Empathy Leads to Increased Online Charitable Behaviour When Time is the Currency

This study shows how the empathy-altruism hypothesis can affect helping behaviour where time spent is the currency, through the novel use of a real world charity. Using an online charity task (www.freerice.com) we show that inducing empathy and also anger cause participants to spend more time donating rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. These findings therefore supports the empathy-altruism hypothesis, and adds to previous research that have mainly used artificial and/or hypothetical scenarios by further showing that its effects can be applied to real world scenarios where helping behaviours are beneficial.