Empathy Equity Construct And Demonstration

Many scholars have studied the Equity Theory deeply and widely after it was advanced by Adams in 1960s. The achievements include Procedural Justice, Distributive Justice, Interactional Justice, Equity Sensitivity and Equity Difference Threshold.The study of self has always been one of the hottest parts of psychology study. Since 1980s, some studies focus on self boundary and it differences in different culture. Through the referring to previous studies, Chinese self-circles theory was advanced and explained in this article The concept of Empathy Equity was advanced by combining the Chinese self-circles and Equity Theory. It was defined as a kind of feeling of equity or inequity caused by cognizing other's equity or inequity experience, and the influences of it resemble the influences of the equity or inequity experienced by oneself (Adams' equity). Then the author formulate the Empathy Equity by analyzing the relationship between the feeling of equity, the position of equity experiencer, reference other and equity maker on equity feeler's self-circles and equity feeler's attribution.The conclusion was made after 110 samples being studied. It proved that the phenomenon of Empathy Equity does exactly exist and the feeling of inequity is even stronger than common equity (Adams' equity) in some circumstance. If other conditions are not changed, closer position of inequity experiencer to inequity feeler's self-circles centre means stronger inequity feeling of the feeler, closer position of reference other means weaker inequity feeling and closer position of inequity maker means weaker inequity feeling. The correlation between inequity feeling and the behavior of 'reduce input', 'attempt to increase outcomes of the inequity experiencer', 'change reference other', 'choose to transfer another part of the organization' and 'leave the organization' is strong, that is, the stronger feeling of inequity, the more possibility of these behaviors.