Do All Types of Compassion Increase Prosocial Lying?

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that compassion increases prosocial lying. However, in the present study, we proposed that compassion toward individuals who are frustrated in striving for minimal living conditions (named here as compassion for other’s survival in suffering, abbreviated as COSS) increases prosocial lying, while compassion toward individuals frustrated in seeking development conditions (named here as compassion for other’s development in suffering, abbreviated as CODS) has little effect on prosocial lying. METHODS: In Studies 1 and 2, we asked participants to evaluate the same text twice before and after experimentally experiencing emotion to test the above hypotheses. In Study 3, we created a situation with a strong moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling to investigate the potential psychological mechanisms. RESULTS: In Study 1, we show that COSS and CODS both increased prosocial lying. Notably, COSS effect on prosocial lying was significantly higher than CODS effect on prosocial lying. These findings were augmented by results from Study 2, which showed that individuals with low-trait compassion in COSS condition engaged in more prosocial lying than those with high trait compassion in CODS condition. In Study 3, we report that COSS increased prosocial lying significantly, while CODS did not. CONCLUSION: COSS and CODS are two different types of compassion as shown in Studies 1 and 2; they have different potential psychological mechanisms on increasing prosocial lying (Study 3a and 3b). This study provides additional information on the theory of compassion, which is important in exploring compassion effects.