The Impact Of Empathic Motivation On Denger Differences In Empathic Accuracy:the Effect Of Moral Identity And Monetary Rewards

The findings from different fields such as social, cognitive, neurological science suggest that there are gender differences in empathy. In the study of empathic accuracy, we also found gender differences.How does such gender differences come about? Typically there are two kinds of explanations. One is that empathy ability of men and women is different. The other is that women’s empathic motivation is stronger than men. In the past researches operate some factors to improve women’s empathic motivations, and led to higher empathic accuracy for women than men. Relatively few studies discuss using some factors to improve the motivation of both men and women and the gender differences in empathic accuracy. In view of moral identity and monetary rewards have motivational effect, this study attempts to take moral identity and monetary rewardsas empathic motivation factors, respectively to examine their impacts on the gender difference in empathic accuracy.There are total three experiments in this study. The first one is designed to verify gender differences. The first step is to measure the level of perspective of subjects with IRI scale, then let the subjects watch video to finish empathic accuracy task. The results show that gender differences do exist..The second experiment intend to prime moral identity as a motivation factor, then check its influence on gender differences.The difference from Experiment One is that finishing writing task and empathic motivaiton scale after IRI measuring, then do Empathic accuracy task. The writing task is to prime moral identity. The empathic motivation scale is to measure the level of empathic motivaiton after priming moral identity:The results show the main effect of gender is not significant, that is the gender difference doesn’t exist. And the difference of empathic motivation between female students and the male student is not significant through Independent sample T test.The third experiment is to improve subjects’motivation by giving the instructions of the monetary incentives for well performance, then to test it impacts on gender differences. First requiring all the subjects to finish IRI, then giving them the instruction about monetary rewards, asking to fulfill the empathic motivation questionnaire and empathic accuracy task. The results suggest that the main effect of gender is not significant. The difference of empathic motivation between female students and the male student is not significant.The result of this study show that gender difference exist in empathic accuracy. Moral identity and monetary rewards have motivational impact on the gender difference of empathic accuracy, so the gender difference is not significant. On the one hand, it prompts us to further thinking the effect of motivation on empathy accuracy. on the other hand, it inspires us to stimulate male’s empathy motivation to satisfy the needs of career and life.