Empathy for the Provider (EMPP)

1. Abstract

The Empathy for the Provider (EMPP) scale is a psychometric instrument developed by John P. Costello and Rebecca Walker Reczek (2020) to assess consumer-to-worker empathy within decentralized service environments, most notably peer-to-peer and platform-mediated market systems (commonly conceptualized as the sharing economy or gig economy). Comprising five sentence-completion items, the instrument quantifies the extent to which a consumer engages in cognitive perspective-taking and affective concern toward an individual service provider (e.g., an independent rideshare driver, short-term rental host, or on-demand delivery courier). Rather than measuring generalized dispositional empathy, the EMPP assesses situational, target-specific empathy generated during or in anticipation of a commercial transaction.

The scale employs an adaptable sentence-completion stem identifying the focal provider type (e.g., “When thinking about [rideshare drivers / rental hosts]…”), followed by five dimensional completions evaluated along a 7-point Likert response scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”). Psychometrically, the EMPP manifests a robust unidimensional factor structure accounting for high variance across independent samples, demonstrating excellent internal consistency reliability (typically exhibiting Cronbach’s α coefficients exceeding .90) and exceptional convergent, discriminant, and predictive validities. Methodologically, the scale bridges consumer behavior, organizational psychology, and economic sociology by elucidating how market framing (e.g., provider-centric vs. platform-centric communications) activates consumer empathy, which subsequently drives downstream prosocial behaviors such as tipping, voluntary compliance, positive evaluations, and advocacy for worker welfare.

2. Keywords

Empathy for the Provider, EMPP, perspective-taking, sharing economy, consumer empathy, gig economy, service interactions, pro-social behavior, consumer behavior, John P. Costello, Rebecca Walker Reczek, psychometrics.

3. Authors

The Empathy for the Provider scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by scholars in marketing and consumer psychology:

• John P. Costello, Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. His research examines consumer psychology, focusing on how individuals navigate evolving market technologies, automated systems, and interpersonal relationships within modern business exchanges.
• Rebecca Walker Reczek, Ph.D.: The Berry Chair of New Technologies in Marketing and Professor of Marketing at the Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. Her research explores consumer judgment, ethical decision-making, consumer inferences, and psychological responses to marketplace sustainability and technology.

Institutional contact and academic correspondence regarding the empirical development of the scale may be directed through the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University or the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.

4. Purpose

The rapid proliferation of platform-mediated business models—such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Upwork, and Instacart—fundamentally transformed the traditional bilateral consumer-firm dyad into an asymmetrical triadic configuration involving the platform corporation, the end consumer, and the frontline micro-entrepreneur or independent gig worker. In standard corporate retail environments, consumers often depersonalize frontline workers or perceive them merely as physical embodiments of the corporate entity. However, in the sharing economy, service quality, personal safety, physical labor, and economic livelihood fall predominantly on individual independent contractors who operate without the conventional employment benefits and institutional protections typical of corporate staff.

Despite this shift, early empirical observations demonstrated that consumers frequently treat platform transactions with extreme cognitive detachment. Consumers often commodify the human worker, demanding frictionless service and assigning harsh punitive evaluations for minor service deviations beyond the worker’s control. The primary purpose of the Empathy for the Provider (EMPP) scale is to capture the psychological mechanism through which consumers recognize, process, and emotionally respond to the lived reality of these decentralized workers. Costello and Reczek (2020) engineered this measure to determine how marketing communications—specifically framing platform operations around human service providers rather than technological efficiency or corporate branding—can trigger psychological humanization and activate interpersonal empathy.

Beyond theoretical inquiries in marketing literature, the EMPP serves critical applications across experimental consumer psychology, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, and public policy:

• Marketing Communications and Humanizing Strategy: Measuring how subtle shifts in advertising copy, interface design, and algorithmic nudges shift consumer mindsets from algorithmic entitlement to interpersonal perspective-taking.
• Prosocial Workplace Behaviors: Predicting downstream ethical consumer decisions, including tipping generosity, willingness to accommodate worker schedule adjustments, forgiveness of service failures caused by external factors (e.g., inclement weather or traffic congestion), and overall user rating fairness.
• Labor Rights and Platform Policy: Assessing how public policy advocacy or labor union communication campaigns alter consumer perceptions regarding the human capital behind digital apps, stimulating consumer advocacy for improved gig worker compensation and safety.

5. Psychological Construct

Empathy has historically been conceptualized in social psychology as a multi-component construct consisting of distinct cognitive and affective processes (Davis, 1983). The Empathy for the Provider construct represents a specialized, contextually bound instantiation of this interpersonal phenomenon. Rather than treating empathy as an immutable personality trait (such as trait empathy measured via the Interpersonal Reactivity Index), the EMPP conceptualizes empathy as a dynamic, psychologically malleable cognitive-affective state activated toward a specific functional group: independent service providers.

