Feeling their pain: affective empathy and public preferences for foreign development aid

Abstract

Bringing together psychological approaches to empathy with research on public preferences for foreign development aid, we shed light on the role empathy plays in global helping behavior. We argue individuals combine their affective empathic responses with situational factors when forming foreign aid preferences. Testing our theory with two novel experiments embedded in a national survey of US citizens, we find that affective empathy not only predicts the individual variation in foreign aid preferences but also explains why Americans weigh aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness—the two important situational aspects of foreign aid—differently. We show that the ability to feel others’ pain is what facilitates global helping behavior, not simply knowing their pain. However, even though this affective ability moderates the impact of aid effectiveness, it amplifies that of recipient merit. Our results contribute to a richer understanding of when empathy facilitates public support for foreign development aid and add to the burgeoning research program on behavioral international politics.

Keywords

Psychology empathy foreign aid foreign policy experiment international development

“. . . to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us. . .When you think like this - when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers - it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”

Barack Obama, 11 August 2006

“Empathy has its merits. . . it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. . .”

Paul Bloom (2016: 2)

Introduction: the power of affective empathy

The study of empathy in world politics, once a lacuna of International Relations (IR) theorizing, has received growing attention over the last decade. Much of this work has focused on the normatively desirable aspects of empathy in creating greater understanding between enemies and allies. Recently, however, philosophers and pundits alike have begun to question the unalloyed nature of empathy, suggesting that far from being a panacea for many global ills, empathy is a poor decision-making guide and indeed may do more harm than good. This debate raises several questions for IR, and the social sciences more generally, namely, How should we conceive of empathy and its effects? Under what conditions is empathy a useful, and normatively desirable, feature of human thought and decision-making?

We intervene directly in this debate and provide qualified answers to both questions. Through a systematic analysis of the effect of individual-level empathy on foreign policy preferences, in this case support for foreign development aid, a crucial issue area where the literature is still “thinner” than other areas (Milner and Tingley, 2013: 390), we make three main arguments. First, conceptually, empathy, the ability to understand and recognize the mental and emotional states of others, is not a monolithic construct, a point often lost in debates regarding whether it is good or bad. Rather, empathy is multidimensional, with both affective and cognitive elements, is experienced differently human to human, and is contextually specific (Decety and Yoder, 2016). It is also neither inherently good nor bad, as empathy can be used to understand the plight of others in order to help them or to dominate them (Booth and Wheeler, 2007: 237). It, unlike sympathy, carries no particular normative valence (Wispé, 1986). Second, empathy is emotional. As we will demonstrate, when it comes to attitude formation, in this case prosocial public preferences over foreign development aid (i.e. desiring to give), it is the ability to feel others’ pain—affective empathy—that matters more than cognitive empathy, the ability to know or understand the interests and positions of others. Feeling is more important than knowing. Affective empathy includes the arousal of emotions in oneself because of another person’s suffering or pain. We claim that it is this arousal that plays the largest role in influencing foreign aid preferences. We further suggest that the reason empathy has remained undertheorized (Booth and Wheeler, 2007: 237) likely relates to its emotional nature, where IR’s turn to emotions has been relatively recent.

Finally, we identify two contextual factors that affect aid preferences: the effectiveness of aid and the deservingness of recipient governments. Building off existing literature, we conceptualize effectiveness as an outcome: did the aid work to facilitate economic growth? Deservingness, on the other hand, is an attribution regarding the recipient government: what did the recipient government do to make the aid work? We argue that individuals with varying levels of affective empathic ability weigh these situational factors differently. The emotional arousal evoked by affective empathy due to poverty will intensify individuals’ willingness to help, if the recipient is viewed as deserving, but it will lead to anger and resentment if the recipient is perceived to be undeserving. Affective empathy motivates individuals to reward deserving recipients but punish undeserving ones.

We use data from two original survey experiments that investigate Americans’ (recruited through Amazon’s MTurk) foreign aid preferences.¹ Our experimental design measures levels of affective/cognitive empathy and manipulates effectiveness and recipient country deservingness. We find support for our arguments. First, we show that only the affective dimensions of empathy influence support for foreign aid. This indicates that simply knowing about poor countries’ suffering is immaterial with respect to prosocial giving preferences. Next, we demonstrate that affective empathy not only predicts individual variation in aid preferences but also explains why some individuals are less sensitive to aid effectiveness and more sensitive to recipient deservingness. Affective empathic individuals are willing to provide aid even when its effectiveness is low. In contrast, affective empathic individuals reward deserving recipients of aid but punish undeserving ones. This shows that empathy leads to a positive bias toward deserving recipients and a negative bias toward undeserving ones.

In developing this argument, we contribute to two broad areas of IR theory. First, we join a recent, and thriving, research program focused on the role of emotions and affect generally and individual-level decision-making specifically. With respect to the former, as we will illustrate, many existing conceptualizations of empathy in IR tend to privilege cognition. That is, empathy reduces to a type of ability to perceive the interests, positions, or other information-based mental states of others. We show that while this is part of empathy, an equally (or in the case of foreign aid preference formation, more) important aspect is emotional. Without understanding the affective component, empathy will remain undertheorized and lead to misleading conclusions about its role. With regard to decision-making and attitudes, we contribute to recent debates on the origins of political preferences. We demonstrate that policy preferences regarding the welfare of others do not stem solely from one’s ability to rationally take the perspective of another, but rather their ability to impute what they are likely feeling. Finally, crucial normative implications and policy conclusions about how public support for helping the less fortunate of the world can be increased follow from our research. At a time when some, including important policymakers such as former US President Barack Obama (2008), have suggested that an “empathy deficit” is the cause of many of our social ills, understanding the ontology of empathy and how it can be engendered become critical policy-relevant aspects of this research.

In what follows, we review what we know about empathy in the context of IR and foreign policy analysis. As empathy is an undertheorized construct and is often conflated with other concepts such as sympathy, we spend some time unpacking it and point to evidence that affective empathy affects preference formation and, in turn, matters for prosocial decision-making. We then present our research design followed by a discussion of our findings. We conclude by highlighting the additional questions that our analysis raises for future research and outlining normative and policy implications.

