Effects of helping behavior caused by compassion on helper’s psychological status

Helping behavior is intended to increase other people’s well-being without expecting substantive rewards. Although a helper performs helping behavior for the target’s benefit, the behavior also affects the helper. For instance, not only compassionate feelings, but also conformity and norms can produce helping behavior. However, people tend to over-estimate the value of helping behavior when the behavior stems from compassionate feelings. This study aimed to investigate the effects of helping behavior that compassionate feelings elicit on the helper’s inner state. In Studies 1 and 2, participants worked as a paid volunteer transcriber for people with hearing difficulties and for other people with difficulties in listening to spoken language (compassion condition) or as an out-sourcing paid job worker (neutral condition). Questions about self-esteem, psychological well-being, intention to help, one’s own morality, work efficacy, and the respondent’s demographic were asked after the task (dependent variables). In testing the original hypothesis, results from a series of t-tests were not significant. An ANOVA, an exploratory analysis, showed that participants in the compassion condition had a higher level of some dependent variables when they had past volunteer experience in comparison to those who had no experience. Although the original hypothesis was not supported, this study found that the experience of volunteering is important for feeling compassion and the consequential actual helping behavior. Among the findings of this study, notably manipulating compassion experimentally (not as individual difference) is an important contribution to future research.