores are linked to aggressive behavior among the inebriated, those who have committed sexual offenses, and those who have been accused of child abuse.
• A recent meta-analysis found that criminal offenders scored lower on PT than non-offenders. However, no relationship was found between EC and criminal offending.

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The research from Twenge definitely inspired this research on empathy. Twenge found an increase in narcissism among college students of .33 standard deviations between the 1980’s and 2006. To put it another way, the rise in narcissism and drop in empathy are positively correlated, but the drop in empathy appears to be more severe.

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The effect size for this analysis was .19, which means the effect of cultural changes on empathy among college-aged kids over the years was quite a bit stronger than the effect that playing violent video games had on aggression among individuals.

In fact, the article also mentions that the effect size of violent video games on aggression is comparable to the use of condoms and risk of HIV infection (pg. 357).

Effect sizes are basically a statistical representation of the strength of a phenomenon, i.e. the decrease in empathy over the past 30 years. They describe the average difference between two groups, but not the variance within each group.

EC and PT showed drops of about .65 and .44 standard deviations, respectively. If you are a visual person, one way to think of this is in terms of the overlap between two parabolic functions. Below, imagine that the dotted line represents EC/PT results in 1979, while the solid line represents EC/PT in 2009.

A standard deviation of .65/.44 represents about 59%/70% overlap – or 41%/30% non-overlap – with less overlap representing a stronger difference between the two and vice-a-versa.

For some context, Cohen compared a “medium” effect size to the difference between a 14 year old girl and an 18 year old girl. It would be visible to the naked eye, but maybe not completely obvious at first glance.

On the other hand, Cohen describes a “large” effect size as being ‘grossly perceptible’ and equates it to the difference between the heights of 13 year old and 18 year old girls.

He also goes on to describe the “large” effect size as the difference in IQ between holders of the Ph.D. degree and ‘typical college freshmen’. I wonder what the difference in empathy would show?

Cohen compared a “small” effect size to the difference in height between a 15 year old girl and a 16 year old girl. Not exactly negligible but probably not readily apparent.

A Likert-type scale is one which is meant to measure the intensity of an attitude. For example, rather than answering “yes” or “no” to a question such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”, a Likert-type scale allows you to measure the extent to which that statement applies, e.g. “strongly disagree”, “slightly disagree”, “strongly agree”, etc.