Creative Empathy

ABSTRACT

Empathy research has long emphasized accuracy when imagining other minds. We explore whether empathy can be a creative process, where people think of multiple diverging possibilities of others’ experiences. We developed two tasks to measure creative empathy. First, we adapted “forward flow” to measure the dynamic unfolding of creativity while imagining other minds, quantified as semantic distance between mental state concepts when freely associating the contents of other minds. Second, we developed a divergent thinking task where participants reflect on others’ mental states and responses are scored using subjective and automated methods. In Studies 1–3, participants instructed to “be creative” showed higher scores than those instructed to be accurate and a no-instruction control, demonstrating that people vary in how creatively they approach empathy. In Study 4, participants instructed to be empathic (vs. objective) toward a target showed greater creativity on the divergent thinking task, demonstrating that empathy can produce creativity. Creativity on these tasks were inconsistently associated with trait and state empathy measures, suggesting complex relationships between creative empathy and empathic outcomes. Overall, these findings support a novel approach to measuring empathy that accounts for creative processes, broadening the scope of empathy and creativity research.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Scott Airey, Olivia George, Steven Schneible, Mackenzie Flanders, and other research assistants in the EMP Lab at Penn State for helpful research assistance throughout this project. We would also like to thank Reg Adams for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2229649.

Data availability statement

Data and syntax for this paper are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/mfb2h/

Notes

1. All word lists can be accessed via the online repository for this project on the Open Science Framework.

2. Details on number of exclusions per criterion, exclusions per condition, and study attrition rates can be located in the supplement.

3. Because conditions were coded with a greater than 1-unit difference, regression coefficients and 95% confidence intervals are multiplied from the output to reflect the actual mean difference and 95% confidence interval for the mean difference, respectively, between conditions.

4. We also looked at forward flow by condition to test for possible carryover effects from the divergent thinking task instructions. There was no difference in forward flow across conditions, F(2, 266) = 1.70, p = .185, η² = 0.01. Note that our primary prediction was for the divergent thinking measure, given that the creativity manipulation was embedded within that measure to test for its influence. In this study, forward flow is incorporated to test for construct validation and convergence with the divergent thinking task.

5. This test was conducted using contrasts comparing the accurate condition (2) with the combination of the creative (−1) and control (−1) conditions and comparing the control (−1) with the creative (1) condition.

6. To test experimental effects, we dummy-coded condition once with the Creative Empathy condition as the reference category, and again with the Empathy condition as the reference category. We used this coding strategy (as opposed to planned comparisons) because we did not have precise predictions about how conditions would differ.

7. Effects on the individual automated and subjective scoring outcomes yielded similar results in this study and are reported in the supplement.

8. Because the two empathy conditions were at least descriptively higher than the objective condition on all measures, we ran a follow-up targeted contrast analysis comparing the two empathy conditions (2) with the objective condition (−1). This analysis confirmed that the empathy conditions were significantly higher than objective across all creativity and empathy measures (ps < .031).

Additional information

Funding

S.A. was supported by funding from the Rock Ethics Institute at Pennsylvania State University while completing this research. C.D.C is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (#61150). R.E.B. is supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (DRL-1920653; DUE-2155070). .