On testing the empathy-altruism hypothesis among volunteers helping homeless animals

Abstract

The empathy-altruism hypothesis is a well-known explanatory model for prosocial behavior. Given certain limitations, we can consider volunteering with homeless animals as a form of prosocial behavior as the socie-ty represents a final beneficiary. So far, the research onempathy and altruism among these volunteers is scarce.Therefore, it is unclear whether the empathic concern determines altruism in volunteers with animals.Our aim was to study the ability of volunteers to emotionally empathize with others in general, and to learn if this ability is associated with the altruistic orientation towards animals.The study included114 volunteers forhomeless animals invarious Russian charities. The Questionnaire Measure of Emotional Empathy and the Volunteer Functions Inventorywere applied. Based on the data obtained two groups were formed: altru-ists and non-altruists. Next, we compared the level of empathy in the two groups using the Student's t-test (for independent samples).The volunteers showedmoderate to low empathytowardspeople. At the same time, compassion for animals was high among both altruists and non-altruists. No relationship was found between the empathy and altruism among the volunteers with stray animals.It was shown that despite volun-teering with animals can be essentially prosocial, they are compassionate primarily for animals rather than people or society. On the other hand, such degree of empathy can relate to emotional burnout and/or compas-sion fatigue. It can also be determined by the propensity for empathic concern among the volunteers (both to people and animals), or the negative attitude toward people given the context of the volunteers' activities. Further research on the topic is required. Such studies are important for the volunteer movement to be main-tained and the emotional burnout prevention.