Compassion has largely been viewed as a prosocial tendency and the root of a variety of helping behaviors. However, is it possible that compassion can motivate harmful behavior towards others? One case in which this may arise is when one observes someone else suffering due to unjust behavior by a third party. A natural response for a compassionate individual is to aim to reduce the suffering of the victimized, but it may not always be the case that one has the resources or capacity to directly help. Thus, due to the compassionate individual’s need to re-establish justice and morality, he or she may turn to another option: punishing those that have caused the suffering. Supporting the death penalty for sexual abusers or retribution of terror attacks are real-life examples of how people enact this third-party punishment.

A series of studies revealed that as compassion increases, inclinations for third-party punishment increases as well. These relationships were found across a variety of historical examples, such as victims of the war in Syria, sexual assault survivors of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, Germany, as well as a few fictitious scenarios. The important factor that connected compassion and inclinations for third-party punishment was found to be moral outrage — the more compassion one felt given the situation, the higher degree of moral outrage surfaced leading to increased support for punishing the third party. While compassion has generally been known to elicit behaviors that may de-escalate violence, the results suggest that sometimes they may in fact only stimulate it.

What can we do with these findings? First of all, just as people regulate other emotions, it may be important for people to regulate feelings of compassion in instances when it may lead to disproportionate harmful tendencies towards the perpetrator. This is not to say that compassion should be completely repressed, but rather carefully examined and at times controlled in order to minimize instances of harm that may be impossible to retract.

Pfattheicher, S., Sassenrath, C., & Keller, J. (2019). Compassion Magnifies Third-Party Punishment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000165