Child Development, March/April 2001, Volume 72, Number 2, Pages 518–534 Brazilian Adolescents’ Prosocial Moral Judgment and Behavior: Relations to Sympathy, Perspective Taking, Gender-Role Orientation, and Demographic Characteristics Nancy Eisenberg, Qing Zhou, and Silvia Koller The goal of this study was to examine demographic and individual difference variables that predict level of prosocial moral judgment and self-reported prosocial behavior and to test mediating or moderating relations among predictors. The relations of prosocial moral reasoning and self-reported prosocial behavior to perspec- tive taking, sympathy, age, sociometric status, and gender-role orientation were examined with a sample of 149 Brazilian adolescents who completed a series of questionnaire measures. Prosocial moral judgment was ex- pected to be predicted by both sympathy and perspective taking, whereas sympathy or prosocial moral judg- ment was expected to mediate the relations of femininity and perspective taking to prosocial behavior. Self- reported perspective taking and sympathy interacted when predicting prosocial moral judgment; adolescents who were high in either sympathy or perspective taking (or both) scored high in prosocial moral reasoning. A feminine orientation predicted sympathy and perspective taking, perspective taking predicted prosocial moral reasoning and sympathy, and sympathy had both direct and indirect paths (through moral judgment) to prosocial behavior. The findings generally were consistent with the contention that both the tendency to take others’ perspectives and to sympathize are related to level of prosocial moral reasoning, which in turn moti- vates prosocial behavior. Moreover, patterns of correlations among variables were similar to those found in the United States. INTRODUCTION To understand the development of altruistic prosocial behavior (voluntary prosocial behavior motivated by the desire to benefit another rather than by social or economic rewards), it is important to examine cogni- tions and emotion related to, and potentially underly- ing, prosocial actions. Cognitive developmental theo- rists have claimed that cognition and rationality are central to morality and that the capabilities for com- plex perspective taking (cognitively taking the per- spective of another) and for understanding abstract concepts are associated with, and underlie, advances in moral reasoning and in quality of prosocial behav- ior (Bar-Tal, 1982; Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieber- man, 1983; Eisenberg, 1986; Underwood, & Moore, 1982). Kohlberg (1969, 1986) further hypothesized that there is a correlation between maturity of the affective and cognitive aspects of morality, and that af- fect plays a role in both perspective taking and moral motivation. It is not clear if he believed that sympa- thy, independent of cognitive perspective taking, pre- dicts level of moral judgment, because he viewed both cognitive perspective taking and sympathy as aspects of perspective taking. Kohlberg did not seem to believe that emotion had a causal influence on moral judgment: In his view (Kohlberg, 1986, p. 499), “moral judgments typically are accompanied by moral emotions, but emotions themselves do not present a sufficient condition for an act to be justified, which re- quires a moral reason. . . .” Other theorists have differentiated between cogni- tive perspective taking, in which individuals display cognitive understanding of others’ internal states and cognitions, on the one hand, and empathy (an emo- tional reaction elicited by and congruent with an- other’s state) or sympathy (concern for others based on the apprehension or comprehension of another’s state) on the other (Davis, 1983; Eisenberg, 1986; Fesh- bach, 1978; Hoffman, 1982; Underwood & Moore, 1982). Empathy is viewed as one cause of sympathy, although the two constructs often have not been dif- ferentiated in empirical work. Empirical work sup- ports the differentiation between sympathy and per- spective taking (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1994; Feshbach, 1978; Okun, Shepard, & Eisenberg, 2000), although engaging in perspective taking may contribute to sympathy (Batson, 1991; Hoffman, 1982; Underwood & Moore, 1982). In addition, numerous investigators have argued that sympathy is among the most impor- tant motivators of other-oriented moral responding— even at a young age when moral reasoning is primitive—and can influence individuals’ moral rea- soning rather than primarily vice versa (Batson, 1991; © 2001 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2001/7202-0013