Empathy in international politics

Conceptualization and measurement

Policymakers and practitioners of international politics often extol the virtues of empathy. As Tony Blair (2013) recently put it, reflecting on his time in office and, in particular, the Northern Ireland Peace Process, “Many of the hundreds of hours I spent in discussion with the parties were not simply about specific blockages or details of the negotiation, but rather about absorbing and trying to comprehend why they felt as they did and communicating that feeling to the other side. . . I then had inside me something of the passions they felt inside them.”² Theorists of international politics, however, have been relatively slow to appreciate their insights. In surveying the role of empathy, Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler (2007: 237) conclude, “Empathy is a potentially significant but under theorized concept in foreign policy analysis.” One reason for this undertheorization relates, perhaps, to the lack of engagement with emotion, and emotion-laden concepts, more generally. As Blair’s comment makes clear, and research in social psychology and neuroscience affirm, empathy has an emotional component; it is, in part, about feeling what someone else is feeling (Decety and Yoder, 2016). It is only within the last several years that IR theory has moved beyond emotions as “taken-for-granted” constructs (Crawford, 2000: 120–123) and begun to probe how and when they operate, resulting in what Christian Reus-Smit (2014: 568) has argued is a turn, perhaps long overdue, toward one of IR’s “great frontiers.” Empathy is not just emotion, however. To understand another, in addition to feeling what another is feeling, one often invokes cognitive abilities, such as imaginatively putting oneself in the shoes of the other in order to construct, in one’s own mind, what the other might be thinking given the current situation or their perspective. Playing chess at a high level, for example, arguably requires a refined ability to see the positions, interests, and limitations one faces from the perspective of the other side. Theorists of empathy have, therefore, delineated empathy into two broad constitutive parts: an affective or emotional component and a cognitive or information-processing component. These are not divided by a bright line, and there may be overlap, but serve as a useful analytical distinction for assessing the ontology of empathy.

One of the many intriguing aspects of empathy is that psychologists and social scientists view considerable variation in the population with respect to the ability to empathize, sometimes referred to as “empathic capacity.” Some individuals have a more difficult time than others empathizing with strangers as well as friends and family. This variation is likely explained by both genetic factors as well as development and training (Wilson and Thomas, 2004: 81). In other words, empathic capacity relates both to inherent capabilities of individuals, but it also can be affected through socialization, interaction, and learning (Preston et al., 2002). Therapists and medical students, for example, routinely undergo training to hone their ability to convey empathy to patients (Smith et al., 2016). Accordingly, empathy has a regulatory component (Lamm and Silani, 2014: 71). This regulation means that individuals are not slaves to their empathic responses. Rather, this “meta-cognitive feedback loop. . . plays a crucial role in taking into account one’s own mental competence in order to react (or not) to the affective states of others.”

Relatedly, empathic capacity can be activated or invoked. In experimental settings, researchers tap into an individual’s capacity to empathize by presenting subjects with real or hypothetical situations, vignettes, or imagery. Daniel Batson (2011), one of the leaders in empathy research and a pioneer in the use of hypothetical situations in an experimental setting to interrogate empathy and the ability to invoke it, has shown that simply asking individuals to try to put oneself in that person’s shoes changes cooperative behaviors toward others. Invoking empathy, in other words, affects decision-making. Importantly, variation in empathic capacity is not always correlative with positivity from a normative perspective. Psychopaths, for example, often excel at cognitive empathy and indeed use it to their advantage in manipulating others; and, one does not necessarily need empathy to be a good person (Bloom, 2016).

Finally, as a construct, empathy is often measured by delineating four discrete components, comprising both affect and cognition. One widely used measure, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), utilizes self-reporting and has been tested in many independent samples drawn from different countries.³ Perspective-taking (PT) refers to the ability to put oneself in the shoes of someone else, replicating their perceived mental states. This is the cognitive dimension of empathy. Empathic concern (EC) refers to one’s “other-oriented” feelings of concern for individuals. Personal distress (PD) relates to the “self-oriented” feelings of anxiety, unease, concern, or other emotional response to another’s emotional state or condition.⁴ Together, EC and PD capture the affective dimensions of empathy. More specifically, PT measures the cognitive ability to “adopt the psychological points of view of others,” EC captures “the tendency to experience other-oriented feelings and the response to distress in others with the reactive response of sympathy and compassion,” and PD taps “ones’ own feelings of personal unease and discomfort in reaction to the emotions of others.” The main difference between the two affective dimensions of empathy, EC and PD, is that the latter arouses physiological discomfort for the person because it entails self-oriented anxiety due to others’ plight. All in all, individuals can vary considerably in each of these dimensions.⁵

In sum, empathy is complex and requires a sophisticated measurement strategy in order to ensure all constitute parts of the construct are accounted for; simply measuring affective or cognitive responses risks missing important variation. As Decety and Yoder (2016: 2), two leading empathy scholars, put it, “[e]mpathy is a multifaceted construct used to account for the capacity to share and understand the thoughts and feelings of others,” but it is one that requires “examin[ing] the contribution of each of these facets.”

Empathy’s effects

As alluded to above, one reason IR has had relatively little to say about empathy may relate to its affective component. Indeed, many of the empathy studies in IR have focused almost exclusively on the cognitive or PT aspects of empathy (see, for example, “strategic empathy” (Kertzer et al., 2018)). There may be several reasons for this, including a (misguided) tradition of viewing emotion in conflict with, rather than essential for, rationality. While psychologists have done much to dispel this notion, an artifact of the earlier view may be that empathy has been resistant to study in rationalist models. Another reason, as Brent Steele notes (2008: 3), has been the tendency among IR scholars, particularly in the 1990s, to characterize normative social action “as a form of empathy,” which may stand in opposition to self-interested behavior and thus potentially also not particularly amenable to rationalist epistemological approaches.

Recently, however, there have been several applications of empathy in a broad set of domains. In diplomatic studies, some scholars have shown the importance of mediators cultivating empathy between disputants in summitry (Holmes and Yarhi-Milo, 2017). Others have, more generally, argued that empathy is crucial to productive face-to-face interactions (e.g. Hall and Yarhi-Milo, 2012; Wheeler, 2018; Wong, 2016). Empathy allows individuals to understand the positions, interests, feelings, and concerns of others, may help to build trust, and thus (potentially) increases the prospects for cooperation. Empathy is also integral to the creation of political strategy, such as nonviolent resistance (Head, 2012), which has been implicitly linked to democratic peace (e.g. Brock et al., 2006) and security communities (e.g. Koschut, 2014).

On balance, however, we do not have a clear understanding of whether and how empathy influences political preference formation and decision-making. While we know that empathy is believed to play a role in shaping individual beliefs, preferences, and actions (Archer et al., 1981), precisely how remains puzzling. However, some recent works have examined empathy in the broader context of humanitarianism that may provide useful clues. Newman et al. (2015), for example, have shown that empathy moderates individuals’ responsiveness to the plight of immigrants.⁶ While not directly studying empathy, Hansen (2019), similarly, has found that individuals who believe that others should be helped, namely humanitarianism as an empathic value, amplifies the weight of information regarding recipient deservingness in social welfare attitudes. Finally, in the appendix, we discuss a robust scholarly debate on just how desirable empathy actually is. Despite all these recent contributions, however, the behavioral implications of empathy for IR have, to date, been largely overlooked.

