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After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality. A new study showing this relation was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's doctrine was that morality is based on "the everyday phenomenon of compassion, the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it"

Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors of the paper, say "Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer." A sense of other people's suffering may even be the foundation of morality-which suggests that suppressing that sense might make people feel less moral.

"It has often been argued that compassion is fundamental to morality. Yet people often suppress compassion for self-interested reasons. We provide evidence that suppressing compassion is not cost free, as it creates dissonance between a person's moral identity and his or her moral principles," said the author of the study. 

"We instructed separate groups of participants to regulate their compassion, regulate their feelings of distress, or freely experience emotions toward compassion-inducing images. Participants then reported how central morality was to their identities and how much they believed that moral rules should always be followed."

The researchers showed each participant in their experiment a slideshow of 15 images of subjects including homeless people, crying babies, and victims of war and famine. Each participant was given one of three tasks. Some were told to try not to feel sympathy, some were told to try not to feel distress (an unpleasant, non-moral feeling), and the rest were told to experience whatever emotions come to them. After each participant watched the slideshow, they were tested on whether they believed that moral rules have to be followed all the time and how much they cared about being a moral person.

People who had suppressed compassion did, apparently, have a change in their sense of morality: they were much more likely to either careless about being moral or to say that it's all right to be flexible about following moral rules. Cameron thinks this is because suppressing feelings of compassion causes cognitive dissonance that people have to resolve by rearranging their attitudes or beliefs about morality.

Choosing not to be kind is a common experience. "Many of us do this in daily life," Cameron says-whether it's declining to give money to a homeless person, changing the channel away from a news story about starving people in a far-off land, or otherwise failing to help someone in need. 

"In past work, we've shown that people suppress their compassion when faced with mass suffering in natural disasters and genocide. To the degree that suppressing compassion changes how people care about or think about morality, it may put them more at risk for acting immorally."