Increasing Empathic Approach Motivation in Ukrainian Charitable Giving
“Prove you are with us.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Bays, 2022)
As the Ukrainian crisis grinds on, millions have been displaced. Atrocities are emerging, violence is increasing, and suffering is growing. Empathic concern predicts charitable giving and the provision of help to strangers (Weisz & Cikara, 2021). However, ‘UNICEF: Children in Crossfire of Ukraine Crisis’ (Buechner, 2022) does not go far enough in motivating the necessary empathic prosocial behaviors required of us to charitably act upon the feelings of perspective taking, emotion sharing, and compassion surfaced when seeing images of Ukrainian suffering. I will argue this in two ways.
First, the article could engage explicit approach motivation tactics to foster increases in our own emotional resonance with the Ukrainian experience. And second, that the article can and should look for opportunities to increase the intensity of such compassionate responses by bringing the suffering closer to us and finding more positive experiences to articulate.
First, we can increase our positive empathic response to the article through the approach motivations of capitalization, affiliation, and desirability (Crone, 2022a). Engaging with the capitalized positive emotions of the relief of suffering serves clear hedonic benefit to us and increases our inclination towards prosocial behavior. Similarly, empathic affiliation brings us as empathizer and the refugees as empathizees closer together (Crone, 2022a). We don’t feel affiliation in the perspectives of UNICEF’s executives. Therefore, we have a greater opportunity to be drawn closer to those suffering through finding and feeding the good of those materially impacted, even in such awful circumstance. As such, the article is misaligned with our shared sense of who to empathize with. And because we miss this opportunity to draw the suffering closer to us, we also miss the opportunity to signal our inclination, desire, and capacity to help (Crone, 2022a).
Second, our resonance and dimensions of perspective taking, emotion sharing, and compassion are higher when empathizing with positive as opposed to negative experiences in others (Crone, 2022b). These can be challenging to find in images of stark suffering. But Buechner’s article leans on positive testimonials from UNICEF executives, and only minimally surfaces the voices of those impacted (Buechner, 2022). The only elements we see are marginalized negatively oriented captions. We have a hard time empathizing with large degrees of communal suffering, as our urge to act doesn’t scale with the amount of need and suffering, so we must leverage the pull of individual, identifiable victims who have the tendency to outweigh the motivational pull of the suffering of many (Crone, 2022c). But we must also do this in more positive ways. Buechner might greatly improve the capacity for empathic response by first surfacing individualized positive narratives of resilience and the overcoming of adversity, as facilitated by UNICEF’s work. Empathic readers need to feel the suffering of those on the ground, not hear from executives at the top.
Weisz and Cikara explore methods in which explicit separation of the order in which we exercise this experience sharing and perspective taking may drive more favorably charitable outcomes (Weisz & Chikara, 2021). If we apply their interactive model to Beuchner’s article, we may find that prioritizing narratives of identifiable shared experience, followed by perspective taking depictions of what UNICEF is doing, may increase the degree to which we can foster increased empathic concern in the reader, and more charitable outcomes. As such, the article would benefit from having these positive shared experiences earlier.
Conversely, as Paul Bloom points out, not all identifiable victims are created equal (Bloom, 2017). Our empathic response is partial, and driven by the images we see, not the outcomes we seek. Such responses over time can lead to “burnout as well as diminished engagement with individuals in distress” (Bloom, 2017). In feeling the suffering in more intense, but less frequent ways, we might also look for opportunities to put us directly into the refugees’ context, such as more immersive video.
In conclusion, Buechner’s UNICEF article can greatly improve its capacity to motivate empathic prosocial and charitable behavior by reframing the dynamics of who we’re hearing from and adjusting the article’s order to focus earlier on positive shared experience. In addition, it should seek out opportunities for approach motivations of capitalization, affiliation, and desirability. In doing so, it may increase the intensity of our malleable empathic responses through spotlighting individuals, using tactics to draw them closer to us, and most importantly, focusing on the opportunities to empathize with the positive emotions of those impacted.
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