Foreign development aid, empathy, and public attitudes

One area of international politics where empathy may be heavily implicated is foreign aid. After all, at a conceptual level, support for foreign aid likely requires some ability to empathize with the plight of others, others who are often very distant geographically and socially. There are different types of foreign aid such as military, economic, and humanitarian. Our focus here is on official development assistance (ODA), which the OECD defines as “government aid designed to promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries.”⁷ Existing studies suggest that individual preferences for domestic redistribution policies and support for social welfare might be closely linked to motivations generated by empathy (Feldman and Steenbergen, 2001; Fong, 2007; Huddy et al., 2001). On the other hand, to the extent that empathy is implicated, some scholars have lamented this role (Altman, 2014), arguing that “development should be designed and deployed with a balanced mix of empathy and objectivity” (Madhavan and Oakley, 2011: 240), suggesting that an empathic view potentially may be a nonrational one (echoing the views in IR alluded to before). Finally, given the foreign nature of the aid, decisions to give or not to give aid involve “strangers” (Bayram, 2017a), of different social identity groups. This puts empathy to a hard test, as existing studies suggest foreign aid perceptions are highly affected by perceived similarity to the donor country (Taormina and Messick, 1983) and allows us to examine to what extent an empathic or unempathic public is willing to help dissimilar others. At the same time, compared to the plight of refugees or humanitarian crises caused by wars or natural disasters, foreign development aid is a less emotionally charged issue. Focusing on an issue area that does not have extremely high emotional valence is important in order not to conflate the role of empathy with other emotions such as fear.

Studying how empathy sheds light on the relationship between public opinion and foreign aid matters. Paul Collier (2007: 183) has famously noted that “the key obstacle to reforming aid is public opinion in donor countries.” Even though mass publics might not be as interested in foreign policy compared to domestic policy, research indicates that foreign aid spending is an issue that the public takes seriously. For example, survey evidence shows that publics consider the tradeoffs between domestic welfare spending and foreign aid (Heinrich, 2013; Noél and Thérien, 2002), their country’s trade relations with recipients (Hudson and van Heerde-Hudson, 2012), as well as other policy priorities (Heinrich, 2013; Heinrich et al., 2016) when thinking about foreign aid spending.

In addition, research has shown that public opinion influences expenditures on foreign assistance (Milner and Tingley, 2010, 2011, 2013; Mosley, 1985). In democratic donor countries, politicians monitor views of foreign aid, as politicians depend on the votes of their constituencies. For example, according to a 2012 survey by the Council of Foreign Relations, about 60% of Americans thought the US government spends too much on aid. In a longitudinal study, Powers et al. (2010) show that members of Congress are more likely to support foreign aid bills when foreign aid beneficiaries are present in their district. In a cross-national study, Mosley (1985) has shown that public opinion shapes both the amount of aid and where aid flows. For example, Ireland’s official aid program has grown significantly since the early 2000s, and Ireland is now the sixth-largest per capita donor in the world.⁸ This trend is partly shaped by the fact that the Irish public is in favor of Ireland’s growing international role in global development (Connolly et al., 2008).

Finally, the political importance of foreign development aid has risen as populist governments and movements have begun to advocate decreasing ODA spending (Heinrich et al., 2016). Anti-aid rhetoric decreases public support for aid (Bayram and Thompson, 2019). As the popularity of populist parties and candidates in donor countries such as the UK, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States grows, it is arguably more important than ever to understand the relationship between public opinion and foreign aid.

Empathy and the formation of foreign aid preferences

Some studies on donor publics’ preferences for foreign aid have highlighted political economy explanations based on income and education. Scholars have shown that higher income and more educated individuals are more supportive of supplying foreign aid (Milner and Tingley, 2010, 2013; Paxton and Knack, 2012). Studies also suggest that liberals are more supportive of foreign development aid than conservatives (Milner and Tingley, 2010; Prather, 2018; Thérien and Noel, 2000). Finally, social identity may play a role. Paxton and Knack (2012), for example, found that cosmopolitanism increases support for foreign aid, and nationalism decreases support for foreign aid. Beyond material considerations, ideology, and identity, we know that moral factors influence public support for foreign aid. Support for development foreign aid is a particular type of prosocial behavior. It is a moral choice to help strangers. Bayram (2017a) has shown that generalized trust, “the belief in the integrity and trustworthiness of people,” shapes the moral foundation of donor publics’ support for development foreign aid. We contribute to this emergent line of research on the prosocial foundations of foreign aid attitudes by arguing that another factor underlying the commitment to aiding strangers is empathy.

As alluded to earlier, psychologists have noted that the emotional dimensions of empathy are especially crucial for prosocial behaviors to develop (Batson, 2011; De Waal, 2008). With respect to affective empathy in particular, EC is the other-oriented emotional response one feels; it is “feeling for the other” (Batson, 2011: 11). Head (2012: 35) has also argued that “[o]ur ability to experience pain and pleasure, to imagine the pain and pleasure of others and the desire for others to share our experiences, prevents us from acting purely on the basis of self-interest and provides an incentive to perceive ourselves and evaluate our actions through the eyes of others.” Simply knowing about the pain of others, understanding their plight at a cognitive level, is often not a strong enough stimulant to trigger a response in the absence of emotions because it does not create an underlying motivation to help others. As Winczewski et al. (2016) have shown, the ability to accurately know the needs of others and the motivation to help are separate concepts. Accurately understanding others facilitates aiding and responsiveness if individuals already have emotional EC; when EC is low, accurately understanding others does not create a motivation to help. Or, as Batson puts it, “feeling other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of another person in need. . . produces a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing that person’s welfare by having the empathy-inducing need removed (i.e. altruistic motivation)” (2011: 29).

One influential study, in particular, highlights the power of affective empathy in shaping behavioral distribution decisions. Aieleen Edele et al. (2013) measured levels of affective and cognitive empathy, as well as other potential predictors of prosocial behaviors such as justice sensitivity, in a Dictator Game setup when subjects distributed money among themselves and a receiver. Affective empathy was the strongest predictor of altruistic sharing and cognitive empathy did not explain the prosocial behaviors: “not the proper understanding of others’ perspectives but the disposition to react emotionally towards their plights seems to account for altruistic behavior” (2013: 101). These findings also parallel the insights of several IR scholars who have noted the power of emotions to motivate prosocial mental states and subsequent behaviors (Holmes, 2018; Mercer, 2010; Wheeler, 2018).

We, therefore, expect that when affective empathy (PD or EC) is activated at high levels, individuals will be more supportive of foreign aid. We do not expect the cognitive aspect of empathy, PT, to have a similar effect. Adopting a stranger’s point of view is not enough to motivate helping, all else being equal; for that, individuals need to feel either PD or strong concern for the other in order to motivate action.

Affective Empathy Hypothesis (H1): Individuals will be more supportive of foreign aid when they have high affective empathic capacity (i.e. score high PD and EC).

Aid effectiveness, recipient deservingness, and preferences for foreign aid

Psychologists have also long understood that empathy interacts with situational or contextual variables (Archer et al., 1981; Batson et al., 1991; Burnstein et al., 1994; Ickes, 2001; Pierce et al., 2013; Preston and de Waal, 2002). In the context of foreign development aid, the overall effectiveness of aid and the deservingness of specific aid recipients have been identified as crucial variables affecting foreign policy attitudes. At the outset, we note that deservingness and effectiveness are related, but it is important to keep them conceptually distinct. Aid effectiveness is about outcomes: whether aid contributed to economic growth, helped reduce poverty and malnutrition, increased employment, and so forth. Recipient deservingness is about how well the recipient government used aid and how hard it tried to achieve economic growth. Of course, if foreign aid ends up in the hands of corrupt governments, or self-serving autocratic regimes, it will not be effective, as aid effectiveness and recipient merit are related (Bauhr et al., 2013; Bodenstein and Faust, 2017; Dutta et al., 2013; Hodler and Raschky, 2014). Nevertheless, there are reasons why aid might end up being ineffective even though a recipient government displays “good behavior,” and these reasons warrant keeping effectiveness and deservingness separate. Exogenous events such as global financial crisis or natural disasters (Leach-Kemon et al., 2011), deficiencies in the proper allocation, distribution, and delivery of aid due to donor fragmentation (Dietrich, 2013; Easterly and Pfutze, 2008), donor restrictions on how aid should be spent (Bayram and Graham 2017) or simply insufficient funds can all hamper aid effectiveness but have little to do with recipient governments’ deservingness.

