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Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior
Studies show that people are concerned with other people's consumption position in a varying degree with respect to the type of goods consumed and individual characteristics. Using both survey experiments and a large survey of subjective well-being (SWB) dataset, this paper aims to investigate...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6811653/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31681071 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02226 |
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author | Akay, Alpaslan Karabulut, Gökhan Terzioğlu, Bilge |
author_facet | Akay, Alpaslan Karabulut, Gökhan Terzioğlu, Bilge |
author_sort | Akay, Alpaslan |
collection | PubMed |
description | Studies show that people are concerned with other people's consumption position in a varying degree with respect to the type of goods consumed and individual characteristics. Using both survey experiments and a large survey of subjective well-being (SWB) dataset, this paper aims to investigate the association between the degree of empathic capacity and positional concerns for consumption items involving pleasure and pain. The paper exploits both empathy quotient (EQ) and interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) measures of empathic capacity, i.e., dispositional empathy, which are sufficient measures capturing affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Positional concerns are identified directly using a series of stated choice experiments and indirectly using the SWB approach. The main result of the paper is that positional concerns vary substantially with the levels of empathic capacity. Both EQ and IRI are found to be positively associated with positional concerns for “goods” (e.g., after-tax income, market value of a luxury car), reflecting a degree of self-regarded feelings and behavior to reduce personal distress, and negatively associated with positional concerns for “bads” (e.g., working hours and poverty rates), reflecting a degree of other-regarding feelings and behavior. The results are robust with respect to various checks including statistical specifications, reference groups, and omitted variables (e.g., prosocial behavior and competitivity) that could bias the results. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6811653 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-68116532019-11-01 Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior Akay, Alpaslan Karabulut, Gökhan Terzioğlu, Bilge Front Psychol Psychology Studies show that people are concerned with other people's consumption position in a varying degree with respect to the type of goods consumed and individual characteristics. Using both survey experiments and a large survey of subjective well-being (SWB) dataset, this paper aims to investigate the association between the degree of empathic capacity and positional concerns for consumption items involving pleasure and pain. The paper exploits both empathy quotient (EQ) and interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) measures of empathic capacity, i.e., dispositional empathy, which are sufficient measures capturing affective and cognitive aspects of empathy. Positional concerns are identified directly using a series of stated choice experiments and indirectly using the SWB approach. The main result of the paper is that positional concerns vary substantially with the levels of empathic capacity. Both EQ and IRI are found to be positively associated with positional concerns for “goods” (e.g., after-tax income, market value of a luxury car), reflecting a degree of self-regarded feelings and behavior to reduce personal distress, and negatively associated with positional concerns for “bads” (e.g., working hours and poverty rates), reflecting a degree of other-regarding feelings and behavior. The results are robust with respect to various checks including statistical specifications, reference groups, and omitted variables (e.g., prosocial behavior and competitivity) that could bias the results. Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-10-17 /pmc/articles/PMC6811653/ /pubmed/31681071 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02226 Text en Copyright © 2019 Akay, Karabulut and Terzioğlu. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Akay, Alpaslan Karabulut, Gökhan Terzioğlu, Bilge Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title | Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title_full | Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title_fullStr | Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title_full_unstemmed | Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title_short | Standing in Others' Shoes: Empathy and Positional Behavior |
title_sort | standing in others' shoes: empathy and positional behavior |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6811653/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31681071 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02226 |
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