It is commonly assumed in social and personality psychology that measures of empathy and personal distress are valid indicators of tendency to feel compassionate emotions in various situations. Another common assumption is that individual differences in these personality variables, measured using standard self-report questionnaires, are stable across situations and predict prosocial responses such as compassionate emotions and intention to help. To the best of our knowledge, despite the plausibility of such assumptions, there has been no direct attempt to assess how levels of empathy and personal distress affect the prosocial decision-making process set out in Weiner’s attribution model. We aimed to test whether traits previously shown to be associated with prosocial behavior would predict compassionate emotions in two versions of a helping scenario and whether compassionate emotions mediated the effect of attribution of responsibility on intention to help.

To do this, we used well-known, realistic scenarios to manipulate participants’ likely attribution of responsibility (Weiner, 1980b, 2012). In the SR condition participants were induced to make an internal attribution of responsibility whereas in the SNR condition participants were induced to make an external attribution. We expected a difference in attributions between these conditions and intended to exploit this to investigate whether any association between empathy or personal distress and compassionate emotions was independent of the attribution of responsibility. On the basis of our review of the literature we formulated the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1. Participants in the SNR condition will be more likely to exhibit an intention to help than participants in the SR condition.

Hypothesis 2. Participants in the SNR condition will exhibit more compassionate emotions than participants in the SR condition.

Hypothesis 3. Compassionate emotions will mediate the effect of attribution of responsibility on intention to help.

Given that there is plenty of empirical evidence corroborating the processes postulated in Weiner’s model (Pilati, 2011; Pilati et al., 2015; Rudolph et al., 2004; Weiner, 1980b) we expected to observe the standard pattern of mediation of compassionate emotions.

Hypothesis 4. Empathy and personal distress will predict compassionate emotions in both experimental conditions.

As described previously, research on empathy and personal distress has shown that they are predictors of certain prosocial responses (Barraza & Zak, 2009; Dovidio et al., 2006; Eisenberg et al., 2002; Paciello et al., 2013; Stocks et al., 2009; Sze et al., 2012). The precise role of these personality variables in prosocial decision making remains to be explored. We predicted (Hypothesis 4) that any associations between empathy or personal distress and compassionate emotions would be independent of the attribution of responsibility.

A MANOVA revealed that the experimental manipulation was effective; there was a condition effect on attribution of responsibility, F (1, 625) = 531.27; p < 0.001; η_p ² = 0.46. There were also effects of condition on compassionate emotions, F (1, 625) = 50.71; p < 0.001; η_p ² = 0.08, and intention to help, F (1, 625) = 21.12; p < 0.001; η_p ² = 0.03, supporting hypotheses 1 and 2. We did not expect to observe any effect of condition on the personality variables as we assumed that the instruments we used assess empathy and personal distress as stable, dispositional personality variables, rather than transient, context-dependent state variables. As predicted there was no effect of condition on empathy, F (1, 625) = 0.12; p = 0.73; η_p ² < 0.001, or personal distress, F (1, 625) = 0.10; p = 0.75; η_p ² < 0.001. The means and standard deviations for these variables are presented in Table 1.

TABLE 1 TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics of the MANOVA Source: own work.

Descriptive statistics and correlations between the variables are presented in Table 2. Attribution of responsibility was not correlated with empathy or personal distress. A multi-group path analysis of the conceptual model presented in Figure 1 (Byrne, 2010) using a recommended bootstrapping procedure (Hayes, 2013) was used to test hypotheses 3 and 4. We re-sampled 5.000 times from our data set and calculated the relevant direct and indirect effects and corresponding confidence intervals.

TABLE 2 TABLE 2 Descriptive statistics and correlation matrix Source: own work.

Figure 1 Figure 1 Conceptual model tested with path analysis Source: own work.

Fit indices from the multi-group path analysis indicated that the model presented in Figure 1 was an acceptable fit to the data (χ² (8) = 48.89, p < 0.001; CFI = 0.93; TLI = 0.83; RMSEA = 0.090 (95% CI = 0.067–0.116); AIC = 92.89). We tested hypothesis 3 by calculating the indirect effect of attribution of responsibility on intention to help (path ‘f’ in Figure 1) and the associated 95% confidence interval in both experimental conditions. There was an indirect effect of attribution on intention to help, mediated by compassionate emotions, in both conditions (SR: p = 0.019, 95% CI: [-0.25‑-0.02]; SNR: p = 0.001, 95% CI: [-0.21‑-0.10]). As the confidence interval did not include zero in either condition, we concluded that hypothesis 3 was supported, i.e. there was an indirect effect of attribution of responsibility on intention to help, mediated by compassionate emotions.