Scholars of social welfare and foreign aid also differentiate effectiveness and deservingness conceptually (e.g. Hacker, 2002; Hetling et al., 2008; Van Oorschot, 2006). Taormina and Messick (1983: 373) identify effectiveness as one of the component variables of deservingness, but not the same as deservingness. Riddell (2008) similarly separates the two concepts implicitly, differentiating between how needy a state may be and how well the aid may work in alleviating that need. Kept separate from effectiveness, deservingness or merit is also emphasized in donors’ aid allocation decisions (Berthélemy, 2006; Dollar and Levin, 2006; Thiele et al., 2007). We follow existing models of separating effectiveness and deservingness and note the outcome-oriented aspect of effectiveness and attribution-oriented aspect of deservingness, which we develop later.

Turning first to effectiveness, we know that both public and donor governments care about the effectiveness of aid. “Aid fatigue,” in the context of foreign aid, refers generally to the international community’s waning interest or desire to provide financial assistance. It can have different sources, such as economic recession or increased emphasis on other concerns, such as terrorism. Yet, as Pomerantz argues, effectiveness of aid may underlie many of these perspectives: “aid fatigue is clearly linked to the feeling that not much has been accomplished with the money spent” (2004: 4). This notion of return on investment echoes Altman’s (2014) argument about the need for rationality over “passion” and concrete results over “goodness.” One source of aid fatigue in the United States may relate to inflated and erroneous perceptions of how much the government spends on aid (Gilens, 2001; Hurst et al., 2017). More generally, however, it is difficult for the public to witness the effects of aid. Foreign aid success stories are often under-reported, while high-profile debates regarding effectiveness proliferate. Discourse and policy debate after the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), for example, highlighted the extent to which there is pressure on donor governments to demonstrate value for money spent in the developing world. With little information to go on, it can be difficult for individuals to run the cost–benefit calculation about the effectiveness of aid; providing information regarding effectiveness facilitates such calculation. Finally, though a considerable body of research has analyzed whether foreign aid is effective in promoting growth and reducing poverty (Bauer, 1993; Boone, 1996; Burnside and Dollar, 2000; Chenery and Strout, 1996; Collier and Dehn, 2001; Dalgaard et al., 2004; Easterly, 2001; Goldin et al., 2002; Hansen and Tarp, 2001; Levy, 1988; Mosley, 1980; Stiglitz, 2002; Roodman, 2007), there has been little direct examination of how information on aid effectiveness shapes public preferences for foreign aid. However, there is growing recognition that effectiveness of foreign aid shapes donor publics’ views (Bodenstein and Faust, 2017; Heinrich and Kobayashi, 2018; Hudson and vanHeerde-Hudson, 2012; Knack and Eubank, 2009; Komiya et al., 2018). When publics believe that aid has actually fulfilled its objectives, they are more likely to support it. Following these findings, we hypothesize that the following:

Effectiveness Hypothesis (H2): Individuals will be more supportive of foreign aid when they perceive aid as effective.

As we noted earlier, deservingness refers to recipient characteristics and effort. These could be reflected in the outcomes or in the process of a country’s engagement with foreign aid. A wealth of psychological evidence indicates that judgments regarding whether or not to help others in need are structured not just by whether they think that the help will make a difference (effectiveness), but by how deserving the subject in question is perceived to be. Deservingness is an attribute of the target recipient: “Needy individuals who are viewed as being responsible for their own plight are judged as undeserving of help, whereas those who are viewed as victims of circumstances beyond their own control are judged as deserving” (Aarøe and Petersen, 2014: 686). Put simply, being unlucky and being lazy are not judged the same way. This is the “deservingness heuristic” (Petersen, 2012: 1). The deservingness heuristic operates automatically through affective mechanisms of anger and resentment toward the unmotivated, contrasted with compassion and concern toward the unlucky (Jensen and Petersen, 2017; Petersen et al., 2011, 2012). Agency matters for deservingness assessments. Some scholars have shown that aversive emotions, such as feelings of anger toward undeserving recipients, can be particularly strong, leading individuals to penalize those viewed as lazy (Petersen et al., 2012; Small and Lerner, 2008). Similarly, the deservingness heuristic can provide positive emotional responses when it comes to evaluating those who deserve what they get.

The implications of this on policy preferences are substantial. Aarøe and Petersen (2014) have shown in the context of welfare support that cross-national differences in default perceptions about the recipients’ deservingness predict attitudes. For example, individuals in states with two very different approaches to welfare, Denmark and the United States, possess different stereotypes regarding whether welfare recipients are either unlucky or lazy, absent any other available information about the recipient. Yet, when direct information is provided about the deservingness of a recipient, these differences evaporate. Two sentences of information about the recipient’s laziness/unluckiness affect attitudes. Christina Fong, through a series of experiments, has similarly shown that deservingness strongly influences the extent to which individuals, even those who score low on humanitarianism and altruism scales, are willing to help those in need (Fong, 2007). Findings from many other studies highlight the importance of recipient deservingness. For example, Skitka and Tetlock (1993) showed that people are less likely to provide aid to unemployed AIDS patients than to employed ones, because the former are judged to be unindustrious. Similarly, van Oorschot (2006), in a cross-national study of European countries, demonstrated that individuals are much more willing to help the elderly and the sick and are less willing to help the unemployed and immigrants. Therefore, our second situational hypothesis posits the following:

Deservingness Hypothesis (H3): Individuals will be more supportive of foreign aid when they perceive the recipients of aid as deserving.

