A Second Trial: Past Convictions and the Collapse of Compassion

Jared Mulder Author

07/29/2021 Added

8 Plays

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This study attempts to find out if/why there is a greater compassion collapse for those who have not committed a crime compared to those who have.

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[00:00:01.830]Hi everyone.
[00:00:03.060]My name is Jared Mulder and this is my UCARE research project titled "A Second
[00:00:07.470]Trial past Convictions and the Collapse of Compassion."
[00:00:12.510]So a little about me, as I said before,
[00:00:14.490]my name is Jared Mulder and I grew up in Oakland, Nebraska.
[00:00:17.820]I'm going to be a junior here at UNL and I'm majoring in Nutrition Science and
[00:00:21.480]have minors in Psychology, Biochemistry, and Gerontology.
[00:00:27.030]So compassion collapse...What exactly am I talking about when I say that?
[00:00:32.460]Compassion collapse is defined as when people feel more compassion and have a
[00:00:36.780]greater impulse to help an individual target compared to numerous targets.
[00:00:42.180]While there have been few studies analyzing compassion collapse
[00:00:45.250]based on the targets age, like in Larsen in 2017 and Witt in 2019,
[00:00:50.130]there have been even fewer directly manipulating innocence.
[00:00:54.300]The only study to explicitly manipulate innocence without the confound of age
[00:00:58.320]analyzed how people reacted to felon or non-felon targets suffering
[00:01:04.170]from cancer, like in Witt in 2019. However,
[00:01:07.530]the study did not analyze what degree of criminality might impact the collapse of
[00:01:11.400]compassion. Hence,
[00:01:12.660]this study was designed to address the lack of research in this area.
[00:01:16.350]In our study,
[00:01:17.190]we will be manipulating perceived innocence with an objective criminal scale.
[00:01:23.790]And now moving on to the purpose.
[00:01:26.160]Simply the objective of the study was to see if and why there was greater compassion
[00:01:30.810]collapse for those who have not committed a crime compared to those who have,
[00:01:34.530]with the goal of better understanding why this phenomenon occurs and factors
[00:01:38.910]that may lead to a decrease in this compassion collapse.
[00:01:43.650]Now moving on to our hypotheses. Hypothesis #1:
[00:01:46.890]People will be less compassionate and less willing to help those who have
[00:01:50.730]committed felonies and misdemeanors compared to innocent people,
[00:01:54.150]because individuals who have committed felonies and misdemeanors are viewed as
[00:01:57.540]more responsible for their fate. And for #2
[00:02:00.600]we have compassion collapse will be stronger for individuals who have not
[00:02:03.930]committed any crimes compared to those who have committed felonies or
[00:02:07.020]misdemeanors.
[00:02:10.290]Methods, to keep this brief participation occurred on Amazon's
[00:02:15.210]Mechanical Turk. We made the survey on Qualtrics, transferred it to MTurk,
[00:02:19.410]and then people within the US from ages 18 to 89
[00:02:22.770]participated. The targets within the scenario were presented as
[00:02:27.420]suffering from multiple myeloma cancer, as well as more info on them.
[00:02:31.290]I have an example of
[00:02:34.110]of the first condition in the next slide that you will be able to take a look at.
[00:02:37.980]And then participants were also randomly assigned to read one of six conditions,
[00:02:42.540]which I have another table breaking that down in two slides as well.
[00:02:48.420]So here is the first condition scenario.
[00:02:51.750]Please pause the video for the sake of time and take a look at that.
[00:02:58.700]Alright.
[00:02:59.080]Hopefully you had a chance to read that. Now we are moving on to the conditions.
[00:03:03.130]So you read condition number one,
[00:03:05.380]which was with one target who had no criminal history.
[00:03:09.190]And then this just breaks down the difference.
[00:03:11.530]So if we have one target or eight targets and then the level of crime.
[00:03:18.000]Data. So after the exclusion process of, you know,
[00:03:22.470]people who either failed attention checks, manipulation checks,
[00:03:25.420]suspected robots, et cetera,
[00:03:27.180]we ended up with 232 participants of which we had 123 men,
[00:03:32.070]108 women, and one no response. And a majority were Caucasian.
[00:03:36.480]And then we also have a frequency table breaking down the number of participants
[00:03:41.400]we ended with in each condition.
[00:03:45.600]Now moving on to the data and the results,
[00:03:48.090]our analyses were run through SPSS statistics on IBM.
[00:03:52.170]We transferred the data from MTurk to there to be able to run these analyses and
[00:03:57.090]clean the data. And I have two one way ANOVAs on this
[00:04:01.980]on the slide as well. The first one looking at
[00:04:04.920]the number of targets on compassion and we found that there was no difference in
[00:04:09.270]single versus multiple. And then in the second
[00:04:11.790]ANOVA we see that criminal status and compassion, even though it's a small effect,
[00:04:16.260]we did see a higher compassion reported for non-criminal targets compared
[00:04:21.210]to felon target, to a felon target, excuse me.
[00:04:26.520]And then here is a table breaking down the main analysis,
[00:04:30.420]looking at the interaction between number of targets and criminal status of
[00:04:34.470]targets on compassion.
[00:04:37.620]There was a marginally significant interaction between number of targets and the
[00:04:41.820]target criminal status on the participants reported level of compassion.
