A ground-breaking international research project is set to explore the complex relationship between moral frameworks and empathetic concern among young people across four countries.
The research will investigate how different moral perspectives influence the depth and breadth of empathy in schoolchildren aged 14-16 in the United Kingdom, Iceland, Italy, and Chile.
Led by Professor David Lundie at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social & Environmental Sustainability and funded by a grant from Templeton Religion Trust, the international project is called ‘Measuring Empathy to Bridge Culture-Gaps in Character Virtue Development’.
It aims to answer critical questions about the relationship between young people's empathetic concern, how they morally respond to events, and their ability to communicate shared values across cultural gaps.
Using smartphone-based daily surveys, participants will be given images and music and asked to respond about how this impacts their moral frames and moral emotions to better understand empathy-related responses.
These twice-daily surveys will provide over 14,000 datapoints to help the academics measure empathetic development in a way that’s never been done before. It will help Lundie and his team to understand whether the very different moral frames of their participants have a bearing on the ways they live.
Professor David Lundie said: "Directly asking about moral values often triggers social desirability bias, with people invariably describing themselves as generous and kind. By instead focusing on concrete daily actions – ‘Who did you help today?’ - we hope to bypass rehearsed responses and uncover authentic behaviours.
“Despite adolescents facing an increasingly fractured rhetoric of competing value systems, we expect that our research will help us to understand the common traits, emotions and desired behaviours that we all share.”
Lundie expects that the findings will help to better understand cultural differences in understanding empathy and pro-social behaviour. The findings will be used to create online and school-based resources that help develop empathy among young people.
**First published: 2 April 2025**