Koleva found that avoidant attachme

Koleva found that avoidant attachment was associated with higher utilitarian judgment and that this effect was mediated by lower trait levels of empathy concern. One purpose of the present paper was to unpack this association by asking toward whom do avoidant attached individuals lack empathy ? Avoidant attached people are deeply uncomfortable with having others rely on them: being asked to care for another person threatens avoidant attached individuals' strong need for independence and autonomy. As a result, avoidant attached individuals are relatively unwilling to provide comfort and support to their romantic partners, particularly when their partners are in a state of distress. We suggest that this tendency applies beyond romantic contexts; encountering any individual in distress is a threatening situation for avoidant individuals. The ‘victim’ in a utilitarian dilemma represents a particularly vivid case of an individual in distress. Thus, we predict that, due to their discomfort with caregiving, people who are high in avoidance will display less empathy for the victim than will people who are low in avoidance. Similar effects have been documented for participants who were high in Machiavellianism and psychopathy. However, because groups are more abstract targets than individuals and groups generally elicit less empathy than do individuals , the difference between high and low avoidant participants will be less evident for group targets than for individual targets. Taken together, we predict that because high avoidant display less empathy than low avoidant for the victim, but similar levels of empathy for the group, high avoidant will show a greater preference than low avoidant for the option that favors the group over the victim.