Prosocial Behaviour and COVID-19: How Affective and Cognitive Empathy Drive Support for Measures to Combat the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Coronavirus pandemic poses a major health and economic threat to societies around the world. The success of new measures that policymakers and health officials have introduced to combat the pandemic often relies on voluntary compliance by citizens. While the pandemic has brought increased relevance to prosocial and altruistic behaviour, it is unclear if the pandemic coincides with changes in self-reported dispositional empathy, and to what extent dispositional empathy affects support for governmental measures. I use a representative three-wave panel survey of UK citizens (N=7480) to analyse (1) if the Coronavirus pandemic led to an increase in affective and cognitive empathy from pre- to mid-pandemic, (2) what factors moderate change in empathy, and (3) in what way affective and cognitive empathy drive pandemic-related attitudes, including support for governmental measures to combat the pandemic and a sense of duty to follow new rules. I find that affective and cognitive empathy remained stable from pre- to mid-pandemic on average, but that personal experience during the pandemic helps explain subgroup variation. More empathic people feel a stronger sense of duty to follow the rules and report stronger support for measures to combat the pandemic, but there are significant differences between different types of measures. For some measures, there are significant differences between affective and cognitive empathy, but not for all. These findings improve our understanding of how affective and cognitive empathy shape attitudes and behaviour during a major crisis and imply that empathy plays a crucial role in explaining prosocial behaviour during the Coronavirus pandemic.