engleski

The role of empathy and moral reasoning in adolescents' prosocial behaviour

The purpose of the present study was to determine the relationships between adolescents' empathy and maturity of moral reasoning with their self-reported prosocial behaviour. Fourteen years old adolescents (174 females and 137 males) were administered Emotional Empathy Scale (Raboteg-Šarić, 1991), three Kohlberg's structured moral dilemmas and Prosocial Behaviour Scale (Raboteg-Šarić, 1990). Data were analysed by means of hierarchical regression analyses with emotional empathy, fantasy and moral reasoning and their interactions as predictors and prosocial behaviour as a criterion variable. Intelligence, social desirability tendencies, and subjects' gender were taken as control variables. The results showed that higher prosocial behaviour could be best explained by higher emotional empathy. Moral reasoning was not related to prosocial behaviour. However, significant interactions of moral maturity and emotional empathy results was found showing that the correlation of empathy and prosocial behaviour was stronger at higher levels of moral reasoning. Additional analyses indicated that girls were found to be more altruistic than boys due to a higher emotional empathy. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of the debate on the role of moral cognition and moral affects in determining prosocial behaviour.

altruism; empathy; moral reasoning

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