Hypothesis 4 was partially corroborated; as both empathy and personal distress were predictors of compassionate emotions in both experimental conditions (see Table 3). The confidence interval for the direct effect of empathy (path ‘a’ in Figure 1) did not include zero in either condition, indicating that empathy had a direct effect on compassionate emotions in both conditions; the confidence interval for the direct effect of personal distress (path ‘c’ in Figure 1) did not include zero in the SNR condition. In the SR condition empathy was almost twice as strong a predictor of compassionate emotions as attribution of responsibility, whereas in the SNR condition attribution was the strongest predictor of compassionate emotions.

TABLE 3 TABLE 3 Path analysis coefficients of determination between the model variables and 95% Bootstrap Confidence Intervals Source: own work.

As shown in Table 3, personal distress was the weakest predictor in the model and the confidence interval for the direct effect of personal distress on compassionate emotions included zero in the SNR condition, so hypothesis 4 was only partially confirmed. This analysis also revealed that the confidence intervals for the direct effect of empathy on intention to help (path ‘d’ in Figure 1) and the direct effect of personal distress on intention to help (path ‘f’ in Figure 1) included zero; we therefore concluded that these variables did not have a direct effect on intention to help. Finally, we held the regression parameter associated with path ‘a’ in the model constant and compared this model with our original model using a χ² difference test; the result indicated that the difference in model fit was not statistically significant (χ² _diff = 0.457, p > 0.05).

We aimed to conduct a test of the hypothesis that dispositional empathy and personal distress predict compassionate emotions independent of attribution of responsibility (hypothesis 4) and a related hypothesis that compassionate emotions mediate the effect of attribution of responsibility on intention to help (hypothesis 3). Our manipulation check indicated that we successfully influenced participants’ attributions in the expected direction. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were confirmed, as participants in the SR condition were more likely to report an intention to help and more likely to feel compassionate emotions for the protagonist; the results provide some of the first evidence for this element in the context of Weiner’s attributional model of helping behavior. Hypothesis 3 was also confirmed; analysis revealed that attribution of responsibility was indirectly associated with intention to help and that this association was mediated by the relationship between compassionate emotions and attribution of responsibility, qualifying compassionate emotions as a mediator of the indirect effect and corroborating previous evidence for Weiner’s attributional model (Pilati, 2011; Pilati et al., 2008; Rudolph et al., 2004; Weiner, 1980b). Finally, hypothesis 4 was only partially confirmed, because although empathy was a predictor of compassionate emotions in both conditions, personal distress was only a predictor in the SR condition. The fact that the confidence intervals associated with the direct effect of these dispositional variables on intention to help included zero in both conditions indicates that these effects were mediated by compassionate emotions. Participants with a greater tendency to feel empathy for others were more likely to feel compassionate emotions for the protagonist in the help-seeking scenario and, in consequence, more likely to report an intention to help the protagonist in such a scenario. We noted a further unexpected result, namely that in the SR condition empathy was a better predictor of compassionate emotions compared to the perception of personal responsibility; this emphasizes the importance of dispositional personality variables as determinants of intention to help, even when influential situational factors are also in play. At least in the case of empathy, dispositional variables were more important predictors of compassionate emotions than situationally manipulated attribution of responsibility. These results confirm that prosocial dispositional variables are robust and important antecedents of prosocial behavior and strengthen the case for including dispositional variables in situational models of prosocial behavior to provide a more complete theoretical account of prosocial behavior. In general our data provide support for Weiner’s model, confirming that attribution of responsibility influences compassionate emotions which enhance intention to help (Weiner, 1980a, 2012).

Our study makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to the literature on prosocial decision making, because our findings strengthen the case for developing theoretical models which recognize that both situational and dispositional variables are essential to understanding prosocial behavior (Penner & Orom, 2010; Perugini & Prestwich, 2007). Our conclusions are more reliable because our large sample size ensured that our analysis was more powerful than is standard in social and personality psychology, thus reducing the probability that our findings were affected by type I or type II errors or the other biases which often affect social psychological research (Asendorpf et al., 2013).

One limitation of our study is that the psychometric properties of some of the instruments used were adequate rather than good, although they were similar to those reported in previous research (Rabelo et al., 2012; Rabelo & Pilati, 2013; Sampaio & Menezes, 2011). This may reflect a problem with the instruments; other instruments should perhaps be used in replications of these results. Future research should focus on testing how well self-report scales or implicit measures of dispositional empathy or personal distress predict various types of prosocial responses (Perugini et al., 2011). Compassionate emotions are mental states elicited by fast and automatic evaluations of the environment, so implicit measures may be better predictors of compassionate emotions than self-report based measures, but this is an issue for future research. This kind of research will help us to draw stronger conclusions about the theoretical and practical importance of personality variables in the description and prediction of prosocial behavior.