Motivated empathic choices

Sharing in the experiences of others often feels like a natural inclination, yet several groups have converged on the idea that empathy reflects motivated choices. Although sometimes criticized for being unreliable, many studies suggest that empathy depends on motivated emotion regulation: people appraise the costs and benefits of empathizing, and then regulate empathy based on their evaluations of its anticipated outcomes. In the current review, we begin by highlighting the importance of the motivated empathy question from a psychological and ethical perspective, and how early empathy avoidance experiments set the stage for the recent resurgence of interest in the topic. We discuss how experimental approaches to testing motivated empathy can provide alternative explanations of empathy failures such as compassion collapse and fatigue—turning a question of whether we can empathize with mass suffering into one of whether we will empathize. We furthermore highlight our free-choice approach to understanding empathic propensity that draws upon cognitive science and economics—the empathy selection task—and then outline four categories of extensions with this approach, including testing motivational interventions, extending to other social emotional processes (e.g., compassion, moral outrage), testing group differences in empathy, and understanding empathy choice strategies. Treating empathy as a choice opens new perspectives for evaluating the possibilities of understanding other minds.