The bedside manner of homo economicus: How and why priming an economic schema reduces compassion

Abstract

We investigate how, why and when activating economic schemas reduces the compassion that individuals extend to others in need when delivering bad news. Across three experiments, we show that unobtrusively priming economic schemas decreases the compassion that individuals express to others in need, that this effect is mediated by dampened feelings of empathy and heightened perceptions of unprofessionalism, and that it is circumscribed to bad news that has economic implications. We discuss implications for theory and research on schemas, procedural justice, emotion expression, and prosocial behavior.

Introduction

“The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron.” (Sen, 1976, p. 329)

Few people enjoy delivering bad news. However, in tough economic times, bad news is an inevitable feature of organizational life. In recent years, organizational scholars have focused considerable attention on the importance of treating recipients of bad news with interpersonal sensitivity and compassion. Treating individuals with compassion is known to protect the welfare of those receiving the negative news (Bies and Moag, 1986, Greenberg, 1987, Tyler and Bies, 1990) and result in more favorable outcomes for organizations (Brockner, 1992, Brockner, 1994, Folger and Skarlicki, 1998, Tyler and Lind, 1992). Findings from medicine, for example, show that when doctors fail to express compassion and concern, patients are more likely to sue them for malpractice (Ambady et al., 2002, Levinson et al., 1997). In business, when managers fail to express compassion and concern in conducting layoffs and pay cuts, employees are more likely to file wrongful termination lawsuits (Lind, Greenberg, Scott, & Welchans, 2000) and retaliate with theft and sabotage (Greenberg, 1990).

Despite the benefits of expressing compassion, research suggests that when delivering bad news, organizational actors often express less compassion than observers and victims expect (Brockner, 2006, Folger and Skarlicki, 1998). To explain these compassion deficits, recent research has focused on the psychological experiences of those delivering bad news. In particular, researchers have advanced an “emotional overload” hypothesis, suggesting that people often fail to express compassion because they are seeking to protect themselves from high levels of emotional distress (Clair and Dufresne, 2004, Folger and Skarlicki, 1998, Folger and Skarlicki, 2001, Kets de Vries and Balazs, 1997, Molinsky and Margolis, 2005, Wright and Barling, 1998). Because the act of delivering bad news elicits such high levels of guilt, anxiety and distress, individuals often disengage psychologically or even physically from the situation (Clair & Dufresne, 2004), protecting themselves but harming victims in the process.

Recently, however, researchers have introduced an alternative perspective, suggesting that not everyone delivering bad news is consumed with negative emotion, and that not everyone consumed with negative emotion fails to produce compassionate behavior (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008). Indeed, in certain cases, individuals experience little emotion when delivering bad news and, as a result, express little compassion (Kets de Vries & Balazs, 1997). In other cases, individuals experience appropriate levels of concern but still fail to express compassion (Clair and Dufresne, 2004, Margolis and Molinsky, 2008). Although researchers have begun to recognize that such emotional “underload” can occur, we know little about its causes and the underlying psychological processes through which it inhibits compassion.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen our understanding of emotional underload by examining how economic schemas, which are widespread in organizations, can limit compassion by minimizing the amount of emotion that people experience and express. An economic schema is defined as a knowledge structure that prioritizes rationality, efficiency and self-interest, concepts at the heart of economics (Wang, Malhotra, & Murnighan, 2011). As prior work on schemas suggests (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000), the economic schema can be activated by ambient cues in the immediate environment, and can shape cognition, emotion, and behavior.

We propose that the activation of this schema is an important force that reduces compassion when delivering bad news. Rather than being engulfed by emotion, people whose economic schema is elicited fail to act with compassion because they do not experience sufficient emotion or believe it is inappropriate to express the emotion they do feel. More specifically, we propose that activating an economic schema decreases compassion through two mechanisms, one emotional and the other cognitive: dampening the empathy that individuals feel and leading them to perceive expressing emotions as unprofessional and inappropriate. We examine these effects across three experiments, demonstrating how, why and when unobtrusively priming the economic schema results in reduced levels of compassionate treatment to others in need or distress. Our research advances knowledge about the dual psychological processes through which economic schemas can reduce compassion, providing new insights into the factors that constrain prosocial behavior and interpersonal justice in organizational settings.

