Empathy and Public Support for Capital Punishment

Using the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS), this study illuminates the relationships among empathy—the imaginative transporting of oneself into the thinking, feeling, and acting of another and by doing so viewing the world as the person does—two intervening variables, and public support for the death penalty. More specifically, we investigate whether empathetic Americans are less likely to be racially and ethnically intolerant and politically conservative, and whether these intervening variables mediate the relationship between empathy and support the death penalty. Our results show that empathy has a direct and indirect effect on public support for capital punishment. Thus, we discovered that empathy directly predicts support for the death penalty and empathetic Americans were less likely to support capital punishment because they tended to be politically liberal and racially and ethnically tolerant. Accordingly, our results indicate that scholars investigating public support for the death penalty should include humanistic-oriented beliefs such as empathy into their analysis.