Life’s difficulties and misfortunes can break a person and cause various disorders. On the other hand, they can also temper people, cultivating resilience and involving them in cooperation in the face of a common misfortune or danger.
Psychologists David Desteno and Daniel Lim from Northeastern University (USA) decided to find out how hard life affects the ability to compassion – more often hardens or, on the contrary, increases the ability to sympathize with others?
Pass the tests
- How do you build relationships with others?
- How considerate are you to others?
First, they interviewed 224 people they found online using the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. The age of the respondents ranged from 22 to 74 years, 60% of them were women. During the survey, the researchers first found out what difficult life events the participants in the study had to endure – for example, illnesses, loss of loved ones, divorces and separations, and so on were mentioned. Respondents also answered questions designed to assess their capacity for empathy and compassion. At the end of the survey, participants were asked to donate some of the money they received for participating in the study to charity. It turned out that the more adversity (of any kind) the participants had to endure, the more developed their capacity for empathy and compassion (in their own words) and the more money they left for charity.
Read more:
- “Why I bought tea and buns for the homeless”
David Desteno and Daniel Lim went beyond the survey and conducted an additional experiment involving 51 students. The students were unaware of the true purpose of the study and thought they were being tested for their ability to recognize emotions. During the experiment, there was another “participant” in the lab (actually an actor) who was doing a very boring task, complaining that he was sick and needed to see a doctor. The researchers were interested in whether the participants would offer to help (or even take on the boring task themselves). The next day, the participants of the experiment took a survey in which they answered questions about the difficulties experienced in life and their tendency to compassion. And again, the same pattern emerged – those who had experienced more adversity were more inclined to compassion, which again was confirmed in practice – they more often helped the “sick student”.
Read more:
- Julius Kim: “A person should be treated with irony and compassion”
The authors of the study emphasize that it is too early to say unequivocally that there is a causal relationship between life’s hardships and compassion. They also note that the impact of experienced difficulties on a person depends on his psychological characteristics. Nevertheless, they believe that, on average, life’s difficulties and adversity are more likely to contribute to the development of empathy and prosocial behavior.
Подробнее см. D. Lim, D. DeSteno «Suffering and Compassion: The Links Among Adverse Life Experiences, Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Behavior», Emotion, January 2016.