Protecting beneficiaries’ privacy in fundraising has become a common practice in real-world charitable campaigns. However, empirical research directly examining how such privacy protection influences individuals’ donation behavior remains unexplored. This research compares different face anonymization techniques (partial-face and full-face anonymization) with no anonymization on donation amount, and explores the mediating roles of empathy and credibility, as well as the moderating role of need for cognition (NFC). We conducted two studies and used ANOVA and bootstrap analysis to assess these effects. The results showed that partial-face anonymization leads to better donation amounts compared to full-face and no anonymization, with this effect mediated by empathy toward beneficiaries and the perceived credibility of nonprofit organizations. Additionally, the comparative effect of partial-face versus no anonymization is significant for donors with high NFC but not for those with low NFC. Our findings offer several implications for charitable platforms, nonprofit organizations, and beneficiaries.

Understanding verbal irony involves detecting that the speaker’s intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning. This is challenging for children as the underlying skills required to understand irony may not be fully developed. We investigated how 10-year-olds’ working memory, empathy skills, and gender were related to their processing and comprehension of written irony. Data from two previous eye-tracking experiments with 97 children (46 girls and 51 boys) were analysed. Results showed that children with stronger empathy skills had higher irony comprehension accuracy and were less likely to reread ironic phrases. Higher working memory was linked to faster processing of irony but did not lead to higher comprehension. Conversely, lower working memory was associated with more accurate irony comprehension. Child gender was not related to irony comprehension. These results imply that working memory and emotional perspective-taking are important for children’s irony comprehension, underscoring theories that take individual differences into account.

Efforts to include animal perspectives in decision-making are gaining attention, yet how to meaningfully represent these perspectives remains underexplored. This study investigated how university students engaged in taking the perspective of dairy cows and calves when introduced to the practice of cow-calf separation — either through a verbal description or a visually immersive video capturing the animals’ point of view. Focus groups were conducted to examine the range and depth of participants’ responses, and transcripts were thematically analysed. Results revealed that participants across both treatments acknowledged the animals’ experiences, particularly the emotional significance of the maternal bond. However, those exposed to the video condition engaged in more emotionally detailed and complex discussions, often referencing specific animal behaviours and vocalisations. The video appeared to enhance perspective-taking by increasing contextual richness, encouraging participants to interpret the animals’ experiences more vividly. While many participants expressed empathy or sympathy, others reported distress or hesitancy, citing challenges, such as anthropomorphism or uncertainty about accurately accessing animal perspectives. These findings underscore the potential for visual interventions to deepen understanding of non-human perspectives, while also highlighting psychological and cultural barriers to animal-inclusive decision-making. Our results suggest that perspective-taking can be a valuable tool in promoting ethical engagement with animal welfare. However, further research is needed to explore how such engagement influences actual decision-making, and how to balance emotional connection with critical reflection.

This article, the first of a two-part empirical–theological study, examines the significance of empathy within Anglican ministry through the perspectives of Archdeacons in the Church of England. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty-five Archdeacons, a suffragan bishop and the National Executive Officer for Archdeacons, the study situates archidiaconal testimony within contemporary research on emotional intelligence, personality and Anglican pastoral theology. Part One establishes empathy as a decisive marker of ministerial flourishing and a recurrent deficit among struggling clergy, often with serious relational and ecclesial consequences. Archdeacons consistently identify empathic attunement, self-awareness and emotional flexibility as foundational to healthy pastoral leadership, while persistent dysfunction is frequently associated with relational blindness, rigidity or defensiveness. This article develops the empirical and conceptual foundations for Part Two, which explores whether empathy is formable, how it may be cultivated through formation and supervision and why it is theologically integral to the Anglican understanding of the cure of souls.

The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski’s work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God’s relationship to what Zagzebski calls ‘counteractuals’, individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God’s omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.

This paper explores the epistemic foundations of empathy and intersubjectivity in Edith Stein’s analysis, placing it in dialogue with Pope Francis’s reflections on the heart in his last encyclical, Dilexit Nos. Beginning with Stein’s development of empathy, the author examines how empathy grants us an awareness of the other’s inner experience, which is non-primordially present and foreign to the empathizing subject. While this structure reveals a fundamental asymmetry between self and other, it also leads Stein’s account of empathy to an epistemic insufficiency: it can describe the givenness of the other, but not the depth of relational life. At this insufficiency, I turn to Pope Francis’ notion of the heart as a lived space of spiritual life. The heart, in this vision, is where contradictions and polar tensions between self and other are not solved but held – a space of receptivity, affectivity, and interior openness. Drawing on the image of bamboo that survives precisely through its emptiness, I suggest that a spiritually receptive heart allows us to live in the asymmetrical experiences between self and without collapsing the other into abstraction.

