Many people want to change their personality traits—and research on volitional change has documented their success in doing so. In the present study, we examine whether people also wish to change their levels of empathy, and whether these desires precede shifts in dispositional empathy and morality over a 15-week period. We recorded participants’ change goals, followed by weekly measurements of empathic concern and perspective-taking, as well as moral foundations. Results indicated that most participants wished to cultivate empathic concern and, especially, perspective-taking. Those who sought to develop these qualities tended to actually do so at a faster rate than their peers who did not—and, as a consequence, also drifted toward a characteristically liberal, individualizing morality.

许多人都想改变自己的人格特质，而对自愿改变的研究证明了他们的成功。在本研究中，我们研究了人们是否也希望改变他们的共情水平，以及在15周的时间里这些愿望是否先于性情和道德的转变。我们记录了参与者的变革目标，然后每周测量同情关注和观点采择以及道德基础。结果表明，大多数参与者希望培养同情心，特别是观点观点。那些寻求发展这些特质的人往往比没有选择这些特质的人更快地这样做，因此，他们也偏向了具有特征性的自由主义，个性化的道德体系。