The Quantifying Quandary: The Lack of a Binary Divide when Categorizing Metrics of Social Cognition

Abstract

Empathy is an enigmatic human ability that is utilized in almost every facet of daily life. Psychologists and neuroscientists need a means to measure this human capacity to diagnose patients and run longitudinal studies. This paper evaluates the different ways of quantifying an individual’s social cognitive abilities. I hypothesize that among behavioral and self-reported tasks a delineation exists between ones measuring implicit or explicit empathy. Rather than a categorization found in the visual or non-visual properties of tasks, this study argues that the implicit/explicit divide highlights a significant difference in human ability. To test this hypothesis, data gathered from six different behavioral tasks (STOMP, RMET, Face Emotion Morph, Social Inference, Social Stroop, Moral Judgement) and nine different self-reported tasks (BEES, NCCS, ULS, MOS, MoL, CESDR, SIAS, RSE) was analyzed through exploratory correlation analysis and principal component analysis to investigate if meaningful relationships between any tasks exist. Confirmatory factor analysis tested the fit of various hypothesized groupings. Among all tasks, the strongest relationship was found between the Moral Judgement task and the self-reported tasks. The data did not support the other hypothesized binary categorical distinctions.