The construct encapsulates three tightly interrelated psychological dimensions synthesized into a single, cohesive measurement instrument:

1. Active Cognitive Perspective-Taking

The cognitive dimension of provider empathy involves deliberate mental simulation, wherein the consumer actively steps outside their immediate consumer persona to visualize the commercial encounter from the provider’s viewpoint. This includes reflecting on what it is like to occupy the provider’s position, taking note of structural constraints such as long driving hours, physical exhaustion, emotional labor, customer incivility, and economic precarity. The consumer does not merely process the transaction as an outcome-oriented utility exchange; they construct a mental model of the human agent performing the task.

2. Recognition of Provider Subjectivity and Individuality

A crucial barrier to empathy in modern commerce is psychological depersonalization or instrumental objectification, where service personnel are viewed merely as automated tools designed to fulfill consumer desires. The EMPP measures the degree to which a consumer actively perceives the provider as an individual characterized by a unique personality, authentic emotional vulnerabilities, goals, and internal psychological states. This facet counteracts the psychological distancing often induced by digital application interfaces that present service providers as anonymous icons on a GPS map or digital listing.

3. Impact Awareness and Welfare Contemplation

The final core element of the construct entails contemplation of interpersonal impact: the recognition that consumer behaviors, demands, words, and evaluative decisions directly influence the health, livelihood, and emotional wellbeing of the provider. Consumers exhibiting high provider empathy recognize that a low rating or a rude interaction does not vanish into an abstract corporate ledger, but rather inflicts immediate psychological and financial damage on a fellow human being. This dimension connects cognitive appraisal to affective concern, creating a potent psychological deterrent against consumer mistreatment and a catalyst for prosocial support.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundations of the Empathy for the Provider scale draw upon decades of scholarship in social psychology, consumer behavior, and humanistic sociology, primarily integrating Batson’s Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis, Mark Davis’s multidimensional model of empathy, and theories of mind perception and psychological dehumanization.

Batson’s Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

Daniel Batson’s foundational work posits that observing another individual in need, or recognizing their vulnerability, induces an other-oriented emotional state characterized by sympathy, compassion, and tenderness. This emotional state evokes an altruistic motivation to enhance the other person’s welfare, wherein the primary goal is not personal egoistic distress reduction, but the authentic benefit of the target individual (Batson, 1991). Costello and Reczek (2020) anchor the EMPP in this paradigm by proposing that when marketing communications spotlight the individual service provider (as opposed to the platform brand), the consumer shifts attention to the human worker’s vulnerability and effort. This cognitive perspective-taking evokes empathetic concern, which systematically activates downstream altruistic behaviors—such as paying higher tips, accepting higher platform surcharges, or engaging in word-of-mouth advocacy on behalf of workers.

Mind Perception and De-objectification

The scale is further grounded in theories of mind perception (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007). According to this framework, entities are perceived along two distinct psychological axes: agency (the capacity for intentionality, planning, and action) and experience (the capacity to experience sensations, emotions, pain, and joy). In digital platform markets, consumers readily grant agency to algorithms and workers (e.g., expecting a driver to navigate quickly), but frequently deny them experience, effectively commodifying the human provider into an instrument of utility. The EMPP operationalizes the restoration of experience perception, measuring how interventions prompt consumers to perceive the service provider as fully conscious of emotional suffering, physical strain, and personal pride.

Target-Specific vs. Trait Empathy Dynamics

Methodologically, the theoretical framework differentiates between static trait empathy and target-directed situational empathy. While trait empathy remains a stable individual difference, situational empathy is highly contingent upon framing, contextual salience, and social categorization. By developing the EMPP as a target-flexible instrument, Costello and Reczek established a theoretical model demonstrating that consumer empathy is not solely determined by whether a buyer is intrinsically compassionate; rather, empathy can be systematically amplified or suppressed through strategic structural and communication interventions.

7. Validity

The psychometric integrity of the Empathy for the Provider scale was rigorously established through multiple empirical experiments involving thousands of participants across various sharing economy verticals (e.g., ridesharing, peer-to-peer home rentals, freelance labor). Costello and Reczek (2020) demonstrated exceptional construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was validated by confirming that the scale dynamically responds to experimental manipulations designed to alter psychological distance. In controlled laboratory and online experiments, participants exposed to “provider-focused” marketing communications (which highlight the identity, agency, and presence of independent workers) reported significantly higher scores on the EMPP scale compared to those exposed to “platform-focused” communications (which emphasize the platform’s proprietary technology, convenience, or network scale). The scale consistently converged with theoretically aligned constructs, displaying strong positive correlations with general other-oriented concern, perceived common humanity, and emotional connection to frontline service workers.

