I’m DeDee Ludwig-Palit, a researcher at Inform Evaluation & Research, a board member for the Arizona Evaluation Network, and a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Inform specializes in program evaluation, visitor studies, and educational research for STEM and conservation education institutions. Our experience working with environmental organizations has shown that empathy and compassionate feelings for the environment and wildlife can be an important aspect of promoting pro-conservation behaviors.
In the spring of 2022, Monterey Bay Aquarium opened a new exhibition, Into the Deep: Exploring our Undiscovered Ocean, which explores the deep sea and the animals that live there. Throughout 2022 and 2023, Inform collaborated with the Aquarium on an in-depth study of this exhibition designed to investigate time spent in the exhibition and thoroughness of use, cognitive outcomes, and affective outcomes. Our exploration included understanding the messages visitors were taking away, retention of conservation messaging, and visitors’ empathy for the animals in the exhibit. While much of previous empathy work has focused on more common “charismatic” animals, the Aquarium was particularly interested in whether the exhibition could foster empathy for deep-sea, almost otherworldly, animals that visitors were unlikely to ever have encountered before.
We wanted a clear definition of empathy and utilized Empathy for Animals which describes empathy as “a stimulated emotional state that relies on the ability to perceive, understand, and care about the experiences or perspectives of another person or animal.”
Data collection included both traditional and alternative methods. To investigate empathy-related outcomes, 130 interview participants were shown an image of a deep-sea animal and asked to select words from a list that best matched how they felt about it. Follow-up interviews probed further into those selections. An additional 209 empathy observations were also carried out utilizing a modified version of an instrument from the Measuring Empathy Collaborative Assessment Project, which includes more than 30 expressions of empathy and related emotions that can be observed in visitors.
Lessons Learned
We observed three aspects of empathy:
- Stimulated emotional state: Visitors frequently expressed awe, wonder, and curiosity in response to their exhibition experience. Based on the feelings of awe and wonder the exhibition often evoked, it appears that encountering the “otherness” of the animals in the exhibition may have enabled visitors to connect with deep-sea life.
- Perceiving and understanding: Some visitors provided evidence of “perspective taking,” an important aspect of empathy. Perspective-taking was typically related to threats deep-sea animals face from microplastics.
- Care: Survey and interview data suggested that Into the Deep elicited compassionate empathy (the ability to sense and be motivated to improve the life of another being) in some visitors. In many cases, it was demonstrated as an emotional response to deep-sea life and triggered feelings of care, as visitors frequently discussed how deep-sea life is under threat from plastic pollution.
Overall, the findings suggest that aquarium exhibitions can foster empathy in visitors–even for unusual animals from the deep sea. They provide the field with an important justification for identifying and implementing strategies to elicit those feelings in other environment-focused programs and exhibitions.
After presenting the initial findings, we engaged in a longitudinal study to understand the longer-term impacts of the exhibition using a delayed-post survey and interviews. We found that many visitors maintained empathy for deep-sea animals months after visiting.
Rad Resource
Measurements of empathy can be an impactful measurement when carrying out evaluations of environmental education programs and exhibitions. The Measuring Empathy Collaborative Assessment Project provides an array of best practices, tools, and resources that can be used to measure empathy.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Environmental Program Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our EPE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.