Empathy, aid effectiveness, and recipient deservingness

It is also possible to think of the effect of empathy on support for foreign aid from an interactionist perspective. The emotional logic of empathy means that affective responses can crowd out concerns about effectiveness. As Storbeck and Clore (2008: 1827) argue, affect affects judgment and decision-making in concrete and predictable ways: “people often make judgments essentially by asking themselves, ‘How do I feel about it?’” And, as they point out, “Positive feelings then generally lead to positive judgments and negative feelings to negative judgments.” The intensity of the affect matters as well. The arousal of the affect, or the strength at which it is felt, “may make an object seem more important or may intensify its apparent affective value so that positive objects seem more positive and negative objects more negative” (Storbeck and Clore, 2008: 1828). We, therefore, anticipate that at lower levels of affective salience and activation individuals are more likely to privilege their cognitive beliefs and attitudes. When affective salience is high, however, we should expect cognitive beliefs to be minimized in favor of affective responses. Put differently, affect amplifies affect, and cognition amplifies cognition. Therefore, when PD and EC aspects of empathy are salient, we would not only expect that individuals will support foreign aid, but also that an individual would be less likely to make decisions based on rational cost–benefit analyses that involve probabilities, beliefs regarding effectiveness, and so forth. When PD or EC is not activated, or only activated at low levels, the affective response, to the extent that there is one, reinforces cognitive beliefs. When individuals “feel” the pain of others in poor countries and experience anxiety and discomfort because of this feeling, they should pay less attention to whether foreign aid has been effective or not because they will be motivated by a desire to help. Accordingly, high levels of PD and EC should decrease the importance of aid effectiveness information in individuals’ decision-making compass. Therefore, we expect the following:

Affective Moderation Hypothesis (H4): Affective empathy (PD and EC) will decrease impact of aid effectiveness on individuals’ support for foreign aid.

When it comes to recipient deservingness, however, the emotional logic of affective empathy means that the importance of information on recipient deservingness will be amplified when individuals “feel” the pain of the people in poor countries. This is because, as we explained earlier, recipient deservingness is affective and operates through an affective heuristic. Individuals who score highly on affective measures will want to reward the deserving governments, but they will be angry at the undeserving ones, and thus will likely punish them for wasting away foreign aid. Accordingly, we expect individuals who are higher on PD and EC aspects of empathy to put more weight on recipient deservingness than those who score lower on affective empathy:

Affective Amplification Hypothesis (H5): Affective empathy (PD and EC) will increase effect of recipient deservingness on individuals’ support for foreign aid.

Method and data

To test our model, we developed and fielded a new public opinion survey with two experiments embedded in it. Between October 2016 and March 2017, we recruited 1165 American adults through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) online survey platform. Despite initial skepticism, MTurk samples are now widely considered to be appropriate for experimental studies (Buhrmester et al., 2011; Kertzer et al., 2018). Berinsky et al. (2012: 366) have shown that “relative to other convenience samples, MTurk samples are actually more representative of the general population.” Perhaps even more importantly, scholars have demonstrated that the results of nationally representative samples can be replicated using MTurk participants (Berinsky et al., 2012; Mullinix et al., 2015).

Our survey consists of four main parts: (a) an empathy section that includes the IRI index, (b) an experimental section, (c) a dispositional questionnaire that measures potential covariates, and (d) a questionnaire that includes demographic measures. In the beginning of the survey, all participants responded to the IRI empathy questions. Respondents then randomly received either an experiment involving Macedonia or Zambia. Participants then responded to the individual-difference measures included in the dispositional questionnaire such as foreign policy orientations, cosmopolitanism, support for government welfare, in a random order. All respondents answered the demographic questions last.

Both the Macedonia and Zambia experiments have a between-subject design (2 × 2) with a control condition. As captured by Figure 1 (demonstrating survey flow and the experimental research design), in the experimental vignettes we manipulated only information about aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness; everything else remained constant. The introductory preambles for each experiment stated that Macedonia/Zambia is a poor country that heavily depends on foreign development assistance from rich donor countries, including the United States, and aid constitutes a large portion of its national income. After receiving the introductory preambles, participants were randomly assigned to either the control or one of the treatment conditions. Those assigned to the control condition did not receive any additional information. They were simply asked about their willingness to provide aid. Respondents assigned to the treatment group received one of the four experimental vignettes that provided information about the effectiveness (high or low) of foreign aid and the deservingness (high or low) of the Macedonian/Zambian government.

Figure 1.

Flow of the survey and experimental design.

We manipulated aid effectiveness by informing participants about the contribution foreign aid has made to Macedonia’s/Zambia’s economic growth. As argued earlier, focusing on economic growth is an important measure of aid effectiveness watched closely by donor publics and aid agencies. To manipulate deservingness of the Macedonian/Zambian government, we provided signals about the industriousness of the recipient government by conveying to participants that it either succeeded or failed to establish a national development program, set clear policy priorities and monitoring programs, and to report the results of the country’s economic progress to donors and its citizens. As our deservingness conceptualization includes the industriousness of the recipient government, the emphasis of the deservingness treatment is on the effort invested by the recipient government, not on whether aid helped increase growth. This operationalization also addresses the possibility of a deserving recipient whose economy nevertheless did not improve because structural factors were too large for aid to lead to a positive outcome. As can be seen in Table 1, each of our four experimental scenarios represents a combination of effectiveness and deservingness.

Table 1.

Experimental conditions for Macedonia and Zambia experiments.

Condition	Manipulated factor: effectiveness	Manipulated factor: deservingness	Condition short name	Macedonia (N = 1027)	Zambia (N = 1031)
1	High effectiveness	High deservingness	HEHD	N = 208	N = 208
2	High effectiveness	Low deservingness	HELD	N = 207	N = 207
3	Low effectiveness	High deservingness	LEHD	N = 202	N = 206
4	Low effectiveness	Low deservingness	LELD	N = 209	N = 204
Control	n/a	n/a	Control	N = 201	N = 206

Results

We present the results in two stages. First, we analyze the treatment effects across our two experiments, testing whether the effectiveness of foreign aid and the deservingness of the recipient government affect participants’ willingness to provide foreign development aid. Second, we analyze the role empathy plays in shaping aid preferences and its relationship to effectiveness and deservingness by estimating a series of regression models. These analyses allow us to determine whether empathic individuals are more supportive of foreign aid and whether they respond to aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness differently than relatively unempathic individuals.

The effect of aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness on support for foreign aid

There is substantial variation in participants’ support for providing foreign aid to Macedonia (M = 3.29, SD = 1.45) and to Zambia (M = 3.33, SD = 1.52). Crucially, as can be seen in Figure 2, which plots the average responses for each treatment condition with 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals, the aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness treatments have statistically significant effects both in the Macedonia (F(4,1007) = 26.47, p = 0.000) and in the Zambia (F(4,1026) = 28.80, p = 0.000) experiments as revealed by an analysis of variance (ANOVA) estimation, supporting the Effectiveness and the Deservingness hypotheses (H2 and H3).

Figure 2.

Average treatment effects: aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness predict support for foreign aid.

The effect of empathy on support for foreign aid

To examine how empathy influences support for foreign aid, we estimate a series of regression models. To estimate these models, we drop the control condition from our analysis and create binary variables for aid effectiveness/recipient deservingness. We do so in order to isolate the specific impact of aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness in accord with our hypotheses. The aid effectiveness variable is coded “1” if a respondent was told that aid has contributed to Macedonia’s/Zambia’s economic growth by 75%, and “0” if 25%. Similarly, the deservingness variable is coded “1” if the Macedonian/Zambian government is described as successfully establishing a national development strategy and using aid well, “0” if described as having failed to establish a successful national development strategy.

