Motivation Science, Vol 12(4), Dec 2026, 466-484; doi:10.1037/mot0000429
Empathic concern promotes prosocial behavior, but the effect of empathy is not the same for everyone. Scholars have extensively mapped the situational and personality factors that modulate the empathy-helping relationship, but only a few studies have examined the cognitive processes that link empathy with helping. Lockwood et al. (2016) found that individual differences in online simulation (the deliberate intention to imagine what another person is feeling) were associated with individual differences in the rates at which people learned how to benefit an anonymous other person in a two-armed bandit task (which we term prosocial learning). Across three experiments (N = 1,188; data collected between April 2021 and March 2024), we critically tested and extended this finding by asking participants to learn on behalf of real people in need, generalizing existing methods of prosocial learning to online research environments, conducted with participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Although each individual experiment provided only mixed evidence for the hypothesis that empathic concern is associated with prosocial learning, a mega-analysis that included data from all three experiments revealed that both state and trait empathic concern were weakly (but significantly) positively associated with prosocial learning. Although manipulations of empathy were unsuccessful and had no effect upon prosocial learning, attempts to causally manipulate empathy were also ineffective, leaving the causal association between empathy and prosocial learning unclear. We also could not replicate the finding that online simulation was associated with learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)