As noted above, we define an economic schema as a knowledge structure that emphasizes the importance of rationality, efficiency and self-interest (see Wang et al., 2011). Little research has explicitly designated the notion of an economic schema, or directly detailed its effects on the delivery of compassionate treatment. However, important clues about the nature and consequences of the economic schema are available in three interrelated literatures: economics education, the norm of self-interest, and the psychological effects of money. We ground our theorizing in these three lines of research, which suggest that the economic schema is a pervasive knowledge structure and that it may have a powerful effect on compassionate behavior.

First, research on economics education supports the notion of an economic schema. In schools, businesses, and the broader society, economic language is frequently used to justify and explain decisions (Ferraro et al., 2005, Miller, 1999, Sonenshein, 2006, Wang et al., 2011). There is reason to believe that exposure to economics increases the salience of knowledge structures prioritizing rationality, efficiency, and self-interest—and that when these knowledge structures are activated, people act with less compassion. For example, Frank, Gilovich, and Regan (1993) found that in a prisoner’s dilemma game, economists, whose economic schema is chronically activated, defected more often than non-economists. They also found that economics professors were less likely than those from other disciplines to donate to charity. Other studies have shown that when social dilemmas involved economic decisions, people behaved more competitively (Pillutla & Chen, 1999).

Additionally, Wang et al. (2011) showed that people with greater exposure to economics kept more money for themselves in allocation decisions and had more positive attitudes toward greed, and that merely exposing people to a brief statement about the societal advantages of self-interest led them to view greed as more morally acceptable. In the domain of negotiations, Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) found that referring to a prisoner’s dilemma game as a Wall Street Game, as opposed to a Community Game, strongly influenced behavior within the game. When the game was called the Community Game, individuals were more likely to cooperate, whereas the opposite pattern occurred in the Wall Street Game. Similarly, Kay and Ross (2003) showed that cooperative and competitive primes led participants to construe and respond to prisoners’ dilemmas in corresponding fashions. Further, in a series of clever experiments, Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross (2004) demonstrated that exposure to physical objects with economic connotations, such as boardroom tables and briefcases, made competition more accessible, led participants to perceive social interactions as less cooperative, and caused participants to make more selfish proposals in the Ultimatum Game.

Second, a related stream of research on the norm of self-interest (Miller, 1999) suggests that individuals in Western societies have internalized schemas that prioritize self-interest above other motivations and reasons for action (Miller and Ratner, 1998, Schwartz, 1997, Wuthnow, 1991). The norm of self-interest is thought to discourage compassion by leading individuals to feel that it is socially inappropriate (Holmes et al., 2002, Miller, 1999, Ratner and Miller, 2001). The norm of self-interest is also thought to be particularly pervasive in business, where managers and employees are often trained in economic reasoning, which cultivates and reinforces beliefs in the prevalence and power of rational self-interest (Ferraro et al., 2005, Gandal et al., 2005, Ghoshal, 2005, Kasser et al., 2007, Sonenshein, 2006). Leavitt (1989, p. 39) went so far as to argue that business education, with its narrow focus on economics, creates “critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts, and shrunken souls.”

Third, researchers have also shown that merely exposing people to the concept of money has a similarly powerful influence on cognition and behavior. This effect has been demonstrated in two different ways. Extensive experimental evidence shows that merely activating the concept of money leads individuals to engage in less prosocial behavior (Vohs et al., 2006, Vohs et al., 2008). Moreover, field studies indicate that hourly pay leads employees to construe time in terms of monetary value, thereby reducing their willingness to donate their time as volunteers (DeVoe & Pfeffer, 2007).

Taken together, these three streams of research provide evidence in support of the notion of an economic schema that can be activated through mere exposure to schema-relevant stimuli, and that can shape psychological processes and behaviors. Our goal is to examine how activating the economic schema affects the degree of compassion a performer expresses when delivering bad news. Compassion is a behavioral expression of concern that involves offering understanding, support, or solutions (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006).

Our hypotheses are grounded in theory and research on compassion in organizational settings that suggesting that once another person’s need, distress, or suffering is noticed, the act of compassion unfolds in a two-step process: first, an individual must feel empathy and concern (Solomon, 1998, Wuthnow, 1991), and second, the individual must act by offering understanding, support, or solutions (Dutton et al., 2006). Research indicates that once a need is noticed, an act of compassion has two key elements: the felt experience of empathy for the person is need (Solomon, 1998, Wuthnow, 1991) and behavioral expressions of concern emanating from this felt experience (Dutton et al., 2006). We suggest that the economic schema can interfere with both of these elements. First, the economic schema may reduce empathy, a state of emotional concern for another person in need, distress, or suffering (Batson, 1990, Batson, 1998). Empathy and compassion are distinct, in that empathy involves only a feeling of concern, whereas compassion requires a behavioral expression of concern. As Dutton, Worline, Frost, and Lilius (2006, pp. 60–61) summarize, compassion differs from empathy in that compassion “implies action and must involve some sort of response… there must be a movement to respond.”

