We investigate the efficacy of a novel manipulation of choice architecture to affect giving– increasing the number of action options available to donors to increase how much they give. Across six experiments, viewing multiple bids for aid increased both intention to donate and actual donation (controlling for affective states that have been previously associated with costly helping). Finally, we replicate our effect in a natural experiment of charitable donations (N = 10,000). Presenting donors with multiple bids increased the average donation by $8.77 (a 19.7% increase).

In this field experiment, we took a novel approach to building empathy among early adolescents in four schools (n = 857), targeting the motivation to empathize rather than addressing the ability to empathize. Students who received a norms-based intervention, compared to those in other conditions—experienced greater motivation to empathize, which indirectly affected their prosocial behavior as reported by peers. Findings suggest a novel avenue for increasing empathy among adolescents—by focusing on peer-driven motivation—and underscore the importance of context in shaping intervention outcomes.

Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings. First, the larger the group, the greater this attention bias. Second, the attention bias is stronger for faces expressing negative emotions than for faces expressing positive ones, meaning that our ability to judge a group’s emotional state isn’t just skewed towards more intense emotions — it is specifically biased toward more negative evaluations. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that when giving a talk or meeting a large group of people, we should attempt to intentionally scan the audience more evenly in order to counteract our natural attention biases and get a more accurate picture of the group’s overall emotional state.

We examine recent empathy literature that establishes when, how much, and what aspects of empathy promote specific outcomes. After reviewing a theoretical framework which characterizes empathy as a suite of separable components, we then examine evidence showing how dissociations of these components affect important socio-emotional outcomes and describe emerging evidence suggesting that these components can be independently and deliberately modulated through intervention. Finally, we advocate for a new approach to a multi-component view of empathy which accounts for the interrelations among components.

When people are briefly exposed to an array of faces, they can only sample a subset of them. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to more emotional faces and that this generates a crowd emotion amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response as more extreme than it is. Across three experiments, we find evidence for amplification of a crowd’s emotions, driven by attentional bias to emotional faces