Is Empathy a “Double-Edged Sword”? How Empathy with Nature Shapes Tourist Well-Being in Wildlife Tourism

Empathy is regarded as a key affective driver of individual well-being. In the context of a performance-oriented, hyper-mobile society, the target of empathetic concern has shifted “from humans to nature,” and non-human life is increasingly treated as a new anchoring point onto which emotions are projected and well-being restored. Extant literature, however, usually reduces empathy to a unidimensional emotional amplifier, overlooking the positive–negative bipolarity inherent in empathic responses and the differentiated effects this polarity exerts on well-being. Yet, the gain-and-loss pathways through which empathy with nature influences tourist well-being, together with their boundary conditions, remain unexplored. Adopting an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, the study deconstructs the mechanism through which empathy with nature affects tourist well-being by means of in-depth interviews and grounded-theory analysis. Three follow-up experiments corroborate the qualitative findings. Results reveal that empathy with nature in wildlife tourism bifurcates into positive and negative strands, exerting asymmetric impacts on tourists’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Restorative experience operates as a vicarious mechanism linking empathy with nature to well-being outcomes. Furthermore, wildlife anthropomorphism asymmetrically moderates these affective pathways—amplifying the harm of negative empathy on hedonic well-being and restoration—while leaving eudaimonic well-being unaffected. Based on mainland Chinese participants in scenario-based zoo encounters, these findings offer an initial, culturally situated account of how empathy with nature shapes tourist well-being in wildlife tourism.