The growth in economic inequality in the United States over the past forty years has stimulated interest among scholars in the effects of exposure to inequality on the American people. A prominent vein of scholarship explores whether exposure to inequality diminishes belief in a key pillar of the ‘American dream’ – the meritocratic ideal that hard work will translate to economic success. We offer this literature a novel test that explores the relationship between quotidian exposure to economic inequality in one’s adolescent residential context and belief in the American dream among roughly 1.3 million late-adolescent Americans entering college. We find that adolescent residence in high-inequality areas is associated with decreased belief in the American dream upon entering adulthood. Further analysis revealed that this relationship is most pronounced among young Americans raised in higher income households.

As political polarization increases across many of the world's established democracies, many citizens are unwilling to appreciate and consider the viewpoints of those who disagree with them. Previous research shows that this lack of reflection can undermine democratic accountability. The purpose of this paper is to study whether empathy for the other can motivate people to reason reflectively about politics. Extant studies have largely studied trait‐level differences in the ability and inclination of individuals to engage in reflection. Most of these studies focus on observational moderators, which makes it difficult to make strong claims about the effects of being in a reflective state on political decision making. We extend this research by using a survey experiment with a large and heterogeneous sample of UK citizens (N = 2014) to investigate whether a simple empathy intervention can induce people to consider opposing viewpoints and incorporate those views in their opinion about a pressing political issue. We find that actively imagining the feelings and thoughts of someone one disagrees with prompts more reflection in the way that people reason about political issues as well as elicits empathic feelings of concern towards those with opposing viewpoints. We further examine whether empathy facilitates openness to attitude change in the counter‐attitudinal direction and find that exposure to an opposing perspective (without its empathy component) per se is enough to prompt attitude change. Our study paints a more nuanced picture of the relationship between empathy, reflection and policy attitudes.

Previous research suggests that empathy is a strong contributor to altruistic behavior. However, there is a lack of research regarding the role of empathy in long-term, effortful altruistic acts such as volunteering. In this preregistered study, we aimed to understand the moderating role of belief in a just world in the association between induced empathy and intentions to volunteer among both volunteers (N = 99) and non-volunteers (N = 203). Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental group (N = 149) or the neutral group (N = 153). In the experimental group, participants read a text about the suffering of an individual with a chronic illness. In the control group, participants read a text about a typical Tuesday for someone. Then, all participants were asked to complete surveys regarding empathy levels, prosocial intentions, belief in a just world, and demographics. Results showed that inducing empathy did not directly affect the levels of intention to volunteer in the future. However, empathy induction was effective for non-volunteers, particularly those with lower levels of personal (but not general) belief in a just world. These results suggest that increasing levels of empathy might be ineffective when personal belief in a just world poses a barrier to displaying volunteering acts. Notably, these findings were observed specifically for non-volunteers, not for volunteers. Thus, future research should explore potential differences due to previous volunteering experiences and the levels of belief in a just world in the motivating roles of empathic concerns for displaying long-term, effortful helping behaviors.

Virtual reality (VR) can boost charitable attitudes and behavior. In an experiment with 100 participants viewing the content in VR vs. desktop computer, the VR group exhibited significantly higher levels of spatial presence (MD = 1.24, p < .001), attention allocation (MD = . 58, p < .001), spatial situation model building (MD = .47, p = .01), and empathy (MD = .46, p = .049). Donation behavior did not differ between the two groups (p = .36). Both computer and VR viewers shared similar emotions, but VR users felt greater immersion and emotional intensity, perceiving themselves as active participants, while computer viewers took a more passive role. This study generated insights for nonprofits considering VR in their marketing strategies, shedding light on the potential of VR storytelling and its effects on charitable giving.

The paper aims to test why people from the general population intend to volunteer in the future. Our study tests empathy (affective and cognitive) as the intrinsic antecedent, satisfaction with life and meaning in life as the endocentric antecedents, and social value orientation as the ipsocentric antecedent of the intention to engage in volunteering. The paper is based on a 2-wave longitudinal online, questionnaire-based study (N = 566) performed on a general sample of Polish residents in May 2022 and May 2023. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that empathy at time 1 of the study predicted subsequent volunteering intention (when controlling for other variables in the model). Moreover, the volunteering intention at time 1 predicted social value orientation at time 2, and endocentric antecedents at time 1 negatively predicted empathy at time 2. The results suggest that concern for others and their welfare is the strongest factor associated with intentions to volunteer in the general population. Practitioners should consider that people with higher dispositional empathy might be the best targets for volunteer recruitment.