Increasing Empathy through Participation in Structured Groups: Some Attributional Evidence

Abstract

Increases in empathy produced by participation in a short-term empathy skills training group were assessed by contrasting trained and untrained individuals' attributions about salient and nonsalient stimulus persons. Although previous evidence suggests that empathy limits the observer's tendency to over-attribute behavior to personal rather than situational causes, trained subjects underestimated the impact of situational determinants on behavior, especially when observing salient actors. These findings suggest that the early stages of empathy training in structured groups may be characterized by losses in empathic orientation, perhaps as a result of increases in listening skills.