In plain language
A popular idea, echoed from Buddhist teachings to pop psychology, is that you must first be kind to yourself before you can be kind to others. But does treating yourself with compassion actually make you more helpful toward other people? Almost all previous evidence came from one-off surveys of adults, which cannot tell us whether self-compassion leads to kindness, follows from it, or neither. This study put the "self-first" idea to a rigorous longitudinal test in teenagers.
The researchers followed 2,078 Australian students across 17 high schools from Grade 9 to Grade 12, measuring self-compassion and empathy each year. Rather than relying on self-reports of kindness, they asked students' own classmates to rate how helpful each student was — a much tougher, more objective test of prosocial behavior. Multi-level models accounted for the nesting of students within classes and schools.
The answer to the title question is nuanced. Self-compassion is not selfish: more self-compassionate teens were rated as more helpful by their peers, even after accounting for empathy. But self-compassion did not predict growth in prosocial behavior over the high school years — only affective and cognitive empathy did. In other words, being kind to yourself goes along with being kind to others, but it is empathy that appears to drive the development of kindness toward peers. The authors suggest self-compassion may still play a valuable supporting role, for example by buffering against the distress that can come with feeling others' pain.
Key findings
- Self-compassion, affective empathy, and cognitive empathy each uniquely correlated with peer-rated prosocial behavior during adolescence; the self-compassion link held even when controlling for empathy.
- Only empathy (both affective and cognitive) predicted increases in prosocial behavior across the high school years; self-compassion did not.
- Prosocial behavior also did not predict increases in self-compassion over time, suggesting no developmental feedback loop in either direction.
- The study followed 2,078 youth across 17 schools from Grade 9 to Grade 12 (mean age 14.65 at Time 1; 49.2% female), with yearly measurements and peer ratings of helping.
- This is the first longitudinal study of self-compassion and prosocial behavior in adolescents, and it used multi-level modeling with students nested within classes and schools.
- The authors conclude that self-compassion is not selfish, but it does not appear to facilitate the development of kindness toward peers; it may instead buffer against the negative effects of empathic distress.
How to cite
APA
Marshall, S. L., Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P. D., & Sahdra, B. K. (2020). Is self-compassion selfish? The development of self-compassion, empathy, and prosocial behavior in adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 30(S2), 472-484. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12492
BibTeX
@article{marshall2020is,
author = {Marshall, Sarah L. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip D. and Sahdra, Baljinder K.},
title = {Is Self-Compassion Selfish? {The} Development of Self-Compassion, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior in Adolescence},
journal = {Journal of Research on Adolescence},
year = {2020},
volume = {30},
number = {S2},
pages = {472--484},
doi = {10.1111/jora.12492}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.