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Understanding Pro Social Behaviour Among Humans ( Cikara )

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The ability for an individual to recognize another’s suffering and experience the same emotions to some extent is common in order to promote pro-social behaviour among humans (Cikara, Bruneau, Van Bavel, Saxe, 2014). This ability to empathize with others begins early on and is motivated by the need to alleviate the distress in another when they are suffering. As noted by de Waal (2008), empathy occurs quickly and automatically as a way to respond to the emotional states of others, in turn being a major part of social interactions, coordinated activity, and cooperation toward shared goals. Thus, de Waal (2008) discusses the three different levels of empathy, among which are emotional contagion, sympathetic concern, and empathic perspective-taking. Firstly, emotional contagion is simply about automatic sharing as the individual takes on the emotional state of another even without any understanding of the other (de Waal, 2008). Next, de Waal (2008) suggests sympathetic concern is when an individual attempts to understand and reduce distress in the other (i.e. comforting behaviour), as there is knowledge that the response is about the other. Lastly, empathic perspective-taking occurs when an individual is dependent on imagination and mental state attribution as it is entirely about the other and separate from the self (de Waal, 2008).
There is much research done to suggest that there are failures in peoples’ ability to empathize (Cikara et al. 2014; Brown, Bradley, & Lang,

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