Compassion or Compliance: Alternative Dispositional Attributions for One's Helping Behavior*

Compassion and compliance are two very different self-attributions for agreeing to help someone in need; further, they should have very different consequences for subsequent behavior. Specifically, to see oneself as a compassionate individual should be self-rewarding, leading to the likelihood of helping in response to subsequent requests. But to see oneself as a compliant individual should be self-punishing, making one more reluctant to help in the future. Results of an experiment supported these predictions. Forty female undergraduates, each paired with a confederate, agreed to help in response to a request. As predicted, subjects led to make a compassion attribution for their response to an initial request volunteered more help when presented with a second request than did subjects led to make a compliance attribution for their initial helping.