[00:04:46.260]Only the simple slopes for felon targets were found to be significantly
[00:04:49.410]different when there were one versus eight targets,
[00:04:52.290]specifically participants reported more compassion for multiple felon targets
[00:04:56.220]compared to a single felon target.
[00:04:58.770]And this is the opposite of what we would expect to see for compassion collapse.
[00:05:02.640]As we specifically hypothesized that there would be such a floor effect with
[00:05:06.240]felons targets that compassion would not further collapse at all.
[00:05:10.830]The expected collapse of compassion for non-criminal or misdemeanor targets were
[00:05:14.700]not observed.
[00:05:18.630]And feel free to pause and read through these in more depth,
[00:05:20.910]but for the sake of time,
[00:05:21.780]it's best put that there were no mediations of emotional regulation on the
[00:05:25.950]relationship of number of targets and level of compassion.
[00:05:31.350]And here we have a moderation analysis looking at,
[00:05:35.370]So for the independent variable, we have a single or multiple people,
[00:05:39.180]and then for compassion as the dependent and perceived impact of help for the
[00:05:42.960]moderator.
[00:05:44.160]And we see that there was a significant moderation of perceived impact of help
[00:05:49.080]on the relationship between number of targets and one's level of compassion for
[00:05:52.410]the target.
[00:05:53.940]There was a significant slope for both those who had a low sense of perceived
[00:05:57.620]impact, and those who thought their help would have high impact.
[00:06:01.400]Moving on to a little discussion.
[00:06:03.020]These results might be due to the fact that if you have a low sense of that
[00:06:07.550]your help will impact the target,
[00:06:09.260]you feel more compassion for multiple targets because you feel,
[00:06:13.970]poorer about the help not being as impactful for multiple people compared to one
[00:06:18.800]person. However, if you believe your help will have a large impact,
[00:06:23.510]the collapse of compassion occurs because one is more tempted to reappraise or
[00:06:27.890]suppress their emotions, specifically when faced with multiple targets,
[00:06:31.190]thereby avoiding negative feelings from potentially not wanting to help.
[00:06:37.040]In summary,
[00:06:37.850]we observed that participants reported more compassion for multiple felon
[00:06:41.170]targets compared to a single felon target.
[00:06:44.150]Overall, participants did report less compassion for felons targets as expected.
[00:06:48.380]So it's not that participants necessarily had more compassion overall for felons
[00:06:53.060]compared to other targets.
[00:06:54.950]Perhaps we did not see compassion collapse for non-criminal and misdemeanor
[00:06:58.880]targets if participants in Witt's study in 2019,
[00:07:03.560]assumed that the felon targets had committed misdemeanors instead.
[00:07:07.220]So the whole point of the study was to see if the degrees of innocence
[00:07:11.570]impacted that collapse of compassion.
[00:07:14.150]And our finding was inconsistent with previous research,
[00:07:17.480]which has found that the collapse of compassion for non-criminal targets and no
[00:07:21.950]collapse for felon targets in the same scenario.
[00:07:25.250]Our only difference in this study was that we introduced misdemeanor targets.
[00:07:29.660]It is possible that a single felon target may create a more negative
[00:07:34.370]reaction than multiple felon targets because the one target seems more
[00:07:38.390]identifiable. Therefore,
[00:07:41.120]there is one person who is the recipient of all negative assumptions and
[00:07:44.690]stereotypes. Whereas when there were multiple felon targets,
[00:07:48.650]participants may have been better able to avoid overly stereotyping assumptions
[00:07:53.030]of the felon targets.
[00:07:55.340]The main limitation of this study was that it was slightly under powered.
[00:07:59.060]We would've liked to have seen at least 50 in each condition for sufficient
[00:08:02.870]statistical power. However,
[00:08:05.030]we were able to at least get 30 in each condition,
[00:08:07.880]which was our minimum to run analyses. And then results.
[00:08:11.900]Why do these results even matter in the first place? Well,
[00:08:14.960]it allows us to better understand if and why people are willing to help others
[00:08:18.680]in need. Alright.
[00:08:22.640]And I would first like to thank Dr. Chelsea Witt for all of her efforts.
[00:08:26.260]She has been nothing but excellent as a mentor and a leader in this project.
[00:08:31.090]She took time out of her busy schedule to help me with it throughout the summer,
[00:08:34.780]throughout the year, and I couldn't be more grateful.
[00:08:37.210]I have learned so much about the research process this summer, thanks to her.
[00:08:41.260]And we've been working on this since December,
[00:08:43.990]so it's a bittersweet moment for it to come to an end.
[00:08:46.000]And I truly appreciate everything Dr. Witt has done for me.
[00:08:50.590]And second,
[00:08:51.100]I would like to thank UCARE for giving me the opportunity to develop research
[00:08:55.380]professional skills throughout these past few months.
[00:08:58.890]Without their generous support,
[00:09:00.780]I would not have been able to have had such an outstanding summer.
[00:09:06.380]And that wraps up this slideshow.
[00:09:08.210]So thank you all for watching and I hope you enjoyed this presentation.

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A Second Trial: Past Convictions and the Collapse of Compassion

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