Mind & Life periodically invites guests to contribute to the blog to deepen dialogue and understanding around themes central to our mission. Below, Tyralynn Frazier shares key findings from research conducted through a 2020 Mind & Life PEACE grant.

There is a comforting story we tell ourselves about compassion. We imagine that once suffering is seen, helping naturally follows. Yet some of the most painful experiences in human life emerge from the distance between what we feel and what we are ultimately willing, able, or prepared to do. We live in a moment that asks a great deal of compassion from young people. They navigate a world where suffering is increasingly visible, where social interactions unfold before audiences both real and virtual, and where questions of belonging and identity carry enormous weight. Yet despite growing interest in compassion as a developmental asset, we still know surprisingly little about how compassionate action emerges in everyday life.

We often assume that when young people fail to respond to another person’s suffering, the problem is a lack of caring. Our recent findings, supported through a 2020 Mind & Life PEACE Grant, suggest a more complicated and, perhaps, more hopeful story.

To better understand the gap between caring and action, my colleagues and I developed the Youth Compassion Measure (YCM), a scenario-based assessment designed to explore how adolescents interpret and respond to another person’s suffering. Rather than asking whether young people are generally compassionate, we were interested in a different set of questions: When does compassion become action? Toward whom? And under what conditions is compassionate responding most likely to emerge?     

Youth focus groups first identified common experiences of peer suffering and the factors that influence helping, and cognitive interviews were then used to refine the scenarios and response process. In the latest phase of our research, supported through the Mind & Life grant, we examined the measure’s performance in a sample of 200 middle school students, providing initial evidence that compassionate action is shaped by social context, motivation, and emotional regulation—not simply by recognizing another person’s distress.

This work pointed to an important insight: understanding adolescent compassion requires understanding the relational worlds in which adolescents live.

How Relationships Shape Compassion

Human development is fundamentally relational. We become who we are through our connections with others, and throughout adolescence those connections take on heightened significance. Questions of belonging, identity, status, and social evaluation move closer to the center of daily life. Friendships become sources of security, meaning, and self-understanding. Acceptance feels significant. Exclusion can feel devastating. Adolescents are not simply learning who they are; they are learning who they are in relation to others.

It is within this relational landscape that compassion develops.

One of the clearest findings from our study was that students were significantly more likely to help when the person experiencing distress was someone they knew well. At one level, this seems unsurprising. Most of us would expect a young person to respond differently to a close friend than to a stranger. Yet this seemingly obvious observation reveals something important. Compassion is not just about one individual responding to another; rather, the emergence of compassion depends on a broader social context. The relationships that give our lives meaning also shape what we notice, how we interpret suffering, and whether we feel called to respond.

“…students were significantly more likely to help when the person
experiencing distress was someone they knew well.”

This insight feels especially relevant as public conversations continue to focus on social media, cyberbullying, group chats, and the increasingly public nature of adolescent social life. Much of the discussion centers on technology itself. Yet from the perspective of our findings, the deeper story may be less about technology and more about visibility.

Adolescence brings heightened sensitivity to social evaluation. Today’s digital platforms amplify this fundamental developmental concern. Every group chat, comment thread, shared video, and social interaction creates another context in which young people navigate the question: How will others see me?

Compassionate action is about more than simply recognizing suffering. It is also about deciding how to respond when responding carries social consequences.

From Recognizing Suffering to Taking Action

As we interpreted these findings, my colleagues and I found ourselves returning to the question that traditional compassion measures rarely address: What shapes the transition from recognizing another person’s suffering to taking compassionate action? The patterns we observed suggested that adolescents were doing far more than simply reacting to another person’s distress. They appeared to be actively interpreting what they encountered, weighing questions of relevance, responsibility, possibility, and consequence before deciding how to respond. To better capture this process, we developed a relational developmental model that integrates the Youth Compassion Measure with relational appraisal theory.

Often without conscious awareness, adolescents may be asking themselves:

  • Does this situation really matter?
  • Am I responsible for helping?
  • Will my actions make a difference?
  • What happens if I get involved?
  • What happens if I don’t?

The answers to these questions matter because they help us understand how youth move from recognizing suffering to taking compassionate action.

Consider the public conversations that often follow videos of bullying circulating online. Attention quickly turns to the bystanders. Why didn’t someone intervene? Why didn’t anyone help?

These questions assume that recognizing suffering naturally leads to action. Yet our findings suggest a more complicated reality. In the same situation, one adolescent may see intervention as necessary and morally obvious, while another may perceive significant social risk or uncertainty about what role they should play. What appears from the outside as a single moment of inaction may actually reflect a complex process of weighing responsibility, relationships, consequences, and personal capacity.

This is why context matters so profoundly. In our study, helping changed when relational closeness changed. It changed when audience conditions changed. It changed when helping carried greater social costs. A student who quietly checks on a struggling friend after class may remain silent in front of a crowd of peers. Their values have not changed. Their concern has not disappeared. The context has changed.

Perhaps the most surprising finding from our work was that recognizing suffering alone did not consistently predict helping. Many adolescents understood when someone was struggling. What distinguished compassionate action was not simply awareness but the presence of intrinsic prosocial motivation and the ability to tolerate the emotional discomfort that often accompanies helping.

This distinction matters because helping often requires adolescents to move toward, rather than away from, another person’s distress. Doing so can involve social uncertainty, emotional discomfort, and the possibility of judgment or rejection. In these moments, compassion depends not only on recognizing suffering but also on having the motivation to alleviate it and the capacity to remain engaged despite the discomfort.

Compassion required more than noticing. It required remaining engaged when helping felt uncertain, vulnerable, or socially costly.

There is a tendency to treat moments of inaction as moments of moral failure. We see a young person remain silent, fail to intervene, or walk past another’s suffering, and we assume we understand what happened. Yet our findings suggest that these moments are often more complicated than they appear. They unfold within social worlds shaped by belonging, status, friendship, vulnerability, and the deeply human desire to remain connected to others. What looks like indifference from a distance may, in some cases, reflect a struggle between compassion and the social realities that make compassionate action difficult.

The distance between caring and acting is rarely empty space. It is filled with questions about belonging, uncertainty, responsibility, and risk.

These insights carry an important implication for schools and other settings that seek to cultivate compassion. If compassionate action is shaped by social context, then fostering compassion requires more than helping young people recognize suffering or feel empathy for others. It also requires creating environments in which helping is supported, where students feel connected to one another, and where responding to another person’s distress is seen as valued rather than socially risky. The task, then, is not only to cultivate compassion in young people, but to create the conditions that help compassion become action.

Tyralynn Frazier, PhD, MPH, is an associate research scientist at Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics.

Mind & Life Connections

2020

PEACE Grant

Creation of a performance-based measure of compassion for use with children

Tyralynn Frazier, Brendan Ozawa-de Silva

Topics: Compassion & Empathy | Education