Mark H. Davis

Introduction

Mark H. Davis (born 22 January 1953) is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is best known for developing the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a 28-item self-report instrument built on the premise that empathy is not a single trait but a cluster of related dispositions that can be measured separately. First circulated in 1980 and published in full in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1983, the IRI has become one of the most widely used instruments in the behavioural sciences: it has been translated into dozens of languages and appears in research on autism, schizophrenia, moral judgment, burnout, and the neural basis of social cognition.

Davis's broader contribution was conceptual as much as psychometric. Before his work, empathy research was split between investigators who treated empathy as a cognitive skill of perspective taking and investigators who treated it as an emotional resonance with another person's distress. Davis argued that both were right about different things, and that the failure to distinguish them had produced a literature full of contradictory findings. His 1994 book Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach supplied the organisational framework that the field has used since: situational and dispositional antecedents, internal processes, intrapersonal outcomes, and interpersonal behavioural outcomes.

Early Life and Education

Davis was born in Louisiana, Missouri, in 1953, the son of a career military officer and a university administrator. He began his undergraduate studies at Tulane University before transferring to the University of Iowa, where he completed a B.A. in psychology in 1975 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He then moved to the University of Texas at Austin for graduate training in social and personality psychology, receiving his Ph.D. in 1979.

His graduate years coincided with a period of renewed interest in individual differences within social psychology, after more than a decade in which situational explanations had dominated the field. Davis's early work took up that theme directly, examining loneliness, shyness, and self-consciousness as dispositions with measurable consequences for social behaviour. That interest in stable individual differences — and in how they interact with the situation a person is actually in — became the thread running through everything he later did with empathy.

Academic and Professional Career

Davis held positions at Indiana University and then at Eastern Illinois University, where he was an assistant professor of psychology from 1983 to 1986 and received the university's Faculty Merit Award for outstanding teaching. In 1986 he joined Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and he has remained there since, being promoted to full professor in 1999.

Most of his best-known empirical work was produced in the first decade of that career. Between 1983 and 1991 he published the studies that established the IRI, demonstrated that dispositional empathy predicts emotional reactions and helping behaviour above and beyond features of the situation, and showed that empathy contributes to the maintenance of satisfaction in romantic relationships. He has served as a consulting editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin since 2006, and he has received Eckerd's Robert A. Staub Distinguished Teacher Award (1995) and John Satterfield Mentor Award (Eckerd College, Office of the Dean of Faculty).

Alongside his academic work, Davis was involved in the development of the Conflict Dynamics Profile, an instrument used in organisational settings to assess how people characteristically behave during interpersonal conflict, and he authored the trade book Test Your EQ (first published 2004, Piatkus). He has also published on topics outside his main programme, including a study of why films released late in the calendar year receive more Academy Award nominations.

Major Contributions to Psychology

A multidimensional model of empathy

Davis defined empathy as "the reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another" — a deliberately broad definition intended to cover the range of phenomena that had been studied under that name. The IRI, built to match that definition, consists of four seven-item subscales, each tapping a separate facet:

  • Perspective Taking — the reported tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others in everyday life.
  • Fantasy — the tendency to transpose oneself imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictional characters in books, films, and plays.
  • Empathic Concern — feelings of warmth, sympathy, and compassion for others who are suffering; an other-oriented emotional response.
  • Personal Distress — feelings of anxiety and discomfort produced by witnessing another person's negative experience; a self-oriented emotional response.

The instrument's central design claim is that these four are related but functionally distinct. Two of them — Perspective Taking and Fantasy — are commonly described as cognitive; two — Empathic Concern and Personal Distress — as affective. The more consequential distinction, for Davis, is between the other-oriented response (Empathic Concern) and the self-oriented one (Personal Distress), because they point in opposite behavioural directions.

Empathy, emotion, and helping

In a 1983 study published in the Journal of Personality, Davis tested whether dispositional empathy added anything to the prediction of emotional reactions and helping once the situation was controlled for. It did: including individual-difference measures accounted for a substantially greater share of the variance in participants' emotional responses than situational factors alone. More importantly, the subscales behaved differently. Empathic Concern predicted other-oriented emotional responses and a greater willingness to help; Personal Distress predicted self-focused discomfort and, in some circumstances, withdrawal from the situation rather than assistance.

That pattern gave empirical substance to a distinction that had previously been argued on theoretical grounds: feeling for someone and feeling bad about someone's situation are different psychological events with different consequences, and only the first reliably motivates costly helping.

