Are humans hardwired for compassion? Glancing over my bookshelves, titles such as Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Altruistic Brain remind me that many of my scientific colleagues answer this question with an enthusiastic “yes.” Each of these books, in its own way, teaches that the animal designated Homo sapiens has evolved to care for strangers. It’s just part of who we are. If it doesn’t come effortlessly, all it takes is some patience and some practice. Attend a workshop. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. Read some fiction. Meditate. Read a book about compassion. Compassion is inside of you. You just need to nurture it.

One of the ways we have been taught to nurture empathy is by deliberately trying to take the perspective of a suffering person. “Before you judge people, walk a mile in their shoes,” we exhort our compassion-challenged friends and family. And we parents regularly encourage our kids to imagine the feelings of the people who might be hurt by their self-centered behavior, hoping that our admonitions are doing something to turn our kids into better human beings.

But does trying to take the perspective of other people actually lead to empathy? For half a century, experimental psychologists have been working under the assumption that it does. It was back in 1969 that the social psychologist Ezra Stotland first tried to promote empathy in the lab with instructions to take the perspective of another person. And according to Stotland, it worked: “Any interpersonal process, symbolic or overt,” he wrote, “which causes an individual to imagine himself in another’s position would lead him to empathize with the other person.”

Testing under experimental conditions

Following Stotland’s lead, experimental psychologists quickly began using perspective-taking instructions in their efforts to manipulate empathy in the lab, and they’ve continued to do so for 50 years. In the typical experiment, research participants encounter a stranger in the lab who is going through something difficult in his or her personal life; then, the experimenter asks the subjects to do one of several things. To encourage perspective-taking, researchers might instruct subjects to:

Try to imagine how the person feels about what has happened and how it has affected his or her life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all of the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how the person feels.

In a variant of these standard perspective-taking instructions, researchers might instruct a second set of subjects to imagine how they (rather than the suffering person) might feel in a similar predicament:

Try to imagine how you yourself would feel if you were experiencing what has happened to the person and how this experience would affect your life. Try not to concern yourself with attending to all of the information presented. Just concentrate on trying to imagine how you would feel.

To encourage still other subjects to remain objective (under the premise that doing so will squelch empathy), researchers instruct a third group of subjects to:

Try to be as objective as possible about what has happened to the person and how it has affected his or her life. To remain objective, do not let yourself get caught up in imagining what this person has been through and how he or she feels as a result. Just try to remain objective and detached.

In the ideal experiment, researchers also assign a fourth group of subjects to an experimental condition in which they receive no instructions at all. They just learn about a person in need without any prompting to do anything in particular in response. This fourth group of subjects serves as a control group that enables experimenters to find out both (a) whether perspective-taking increases empathy, and (b) whether remaining objective reduces empathy. Without such a control group, any differences in empathy that arise between the groups cannot be attributed to either condition.

From such a comparison, we can learn whether perspective-taking and remaining objective produce different amounts of empathy, but we cannot know whether perspective-taking increased empathy, or whether remaining objective reduced empathy, or a little of both. This might seem like a subtle distinction in the sorts of conclusions we might draw from experiments on empathy, but as you’ll soon see, it’s a distinction that makes a big difference.

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Reviewing the evidence

My colleagues and I, with the psychologist William McAuliffe in charge, recently published a statistical review (called a meta-analysis) of the results of every experiment we could find that compared the effects of these different instructional sets on self-reported empathic emotion toward a needy stranger. (You can read the full paper here).

In all, we found 85 research papers, authored by scores of different psychologists, that had examined these issues experimentally. From those 85 papers, we identified 177 individual tests of whether any two of the four experimental conditions (imagine-other, imagine-self, remain objective, no-instructions) produced different amounts of empathy for a suffering stranger.