From appraisal to altruism: Examining the paradoxical effects of perceived importance in acting for others

Prosocial action often arises from empathizing with another person’s aversive experience. Yet, this empathic reactivity can be emotionally taxing, reducing their likelihood of taking action and deteriorating their action proficiency. These conflicting influences have been divided into compassion and personal distress to describe the promoting and demoting effects of such an empathic experience, respectively. Although this framework has provided insights and has been applied in the development of training programs to promote compassion and cultivate a prosocial mindset, studies have also revealed additional nuances. For example, the induced stress could also have a promotional effect by increasing the sense of urgency. Therefore, another framework is needed to address these flexible influences of the empathic experience. In this study, we aim to contribute to filling this gap by proposing an appraisal-driven account, demonstrating that perceived importance (PI) can largely account for how prosocial action unfolds and that active regulation is necessary to explain behavioral adaptation arising from prosocial motivation. To facilitate this process-level examination of the perception-to-action mechanism, we adopted a hybrid approach that combines hypothesis validation with explanatory investigations to address the large number of variables involved. The former focused on validating the effects of PI on affective stress, while the latter investigated PI-driven impact on behavioral outcomes. To establish an empirical basis for these, we employed a redesigned computer-based, effort-based slider task, and asked participants to complete it to rescue their session partner from potential threats (i.e., electric stimulation and monetary loss). Self-report, performance-based, and psychological scale data were collected. Based on data from 53 qualified participants, we validated that PI led to affective stress, and that an increase in PI impaired task performance. Yet participants showed performance improvement despite high stress, especially in reaction time, during high-stakes task conditions (i.e., the difficult-task and high-threat conditions). Specifically, lower-altruistic populations reported greater increases in stress. In conclusion, we validated, in part, and provided supporting evidence for the appraisal-driven account of prosocial behavior. We believe that it warrants further validation and examination to elucidate the nuances of empathy's impact on prosocial behavior, particularly in more ecologically valid settings.