Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, H3C 3P8, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2021 Apr 12;11(1):7965. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-87214-x.
Hundreds of studies find that girls and women report feeling greater empathy than boys and men in response to adverse events befalling others. Despite this, few non-self-report measures demonstrate similar sex differences. This produces the oft-cited conclusion that to conform to societal expectations of appropriate sex-typed behavior females report higher levels of empathy. Several studies of sex differences in areas of brain activation and on infants' and young children's behavior however provide suggestive findings that self-reports reflect actual underlying sex differences in experiencing concern about others. We demonstrate using behavioral indices that females experience more empathy than males after witnessing an adverse event befall a same-sex classmate. In our study, one member of a pair experienced a minor accident on the way to constructing a tower while a bystander observed. We measured whether bystanders ceased their ongoing activity, looked at the victim, waited for the victim to recover from the accident, and actively intervened to help the victim. Female more than male bystanders engaged in these activities. These behavioral results suggest that an adverse event produces different subjective experiences in females than males that motivate objectively different behaviors, consistent with findings from self-report measures of empathy.
数百项研究发现，女孩和女性在面对他人遭遇不幸时，比男孩和男性表现出更强的同理心。尽管如此，很少有非自我报告的测量方法显示出类似的性别差异。这就产生了一个常被引用的结论，即为了符合社会对适当性别行为的期望，女性报告的同理心水平更高。然而，一些关于大脑激活区域以及婴儿和幼儿行为的性别差异研究提供了一些有启发性的发现，即自我报告反映了在关心他人方面实际存在的潜在性别差异。我们使用行为指标表明，女性在目睹同性同学遭遇不幸事件后，比男性更能感受到同理心。在我们的研究中，一组中的一个成员在建造塔的路上遭遇了一场小事故，而一个旁观者在观察。我们测量了旁观者是否停止了正在进行的活动，是否看了受害者，是否等待受害者从事故中恢复，以及是否积极干预帮助受害者。女性旁观者比男性旁观者更愿意参与这些活动。这些行为结果表明，不幸事件会给女性带来不同于男性的主观体验，从而促使她们采取不同的客观行为，这与同理心的自我报告测量结果一致。
