The role of empathy and moral reasoning in adolescents prosocial behaviour

The purpose of the present study was to determine the relationship between adolescents' empathy and maturity of moral reasoning with their self-reported prosocial behaviour. Fourteen-year-old adolescents (N=311) were administered scales measuring emotional empathy, fantasy and prosocial behaviour. Kohlberg's structured moral dilemmas were used to measure moral judgement maturity. Data were analysed by means of a hierarchical regression analysis with emotional empathy, fantasy and moral reasoning and their interactions as predictors and prosocial behavior as a criterion variable. Intelligence, social desirability tendencies and sex of subjects were taken as control variables. The results showed that higher prosocial behaviour could be best explained by higher emotional empathy. Moral reasoning was not related to prosocial behaviour. Significant interaction of moral maturity and emotional empathy was found showing that the correlation of empathy and prosocial behaviour was stronger at higher levels of moral reasoning. Significant sex differences in prosocial behaviour were also found. Additional analysis indicated that girls were found to be more altruistic than boys due to their higher emotional empathy. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of the current debate on the role of moral cognitions and moral affects in determining moral behaviour.