Our findings reveal two major points. First, affective empathy has a statistically significant and substantively large effect on support for foreign aid. It is affective, not cognitive, empathy that predicts foreign aid preferences, as we expected. Second, affective empathy reduces the impact of aid effectiveness on support for foreign aid, but it amplifies the effect of recipient deservingness. Highly affective empathic individuals are willing to tolerate ineffective aid, but they do not tolerate undeserving recipients.

Table 2 presents the results for the Macedonia experiment. We start with a model that includes only the effectiveness and deservingness variables (Model M1). Reinforcing our findings from ANOVA, effectiveness of foreign aid and the deservingness of the recipient government have positive and statistically significant effects on participants’ willingness to provide foreign aid. Respondents are more willing to supply foreign aid when aid has been effective and when the Macedonian government has used aid well.

Table 2.

Results for the Macedonia experiment.

	Model M1	Model M2	Model M3	Model M4	Model M5	Model M6	Model M7	Model M8
Effectiveness	0.563*** (0.100)	0.535*** (0.096)	1.331** (0.644)	0.530*** (0.105)	1.120*** (0.317)	0.478*** (0.100)	1.283*** (0.309)	0.527*** (0.105)
Deservingness	0.635*** (0.101)	0.616*** (0.096)	0.627*** (0.100)	0.311 (0.637)	0.611*** (0.095)	−0.024 (0.311)	0.625*** (1.00)	−0.183 (0.310)
Personal distress		0.244*** (0.060)	0.367*** (0.080)	0.102(0.084)	0.405*** (0.077)	0.157* (0.086)	0.378*** (0.076)	0.102(0.082)
Empathic concern		0.205** (0.070)	0.220** (0.093)	0.250(0.101)	0.046(0.070)	0.062(0.065)	0.183** (0.060)	0.205*** (0.058)
Perspective taking		−0.007(0.07)	−0.040(0.102)	0.016(0.104)
Effectiveness × Personal distress			−0.273** (0.121)		−0.238** (0.112)		−0.282** (0.110)
Effectiveness × Empathic concern			−0.083(0.135)
Effectiveness × Perspective taking			0.064(0.150)
Deservingness × Personal distress				0.301** (0.110)		0.236** (0.110)		0.333** (0.107)
Deservingness × Empathic concern				−1.05(0.137)
Deservingness × Perspective taking				−0.035(0.156)
Generalized trust					0.267** (0.100)	0.261** (0.100)
Ideology (left)					−0.010(0.046)	−0.010(0.046)
Nationalism					−0.130** (0.063)	−0.132** (0.063)
Cosmopolitanism					0.300*** (0.066)	0.302*** (0.033)
Support government welfare					−0.115*** (0.046)	−0.116*** (0.033)
Income		0.020(0.055)	0.015(0.040)	0.017(0.05)	0.031(0.038)	0.031(0.053)	0.014(0.055)	0.016(0.054)
Education		0.013(0.041)	0.015(0.055)	0.016(0.038)	0.007(0.038)	0.052(0.037)	0.016(0.040)	0.013(0.040)
Republican		−0.313** (0.136)	−0.305** (0.136)	−0.302** (0.136)	−0.044(0.161)	−0.040(0.162)	−0.306** (0.136)	−0.308** (0.136)
Democrat		0.381** (0.111)	0.404*** (0.136)	0.374** (0.111)	0.140(0.114)	0.120(0.114)	0.403*** (0.111)	0.371** (0.111)
Female		0.087(0.101)	0.072(0.100)	0.105(0.100)	0.072(0.100)	0.090(0.100)	0.077(0.100)	0.104(0.100)
Age		−0.006(0.004)	−0.006(0.004)	−0.007* (0.004)	−0.006(0.004)	−0.006(0.004)	−0.006(0.004)	−0.007* (0.004)
Constant	2.720*** (0.085)	1.355** (0.447)	1.065** (0.408)	1.530** (0.500)	1.160** (0.508)	1.780*** (0.55)	0.103*** (0.401)	1.773** (0.414)
R ²	0.085	0.1771	0.1845	0.1864	0.2648	0.2648	0.1840	0.1853
N	818	797	797	797	734	734	797	797

***p ⩽ 0.001; **p ⩽ 0.05; *p ⩽ 0.10.

Notes: Reported values are regression coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. The dependent variable is how much effort participants would like the American government to make to provide aid to Macedonia, which ranges from 1 (no special effort) to 6 (every special effort). All models are statistically significant. Female, Democrat, and Republication are binary variables with Male and Independent as the respective reference groups.

To analyze the role empathy plays, we add the variables tapping the three core dimensions of empathy, that is, PD and EC (affective empathy), and PT (cognitive empathy) as well as control for standard demographic variables (income, education, party identity, gender, age) given that we have measured and not manipulated empathy (Model M2). While effectiveness and deservingness continue to be important, we find that PD and EC also have positive, statistically significant effects on participants’ willingness to provide aid to the Macedonian government. The coefficient for the PT variable, however, fails to reach statistical significance. These results lead to an important conclusion. Merely attempting to put oneself in the mental shoes of others does not influence an individual’s support for foreign aid. What affects one’s support for foreign aid are the more emotional dimensions of empathy. The ability to be concerned and have personal feelings of anxiety and distress about unfortunate others is what generates support for aid. We also observe that republicans are less supportive of aid and democrats are more supportive relative to independents. As can be seen, however, despite the noticeable effect of party identity, the PD and EC dimensions of empathy are important predictors of aid support. On balance, findings lend credence to our core argument captured in the Affective Empathy hypothesis (H1).

The next two models explore interaction effects between the effectiveness and deservingness and the dimensions of empathy. Even though we did not find a statistically significant effect for the cognitive PT dimension of empathy, we, nevertheless, interact it with contextual factors.⁹ Results reveal two main conclusions. First, replicating our previous results, the cognitive dimension of empathy neither has an impact nor interacts with contextual factors. Second, affective empathy is a moderator of effectiveness and deservingness, but only when it embodies self-oriented and physiological PD not when it reflects EC. As the nonsignificant interaction terms in both models show, the tendency to have concern and compassion for others, namely EC, increases public support for foreign aid independent of situational factors. Individuals who score high on EC are supportive of foreign aid both when it is effective and when it is ineffective (Model M3). They are also supportive of foreign aid regardless of recipient government’s deservingness (Model M4). This finding supports our Affective Empathy hypothesis but not the interactionist hypothesis.

However, in contrast to the EC dimension of empathy, the PD dimension interacts with situational factors, influencing how participants respond to aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness. The effect of the interaction term between PD and aid effectiveness is statistically significant and negative (Model M3) albeit small. This shows that stronger feelings of PD about others’ plight to some degree reduce the importance of aid effectiveness in individuals’ decision-making calculus. As can be seen in Figure 3, at lower levels of PD, there is a gap in aid support between when the aid is described as effective versus ineffective. As PD increases, however, participants’ support for aid rises even when aid has been ineffective. This implies that donor publics’ feelings of empathic distress on behalf of others benefit the recipient countries even when aid has not effectively contributed to economic growth. This result provides support for our Affective Moderation hypothesis (H4).

Figure 3.

Personal distress moderates the impact of aid effectiveness on individuals’ willingness to provide aid to Macedonia.