Discriminant Validity

To establish that the EMPP does not merely mirror generalized positive sentiment, brand admiration, or omnibus empathy, the authors conducted thorough discriminant validity analyses:

• Distinction from Trait Empathy: Controlling for baseline trait perspective-taking and empathetic concern (using the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index), the EMPP accounted for unique, substantial incremental variance in consumer decision-making.
• Distinction from Platform Attitudes: The EMPP was subjected to factor analyses alongside measures of overall platform brand attitude, perceived service convenience, and platform trust. In all cases, average variance extracted (AVE) estimates exceeded shared variance estimates with related latent constructs, confirming that empathy directed toward human providers is conceptually and statistically distinct from favorable attitudes toward the corporate platform.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was demonstrated through mediation analyses across multiple field and lab studies. The EMPP successfully mediated the causal link between provider-focused communication framing and tangible downstream prosocial actions. Specific empirical findings include:

• Increased Financial Giving: Higher EMPP scores directly predicted greater tipping percentages and a higher probability of voluntary monetary gratuity following service completion.
• Enhanced Forgiveness: When exposed to an identical simulated service delay, consumers scoring higher on the EMPP exhibited higher tolerance, lower negative emotional outbursts, and significantly reduced intentions to issue punitive one-star ratings.
• Brand Advocacy and Choice: Elevated EMPP scores translated into higher purchase intentions and willingness to recommend platforms that visibly support and humanize their underlying service providers.

8. Reliability

The Empathy for the Provider scale demonstrates exceptional psychometric reliability across diverse demographic strata, platform sectors, and research designs. Costello and Reczek (2020) reported uniform, robust internal consistency reliability across all operational tests:

• Across multiple large-scale studies conducted via Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic, and university behavioral laboratories, Cronbach’s alpha (α) values consistently ranged between .90 and .95, comfortably exceeding the established academic threshold of .80 recommended for basic and applied psychometric research.
• Composite reliability (CR) metrics calculated via structural equation modeling consistently matched or exceeded .91, establishing exceptional internal coherence among all five indicators.
• Corrected item-total correlations across the five items remained high (routinely ranging from .76 to .89), confirming that each sentence completion contributes substantially and uniquely to the central latent construct without introducing extraneous semantic noise.
• The standard error of measurement (SEM) remained remarkably small across the scale continuum, demonstrating that the instrument possesses high measurement precision in both low-empathy and high-empathy conditions.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent structural properties of the EMPP were rigorously examined via both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse experimental datasets.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and maximum likelihood factor analyses revealed an unambiguous single-factor solution. Scree plot analyses demonstrated an acute point of inflection immediately following the first eigenvalue, with only the primary factor recording an eigenvalue well above 1.0 (typically accounting for 75% to 83% of the total variance across items). Furthermore, all five items exhibited extraordinarily strong factor loadings on this single construct, with standardized loadings universally surpassing .80 and frequently approaching .92. No secondary cross-loadings emerged, confirming the conceptual parsimony of the unidimensional structure.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses using covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) verified the fit of the hypothesized unidimensional model. Standardized model fit indices met or surpassed conventional thresholds for superior structural fit:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .98
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .97
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): < .06 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .02 to .08)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): < .03

These robust factor loadings and model fit statistics verify that the five items seamlessly capture a cohesive psychological state, mitigating potential concerns regarding multicollinearity or dimensional fragmentation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration guidelines, and scoring procedures for the EMPP are organized as follows:

• Instrument Name: Empathy for the Provider (EMPP)
• Authors: John P. Costello and Rebecca Walker Reczek (2020)
• Format: Self-report psychometric rating instrument using a flexible sentence-completion stem.
• Number of Items: 5 items.
• Item Architecture: A standardized prompt identifies the target provider category (e.g., rideshare driver, home rental host, freelance courier), followed by five grammatically integrated completions.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree).
• Scoring Procedure: All five items are positively keyed (no reverse-coded items). An overall Empathy for the Provider score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the five responses. Higher composite scores represent elevated levels of consumer perspective-taking and affective concern toward the focal provider.
• Administration Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Empathy for the Provider scale was formally introduced to the scientific literature in 2020 in the Journal of Marketing, published by the American Marketing Association (AMA). The scale is copyright-protected under standard academic publishing agreements. However, consistent with normative academic conventions, the instrument may be utilized free of charge by academic researchers, educators, and university students for non-commercial scholarly research, thesis dissertations, and scientific replication studies, provided appropriate bibliographic attribution is given to Costello and Reczek (2020).

Commercial enterprises, private market research agencies, corporate consultants, and platform firms intending to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic testing, proprietary software applications, or revenue-generating activities must obtain formal permission and licensing authorization from the American Marketing Association or the original authors prior to implementation.

12. References

• Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-97726-000
• Costello, J. P., & Reczek, R. W. (2020). Providers versus platforms: Marketing communications in the sharing economy. Journal of Marketing, 84(6), 22–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242920925514
• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619–619. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1134475

13. Items of the Scale