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Contributed by Daniel L. Schacter, February 11, 2014 (sent for review September 27, 2013)
Significance
Humans are readily willing to help individuals in need, in part because they can adopt the thoughts and feelings of others. Here, we provide evidence of an additional mechanism facilitating empathic responses. Our experiments revealed that, when presented with a situation depicting another person’s plight, participants who imagined an event in which they help the person (episodic simulation) or remembered a related past event of actually helping others (episodic memory) showed increased prosocial intentions. The findings reported here provide a starting point for research that could be used to develop new strategies targeted at episodic mechanisms for promoting empathy, as well as to guide research that attempts to characterize and improve empathic deficits in patient populations.
Abstract
Empathy plays an important role in human social interaction. A multifaceted construct, empathy includes a prosocial motivation or intention to help others in need. Although humans are often willing to help others in need, at times (e.g., during intergroup conflict), empathic responses are diminished or absent. Research examining the cognitive mechanisms underlying prosocial tendencies has focused on the facilitating roles of perspective taking and emotion sharing but has not previously elucidated the contributions of episodic simulation and memory to facilitating prosocial intentions. Here, we investigated whether humans’ ability to construct episodes by vividly imagining (episodic simulation) or remembering (episodic memory) specific events also supports a willingness to help others. Three experiments provide evidence that, when participants were presented with a situation depicting another person’s plight, the act of imagining an event of helping the person or remembering a related past event of helping others increased prosocial intentions to help the present person in need, compared with various control conditions. We also report evidence suggesting that the vividness of constructed episodes—rather than simply heightened emotional reactions or degree of perspective taking—supports this effect. Our results shed light on a role that episodic simulation and memory can play in fostering empathy and begin to offer insight into the underlying mechanisms.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: dls{at}wjh.harvard.edu or bgaesser{at}wjh.harvard.edu.
Author contributions: B.G. and D.L.S. designed research; B.G. performed research; B.G. analyzed data; and B.G. and D.L.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1402461111/-/DCSupplemental.
Episodic simulation, memory, and empathy
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