We predict that when the economic schema is activated, performers will be heavily influenced by notions of rationality and efficiency. As a result, economically oriented task performers will appraise and make sense of the situation in these terms, rather than in terms conducive to the experience and expression of empathy (Batson, 1998). For example, the performer may focus on the efficiency of delivering the message as quickly as possible (Folger & Skarlicki, 1998) as opposed to the importance of delivering it with compassion and sensitivity. In information processing terms (Epstein, 1994), “cool” rational processing mechanisms instigated by the economic schema will override “hot” intuitive processing, which is ordinarily responsible for the experience of prosocial emotions such as empathy (Loewenstein & Small, 2007). As a result, an individual will feel significantly less empathy when the economic schema is activated than when it is not (Zhong, 2011).

Second, even if the economic schema does not extinguish empathy, we predict that it can discourage individuals from acting on their feelings of empathy to express compassion when delivering bad news. Research shows that even when people have positive feelings toward an action, they often withhold the action if they perceive it as socially inappropriate (Ajzen, 1991). Guided by a “logic of appropriateness” (March, 1991, March, 1994), people implicitly ask themselves, “What does a person like me do in a situation like this?” When delivering bad news and the economic schema is not active, the intuitive answer to this question is “express compassion.” In an economic mindset, however, people may take the role of a manager who, concerned with the goals of the organization—as opposed to the interests of the victims of bad news—answers “what is appropriate” very differently. When the economic schema is salient, the answer to the question may be “avoid expressing emotion” because that is what rational, efficient actors are expected to do.¹

Even if under ordinary circumstances, people might reject the stereotype of the rational, unemotional executioner as a guide for their own behavior, we predict that under the influence of the economic schema, things may change considerably. Individuals will construe compassionate behavior as being inconsistent with their role of the self-interested, rational, efficient task executioner (e.g., Bargh and Chartrand, 1999, Miller, 1999, Sanchez-Burks, 2005) and as a result will be less likely to produce compassionate behavior. Thus, the economic schema may reduce compassion not only by decreasing empathy, but also by leading people to perceive the expression of emotion as unprofessional.

However, the economic schema may not always have this negative effect on compassion. An important boundary condition for this effect is the actual content of the bad news itself. In particular, we predict that the relationship between activation of an economic schema and reduced compassionate behavior will be particularly pronounced when the consequences of the bad news itself are economically relevant. This prediction is grounded in trait activation theory, which suggests that people only act on knowledge structures that they perceive as situationally relevant (Tett & Burnett, 2003). If the bad news has economic implications, the economic schema is directly relevant; if the bad news has no immediate or obvious economic implications, the economic schema may seem irrelevant. As such, we expect that the economic schema will only discourage compassion when the bad news has economic implications. This predicted relationship is also grounded in priming research, which underscores the importance of a schema-relevant context for eliciting schema-consistent behavior. In their elegant priming studies, for example, Bargh and colleagues demonstrate how activating a “rudeness” schema can influence behavior by creating an opportunity to engage in rude (or polite) behavior (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). Similarly, in our studies, we predict that the power of an economic schema will reveal itself and have a robust effect on participants’ behavior in schema-relevant contexts, which in our case are contexts in which the bad news itself has an economic component to it.

This discussion suggests the following four hypotheses concerning the relationship between the activation of an economic schema and a person’s actions, cognitions and emotions while under its psychological influence:

Hypothesis 1

Activating the economic schema reduces compassionate behavior.

Hypothesis 2

The negative effect of the economic schema on compassion is mediated by dampened feelings of empathy toward the victim.

Hypothesis 3

The negative effect of the economic schema on compassion is mediated by perceived unprofessionalism.

Hypothesis 4

The effect of the economic schema on compassion is moderated by the consequences of bad news, such that when these consequences are not economically relevant, the negative effect of the economic schema on compassion will be attenuated.