Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping.

TLDR

Attachment security, both dispositional and experimentally enhanced, promotes cognitive openness, empathy, self‑transcendent values, tolerance of out‑groups, and is linked to everyday volunteering. The study tests whether experimentally increasing attachment security through implicit and explicit priming enhances compassion and altruistic behavior. Five experiments in Israel and the United States used implicit and explicit priming to increase attachment security. Increases in attachment security consistently boosted compassion and altruistic behavior, while attachment anxiety and avoidance reduced them, confirming that security underlies caregiving and that insecurity impairs it.

Abstract

Recent studies based on J. Bowlby's (1969/1982) attachment theory reveal that both dispositional and experimentally enhanced attachment security facilitate cognitive openness and empathy, strengthen self-transcendent values, and foster tolerance of out-group members. Moreover, dispositional attachment security is associated with volunteering to help others in everyday life and to unselfish motives for volunteering. The present article reports 5 experiments, replicated in 2 countries (Israel and the United States), testing the hypothesis that increases in security (accomplished through both implicit and explicit priming techniques) foster compassion and altruistic behavior. The hypothesized effects were consistently obtained, and various alternative explanations were explored and ruled out. Dispositional attachment-related anxiety and avoidance adversely influenced compassion, personal distress, and altruistic behavior in theoretically predictable ways. As expected, attachment security provides a foundation for care-oriented feelings and caregiving behaviors, whereas various forms of insecurity suppress or interfere with compassionate caregiving.