Empathy avoidance: Forestalling feeling for another in order to escape the motivational consequences.
Often people fail to respond to these in need. Why? In addition to cognitive and perceptual processes such as oversight and diffusion of responsibility, a motivational process may lead people, at times, to actively avoid feeling empathy for those in need, lest they be motivated to help them. It is predicted that empathy avoidance will occur when, before exposure to a person in need, people are aware that:(a) they will be asked to help this person and (b) helping will be costly. To test this prediction, Ss were given the choice of hearing 1 of 2 versions of an appeal by a homeless man for help: an empathyinducing version or a non-empathy-inducing version. As predicted, those aware that they soon would be given a high-cost opportunity to help the man chose to hear the empathy-inducing version less often than did those either unaware of the upcoming opportunity or aware but led to believe that helping involved low cost