Who cares about others? : Empathic self-efficacy as an antecedent to prosocial behavior

• Two studies tested associations among self-efficacy and prosocial behavior. In Study 1 wemeasured academic self-efficacy, emotional self-efficacy and self-reported prosocial behavior.The study showed that academic but not emotional self-efficacy was positively correlated withprosocial behavior. Study 1 included only self-oriented emotions, and the absence of empathicemotions may explain the lack of association between emotional self-efficacy and prosocialbehavior. In Study 2 we included empathic as well as self-oriented emotions, because previousresearch (C. D. Batson, 1991) has shown that empathic emotions generate altruistic helping. Asexpected, empathic self-efficacy had a positive association with prosocial behavior. Empathicself-efficacy appears to be an important, largely overlooked antecedent to prosocial behavior.

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