Does Compassion Shape How Much Citizens See Others in Charge During Societal Crises?

Recent evidence shows that compassion prompts personal action in response to societal crises. We argue that compassion—the awareness of suffering and the desire to alleviate it—is also associated with assigning greater responsibility to multiple societal actors, thus possibly facilitating more wide‐ranging crisis responses. As citizens in democracies elect politicians to address the issues they care most about, the recognition of suffering and the desire to alleviate it should prompt citizens to also demand institutional responses (i.e., from politicians, authorities, and organizations). Analyses of nationally representative panel data from Sweden demonstrate that compassion is associated with personal actions and the assignment of responsibility to other societal actors. While an experiment in the US provides no causal evidence that inducing compassion shifts these outcomes, it corroborates our correlational findings: people reporting more compassion also report greater personal action, demands for institutional responsibility, and monitoring of various actors' crisis responses. Together, while further evidence on the causal effects of compassion is needed, our results suggest that compassion's effects may go beyond personal action, facilitating the multi‐layered responses that complex societal crises require.