The PD dimension of empathy also influences the impact of the deservingness treatment. The positive interaction term in Model M4 means that the stronger the participants’ feelings of personal unease and anxiety about unfortunate others, the more the emphasis they place on the deservingness of the Macedonian government when making decisions about foreign aid. As shown in Figure 4, at lower levels of PD, participants’ support for foreign aid is low both when the Macedonian government is characterized as deserving and when it is characterized as undeserving. As PD increases, however, a small gap in aid support emerges between when the Macedonian government is described as deserving versus undeserving. This shows that deserving recipient governments benefit more from donor publics’ feelings of empathic distress than undeserving governments. This finding, which holds independent of aid effectiveness, supports our Affective Amplification hypothesis (H5).

Figure 4.

Personal distress amplifies the impact of recipient deservingness on individuals’ willingness to provide aid to Macedonia.

We have already shown that our results are robust to the inclusion of party identity and socioeconomic demographic. To further test the robustness of our findings and explore any other potential sources of individual heterogeneity, we control for a series of covariates that have been shown by previous research to impact individuals’ attitudes toward foreign development aid (see Bayram, 2017a; Paxton and Knack, 2012 for a discussion of these covariates). We find that generalized trust, cosmopolitan identity, and support for social welfare increase support for foreign development aid, but nationalism reduces support, replicating the findings of existing studies (Models M5 and M6).¹⁰ However, as can be seen, the results for empathy and for the interactions with its PD dimension are robust and consistent across the models, indicating that controlling for other influences on foreign aid preferences, the importance of affective empathy remains. In addition, Models M7 and M8 show that our findings are still robust controlling for standard sociodemographic background variables only.¹¹

Table 3 presents the results for the Zambia experiment following the steps we took earlier. Due to space limitations, we discuss the results of the Zambia experiment at length in the appendix. Here we note the two main conclusions that emerge from the Zambia experiment. First, being concerned and anxious about unfortunate others contributes to aid willingness, providing evidence for the Affective Empathy hypothesis (H3). However, simply taking the perspective of others does not facilitate helping behavior. Second, as captured in Figure 5, similar to what we found in the Macedonia experiment, PD again amplifies the impact of the deservingness treatment (Model Z4). Individuals who score high on PD reward the Zambian government with more foreign aid when it is deserving but they penalize the Zambian government if it is undeserving. This result lends credence to the Affective Amplification hypothesis (H5). However, in contrast to what we found in the Macedonia experiment, PD does not moderate the effect of the effectiveness treatment (Model Z3). When asked about providing foreign aid to Zambia, those who score high on PD are no more willing to advocate for foreign aid when aid has contributed to Zambia’s economic growth greatly than when it has contributed slightly.

Table 3.

Results for the Zambia experiment.

	Model Z1	Model Z2	Model Z3	Model Z4	Model Z5	Model Z6
Effectiveness	0.760*** (0.100)	0.710*** (0.100)	0.805(0.676)	0.704*** (0.100)	0.600** (0.110)	0.700*** (0.100)
Deservingness	0.713*** (0.100)	0.727*** (0.100)	0.718*** (0.100)	0.130(0.674)	0.030(0.324)	0.111(0.309)
Personal distress		0.238*** (0.060)	0.271** (0.100)	0.124(0.081)	0.126(0.085)	0.112(0.080)
Empathic concern		0.216(0.066)	0.340*** (0.084)	0.200(0.100)	0.111(0.065)	0.255*** (0.058)
Perspective taking		0.083(0.081)	−0.100(0.107)	0.063(0.111)
Effectiveness × Personal distress			−0.102(0.116)
Effectiveness × Empathic concern			−0.183(0.126)
Effectiveness × Perspective taking			0.217(0.153)
Deservingness × Personal distress				0.217** (0.113)	0.254** (0.115)	0.232** (0.110)
Deservingness × Empathic concern				0.109(0.127)
Deservingness × Perspective taking				−0.078(0.152)
Generalized trust					0.356*** (0.100)
Ideology (left)					0.001(0.010)
Nationalism					−0.120** (0.062)
Cosmopolitanism					0.320*** (0.065)
Support government welfare					−0.114*** (0.033)
Income		0.0164(0.057)	0.01(0.057)	0.014(0.057)	0.040(0.057)	0.016(0.057)
Education		0.083(0.042)	0.840(0.042)	0.087(0.042)	0.072(0.041)	0.085* (0.041)
Republican		−0.306** (0.132)	−0.272** (0.132)	−0.284** (0.102)	−0.006(0.150)	−0.304** (0.132)
Democrat		0.414** (0.115)	0.425*** (0.116)	0.407** (0.115)	0.231(0.120)	0.403** (0.115)
Female		0.306** (0.101)	0.313** (0.102)	0.302* (0.102)	0.307** (0.101)	0.306** (0.103)
Age		−0.007* (0.004)	−0.07* (0.004)	−0.008(0.004)	−0.005(0.004)	−0.008* (0.004)
Constant	2.658*** (0.085)	0.517* (0.457)	0.686** (0.558)	1.00* (0.540)	0.677(0.521)	1.033** (0.420)
R ²	0.1152	0.2121	0.2151	0.2162	0.2893	0.2253
N	825	807	807	807	728	807

***p ⩽ 0.001; **p ⩽ 0.05; *p ⩽ 0.10.

Notes: Reported values are regression coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. The dependent variable is how much effort participants would like the American government to make to provide aid to Zombia, which ranges from 1 (no special effort) to 6 (every special effort). All models are statistically significant. Female, Democrat, and Republication are binary variables with Male and Independent as the respective reference groups.

This difference between the Macedonia and Zambia experiments tells us that when the recipient is a European country, empathic individuals with strong feelings of PD about the unfortunate others are less concerned about aid effectiveness. They are willing to provide aid even when aid is not very effective. However, when the recipient of aid is an African country, empathy does not decrease the importance of aid effectiveness. As PD increases, the importance of aid effectiveness does not decline. It appears that individuals’ willingness to provide aid to an African country is conditional upon effectiveness, a point we take up later. In sum, findings from both of our experiments indicate that affective empathy is an important predictor of foreign aid attitudes and it moderates information on aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness.

Conclusion: affective empathy, foreign aid, and policymaking

Some see empathy as a panacea for social ills; others see it as poison that leads to biased compassion for in-groups. Others may argue it is just cheap talk, virtue signaling, or naïve wishful thinking to believe that it can change attitudes. We have argued that we can gain a better understanding of empathy by disaggregating the concept into its cognitive and affective dimensions and situating it in political contexts. Focusing on foreign aid, we advanced a model of preference formation that combines the emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy with contextual information on aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness. Using a public opinion survey, we showed that the affective dimension of empathy influences not only Americans’ willingness to provide foreign aid, but also how they weigh aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness. This study contributes to a richer understanding of the moral foundations of public support for foreign aid. We show that affective empathy acts as a type of glue that binds together Americans and people in faraway lands.

