Most of us think empathy is either something you have or do not. A new study from the University of Southern California shows that this social glue can be taught through simple emotional rewards.

After just a few minutes of watching a cartoon stranger enjoy small victories, volunteers started to feel happy for the character and even gave up money to keep that happiness going.

Psychologist Yi Zhang of USC Dornsife, who led the project, says the brain learns to link another person’s good mood to its own internal payoff.

Rewards can train empathy faster

The study reports that empathy can grow when positive feelings are consistently paired with personal gains. This finding challenges the idea that empathy only comes from shared experience or moral instruction.

Instead, the brain appears to treat another person like a favorite object whenever their smile predicts a benefit. That habit stays intact even when the benefit disappears.

In previous decades, empathy training focused on perspective taking workshops. The new data suggest that pairing emotion with reward may work faster and reach people who resist verbal lessons.

Cartoons helped people care

Researchers asked 1,500 adults to view short clips of a stick figure hero who sometimes played with a dog and other times fell off a bike. After each scene, a counter on the screen rose or fell, telling viewers they had won or lost cents.

People whose counters rose during the happy scenes later rated the hero’s feelings as more important and even pressed keyboard keys longer to see new happy clips. Their extra effort showed that the emotional link was now a small but real motivational push.

Importantly, the hero had no voice or facial features, so participants could not read expressions or mirror emotions. That design choice helped isolate learning from automatic mimicry.

Smiles taught empathy like Pavlov’s bell

“It’s a social twist on Pavlov’s classic experiment,” said Professor Leon Hackel, the study’s senior author. By swapping food for smiles, the team demonstrated a form of Pavlovian conditioning that applies to mental states rather than bells and steaks.

Earlier work on associative learning in social settings found that humans and animals easily connect gestures and voices with reward, but this project is among the first to show that abstract emotions can serve the same role.

The research opens the door to training compassion without relying on shared background or ideology.

Because the effect survived a delay period and new scenarios, the authors argue that the brain builds a flexible template rather than a narrow stimulus response chain. In practical terms, caring can expand beyond the original situation.

Empathy led to kind actions

In a later task, participants picked digital gift cards for the cartoon hero, knowing exactly which cards the hero liked. Selecting the preferred card sometimes drained their own point balance.

Those who had learned the happiness reward link were more willing to lose points or at least hesitated before being selfish. The behavior matched their self reported feelings, suggesting that empathy and prosocial behavior can spring from the same learning rule.

The finding matters because many real world prosocial acts, from tipping to blood donation, involve small personal costs. Building the reward link could tip the scales toward generosity in those moments.

Cooperation, competition, and classrooms

The findings help explain why empathy thrives in groups where one person’s win lifts everyone. Studies of cooperative learning in schools show that children who share grades and goals also show sharper gains in caring for peers.

Competitive arenas do the opposite, because a rival’s success predicts personal loss, making the empathic pathway harder to condition. Workplace reward systems could unknowingly shape compassion by choosing between winner-takes-all bonuses and team incentives.

Sports teams and military units, which bond players through shared wins and losses, might naturally leverage the same circuit. Recognizing that link could inspire training programs that cultivate empathy alongside skill.

Empathy training can help therapy

“Understanding how people form emotional bonds could help us design AI that responds in more human-like ways,” said Yi Zhang. Engineers could teach chatbots to value user joy by aligning system rewards with human smiles, rather than relying on canned politeness.

Therapists might also use reward-based exercises to help clients with social anxiety practice noticing and valuing other people’s positive emotions. Because the intervention is brief and game like, it could slot into digital mental health tools.

Parents might reinforce caring by celebrating siblings who cheer each other on. Small rewards paired with shared happiness could be stronger than many lectures on kindness.

Real world tests are needed

The experiments ran online with small monetary stakes, so scientists still need to check whether the same pattern appears in face to face settings. They also want to know how long the effect lasts when real time passes instead of computer rounds.

Brain imaging could reveal whether the reward circuits light up in sync with empathic feelings, or if new networks come online. That work may point toward therapies for disorders marked by low empathy, such as psychopathy.

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

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