A Behavioral Approach To Measuring Empathy

Abstract

This study explored a novel approach to evaluate students’ levels of empathy. Traditional approaches to measuring empathy consist of self-reported Likerttype scales that are susceptible to response bias. To reduce the influence of factors such as social desirability, the current measure used participants’ responses to simulated situations designed to evoke empathetic reactions. The study’s instrument is disguised as a high-stakes, computer administered math quiz in which subjects interacted digitally with an on-line technological service representative after the program apparently crashed. For about one-third of the participants, the representative (IT-Rep) inserted a sympathetic, but irrelevant, story about problems in their life into the discussion about resolving the crash. Following the interaction with the IT-Rep, all participants were asked to provide a qualitative evaluation of the service received; these ratings assessed capacity for empathy from the extent to which participants sought to understand the IT representative’s personal situation or instead rate them exclusively on the quality of technical assistance. The study sampled UMBC students, aged 18 to 25, to psychometrically evaluate this newly designed behavioral measure of empathy. The results indicate a small effect size such that empathy conditions were able to account for some of the differences in IT ratings. Future research should modify the measure to increase variation in responses.