Resumo

ALVES DE AMORIM, Débora; RODRIGUES SAMPAIO, Leonardo  e  RIBEIRO EULALIO CABRAL, Guilherme. Altruism and empathy in situations involving unpredictable personal cost. Cienc. Psicol. [online]. 2018, vol.12, n.1, pp.7-15. ISSN 1688-4094.  https://doi.org/10.22235/cp.v12i1.1589.

This current study aimed to investigate the influence of empathic feelings on a risky altruistic behavior of young adults. 60 undergraduate students, aged between 18 and 35 years old took part in an experiment in which they had to decide in rather to give or not raffle tickets to an unfamiliar person, after participating of a gambling game. The tickets were gained after a memory quiz. 30 participants were allocated to an experimental condition named “neutral” in which they freely took their distributive decisions, and the other 30 were allocated to an “emotional” condition, in which empathic feelings were induced, by using a video. Results indicated that the participants’ sex and the experimental manipulation influenced gambling behavior, allowing the participants to be in the “emotional condition”, more prone to altruistic behavior than the participants in the “neutral” condition. Also, the men helped more in a high-cost condition than the women did. These results point that the influence of empathic concern on altruistic behavior in a situation involving risks might be mediated by the sex and the relation between these variables should be better observed in studies on distributive behavior

Palavras-chave : altruism; empathy; personal cost; gambling; risk behavior.

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