Empathy in close relationships

With H. Alan Oathout, Davis extended the model to romantic relationships in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study tested a mediational account in which empathy influences relationship satisfaction indirectly, by supporting the specific relational behaviours that sustain a partnership. The finding helped move empathy research beyond the stranger-in-a-laboratory paradigm that had dominated it, and it anticipated the much larger contemporary literature on responsiveness and perceived partner understanding.

He also examined how empathy develops, showing with Stephen Franzoi that both self-consciousness and the IRI subscales show considerable year-to-year stability during adolescence — evidence that these are traits with meaningful continuity rather than momentary states.

An organisational framework for the field

The IRI made empathy measurable; the 1994 book made the literature navigable. Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach drew together cognitive, sociobiological, and behavioural traditions and sorted their findings into a single model: what produces empathy (antecedents, both situational and dispositional), what happens inside the person (internal processes), what the observer ends up feeling and intending (intrapersonal outcomes), and what the observer then does (interpersonal outcomes). It remains the standard reference for researchers entering the area, and was reissued by Routledge in 2018.

Major Publications

  • Davis, M. H. (1980). "A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy." JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85.
  • Davis, M. H. (1983). "Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126.
  • Davis, M. H. (1983). "The effects of dispositional empathy on emotional reactions and helping: A multidimensional approach." Journal of Personality, 51(2), 167–184.
  • Davis, M. H. & Oathout, H. A. (1987). "Maintenance of satisfaction in romantic relationships: Empathy and relational competence." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(2), 397–410.
  • Davis, M. H. & Franzoi, S. L. (1991). "Stability and change in adolescent self-consciousness and empathy." Journal of Research in Personality, 25(1), 70–87.
  • Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (Reissued London: Routledge, 2018.)
  • Davis, M. H. (2004). Test Your EQ: Find Out How Emotionally Intelligent You Really Are. London: Piatkus.

Impact and Legacy

The IRI is one of a small number of instruments whose influence can be measured by how rarely its presence needs to be explained. It is used in social, personality, developmental, clinical, and organisational psychology; in neuroimaging studies of the so-called empathy network; and as an outcome measure in intervention research. Its translations and adaptations span Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese versions, among others. For a field that had spent two decades treating empathy as too slippery to operationalise, that represented a genuine methodological settlement.

The criticisms of the instrument are nonetheless substantial, and they have accumulated over four decades.

The four-factor structure does not always hold. Davis's original 1980 analysis of 427 undergraduates supported four subscales, and subsequent large samples have reproduced that result. But other studies have not. Yarnold, Bryant, Nightingale, and Martin (1996) failed to reproduce the original four subscales in either a student or a physician sample, concluding that an additional factor was needed. Alterman and colleagues (2003), working with methadone maintenance patients, found three factors rather than four. Cliffordson (2001) argued for a single general factor that excludes Personal Distress altogether, and De Corte and colleagues (2007) recommended changing or dropping the Fantasy scale. The pattern is that the structure is sensitive to who is being measured — which is a real limitation for an instrument intended to measure a disposition that is supposed to generalise.

The Fantasy scale is the weakest link. Its items ask about absorption in novels, films, and daydreams. Critics — most prominently Paul Bloom — have argued that this measures something closer to absorption in fiction than to empathy, noting that highly empathic people are not necessarily novel readers and that avid fantasists are not necessarily empathic. Davis himself acknowledged construct-validity problems with Fantasy in the 1983 paper. Researchers who use only two composite scores, cognitive and affective, frequently drop it.

Personal Distress may not be empathy. Because Personal Distress correlates positively with neuroticism and anxiety and negatively with social competence, some psychometricians argue that it is better understood as a measure of emotional over-arousal than as a component of an empathy construct. If so, the IRI is partly measuring something adjacent to what it claims to measure.

Self-report has inherent limits. The IRI asks people how empathic they are, and answers to that question are vulnerable to self-presentation and to gender-role norms. Sex differences on the IRI are among its most robust findings, and a recurring question is how much of that gap reflects genuine differences in experience and how much reflects differences in willingness to describe oneself as compassionate. Correlations between IRI scores and actual helping behaviour, while real, are modest.

None of these criticisms has displaced the instrument, and Davis's own work anticipated several of them. What they suggest is that the IRI is best treated as a good measure of self-reported dispositional empathy rather than as a complete account of what empathy is — a distinction Davis drew himself when he defined the construct as reactions to observed experience rather than as capacities or outcomes.

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References

  • Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113-126.

Last updated: 2026-10-28

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