Fighting that sense of compassion may come at a cost.

So here’s the scene:  You’ve just finished lunch at your favorite deli. As you are hurrying back to work for the afternoon, you notice a man panhandling for money at the intersection you are approaching. In his right hand, he has an old coffee cup, about half-filled with coins. As you approach, he shakes his cup a little harder to get your attention – it works. For an instant, you catch his eyes. But the light is green, you may be late for your afternoon meeting and you think “someone else will give this poor soul some money”. You walk right past him without a second thought, hoping you are not late for your meeting.

No problem… right? 

It is certainly normal to not always act on your sense of compassion. In the example above, perhaps you wanted to save your money.  Perhaps you simply did not want to interact  with a panhandler. But even though suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, researchers have found that people lose a bit of their commitment to morality when they suppress their feelings of compassion.

Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn’t have any cost—that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on. But researchers Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suspected that might not be true. “Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It’s been called a moral barometer,” Cameron says. A sense of other people’s suffering may even be the foundation of morality. They wanted to find out if suppressing that sense might make people feel less moral. 

The researchers showed each participant in their experiment a slideshow of 15 images of subjects including homeless people, crying babies, and victims of war and famine. Then the participants were split up into three groups.  Some were told to try not to feel sympathy, some were told to try not to feel distress (an unpleasant, non-moral feeling), and the rest were told to experience whatever emotions come to them. After each participant watched the slideshow, they were tested on whether they believed that moral rules have to be followed all the time and how much they cared about being a moral person.

Cognitive Dissonance

People who had suppressed compassion did, apparently, have a change in their sense of morality: they were much more likely to either care less about being moral or to say that it’s all right to be flexible about following moral rules. But exactly why does this happen? Cameron thinks this is because suppressing feelings of compassion causes cognitive dissonance that people have to resolve by rearranging their attitudes or beliefs about morality.

Choosing not to be kind is a common experience. “Many of us do this in daily life,” Cameron says—whether it’s declining to give money to someone, changing the channel away from a news story about starving people in a far-off land, or otherwise failing to help someone in need. “In past work, we’ve shown that people suppress their compassion when faced with mass suffering in natural disasters and genocide. To the degree that suppressing compassion changes how people care about or think about morality, it may put them more at risk for acting immorally.”

Research like this may possibly be giving us a glimpse into the inner workings of our unconscious mind.  We see how a very quick decision (suppressing compassion) may potentially have long-lasting effects in our attitudes, our feelings and – perhaps – even our morality.

 March 17, 2012
The Healthy Mind Network

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