This has significant implications for state and non-state actors who seek to increase support for foreign aid. For example, Batson and colleagues have demonstrated that videos of human suffering, such as a child in an orphanage (Klimecki et al., 2016), can be a powerful affective empathy inducer. Charities and NGOs often intuit such conclusions, using vivid imagery of children in poverty in order to induce emotion that, in turn, they hope will result in donations. While these types of strategies have been criticized on a number of fronts—social, racial, and ethical, among others—and derisively referred to as “poverty porn” by some (Jensen, 2014: 1), the underlying mechanism of vivid imagery inducing an affective empathic response is an important one to identify and more fully understand through further research.

But we also show that a single focus on empathy obscures the interplay between empathy and the political context of helping behavior. Empathy affects the importance individuals put on aid effectiveness and recipient deservingness, and the interaction between empathy and these situational factors is not as straightforward as one might think. Affective empathy has a polarizing effect. It moves people in one direction when aid effectiveness is at stake and in the opposite direction when recipient deservingness is in question. This result dovetails recent findings on the moderating role of empathy in the context of public opinion toward immigrants and social welfare recipients (Hansen, 2019; Newman et al., 2015). We also find the recipient country matters. Affective empathy does indeed motivate individuals to help strangers. Yet, it does matter which strangers. Empathy might in fact shine a spotlight on those who are similar to “us.” The divergent results between the Macedonia and Zambia experiments suggest that further research is needed to clarify whether it is social identity, or something else, that shapes empathy’s differential effects between two different countries.

Our research also contributes to a better understanding of empathy in IR. While empathy has been the focus of several studies in recent years, it remains relatively undertheorized and poorly understood in terms of its operation in different political situations. Reinforcing the results of an expanding body of research in psychology, our study indicates that the role empathy plays in preference formation in international politics is best understood in terms of the interplay between affective empathy and political context. By showing that empathic individuals downplay aid effectiveness but emphasize recipient merit in preference formation, our findings contribute to IR scholars’ efforts to build bridges between rational choice and psychological approaches (e.g. Rathbun et al., 2017; Bayram, 2017b). More specifically, the affective aspects of empathy suggest that individuals’ emotional responses to stimuli may be more important for preference formation than their cognitive processing. This speaks directly to the rising importance of emotions in understanding international political outcomes and, more generally, contributes to the ongoing “behavioral revolution” in IR (Hafner-Burton et al., 2017).

Important policy implications follow from this research. At a time when many have lamented an “empathy deficit” in much of the world’s politics, a crucial question becomes how to engender empathic responses for those who are unlike oneself. Our results indicate that recipient governments can appeal to donor publics’ affective empathic responses by signaling merit. It is not just donor governments and international organizations that make foreign development aid conditional upon good governance and policy reform. Publics do the same. Even the most empathic individuals can develop antipathy toward undeserving recipients. This implies that recipient governments have an incentive to be deserving or attempt to create perceptions that they are. If recipient governments do not take charge of their own fate and act responsibly, they may be leaving money on the table. This study also has implications for the nexus between conditionality and foreign aid. Whether conditionality works is an ongoing debate for and between aid policy and academic communities. Some have argued that conditionality does not work and thus called for dispensing with conditionality (Collier et al., 1997; Killick et al., 1998). Others have emphasized focusing on measuring institutional performance improvement in developing countries (Birdsall, 2008; Buch et al., 2015; Clemens et al., 2007). Our findings show that retaining the practice of conditionality in some form might be an important means of garnering public support for foreign aid. By publicizing the steps recipients have taken toward the promotion of democracy and human rights, transparency, or the optimization of markets, donors can tap into individuals’ empathic feelings. Our findings also reinforce the conventional wisdom that citizens whose tax dollars fund foreign aid do in fact care about aid effectiveness as a criterion for support. Yet, empathic individuals process cues about effectiveness differently. They are willing to cut donors and recipient countries slack on achieving macroeconomic growth.

Our results suggest a number of promising directions for future research. Scholars can investigate the extent to which emotion regulation might diminish the effect of affective empathy on prosocial behavior. Seeing Syrian children killed in a reported gas attack might paradoxically dampen the impact of empathy because of what Cameron and Payne (2011: 1) call the “collapse of compassion.” When feeling others’ pain takes an unbearable emotional toll, individuals downregulate their empathic feelings, suppress their emotions, and may exhibit some degree of apathy or even callousness. Investigating how empathy interacts with other individual-level dispositions, such as foreign policy beliefs known to shape individuals’ foreign policy preferences and decision-making, in a variety of domains from decisions to go to war to immigration, will be another valuable inquiry.

Further, the precise mechanism, in the body, by which affective empathy affects decision-making and attitude formation remains elusive, though very recent studies suggest that this is an empirical question that may be amenable to laboratory study soon. As mentioned earlier, affective empathy seems to broadly predict certain prosocial behaviors, such as giving in the Dictator Game. Leonardo Christov-Moore and Marco Iacoboni (2016) have taken this research into the neuroscience lab and demonstrated that greater activity in areas of the brain associated with affective forms of empathy is correlated with more generous giving decisions. This type of research buttresses behavioral findings, such as ours, but also allows researchers to begin honing in on, and isolating, particular material causal mechanisms that may allow us to refine our understanding of precisely how empathy shapes preferences, attitudes, and other mental states.

Additional tests of our findings with cross-national data will also be instructive. The amplifying effect of empathy on recipient deservingness may in part be a function of the American culture that emphasizes individual responsibility. Future studies can explore how empathy operates in different political cultures across a range of countries (Taormina et al., 1988). We further suggest that conceptualizing aid effectiveness as provision of basic goods and services to individuals rather than as economic growth and focusing on the deservingness of the citizens in recipient countries will be useful future directions to provide additional tests of our results. We did not find evidence for an interaction between empathy and nationalist or cosmopolitan social identities. Future studies should further investigate the precise relationship between empathy and group identification, both in terms of governments as beneficiaries as well as citizens as the beneficiaries of aid.

Supplemental Material

EJT890915_supp_mat – Supplemental material for Feeling their pain: affective empathy and public preferences for foreign development aid

Supplemental material, EJT890915_supp_mat for Feeling their pain: affective empathy and public preferences for foreign development aid by A. Burcu Bayram and Marcus Holmes in European Journal of International Relations

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as several individuals who provided extensive feedback on the paper. In particular, the authors benefited greatly from presentations at Georgetown University, University of Geneva, William & Mary, and the International Studies Association Convention in 2018. They would like to thank Simone Dietrich, Jeffrey Kaplow, Daniel Maliniak, Abraham Newman, Sue Peterson, Kathy Powers, Lauren Prather, Brian Rathbun, Jaime Settle, Simon Stowe, Michael Tierney, Nicholas J. Wheeler, Pat Conge, and Margaret Reid.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Marcus Holmes

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biographies

A. Burcu Bayram is Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and a former research fellow at the Center for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2011 with specializations in International Relations, Political Psychology, and Interdisciplinary Survey Research.

Marcus Holmes is Associate Professor of government at William & Mary. He is director of the political psychology and International Relations undergraduate research lab and co-director of the Social Science Research Methods Center. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2011 with specialization in International Relations and Political Psychology.

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