Abstract

A substantial body of evidence collected by Batson and his associates has advanced the idea that pure (i.e., selfless) altruism occurs under conditions of empathy for a needy other. An egoistic alternative account of this evidence was proposed and tested in our work. We hypothesized that an observer's heightened empathy for a sufferer brings with it increased personal sadness in the observer and that it is the egoistic desire to relieve the sadness, rather than the selfless desire to relieve the sufferer, that motivates helping. Two experiments contrasted predictions from the selfless and egoistic alternatives in the paradigm typically used by Batson and his associates. In the first, an emphatic orientation to a victim increased personal sadness, as expected. Furthermore, when sadness and empathic emotion were separated experimentally, helping was predicted by the levels of sadness subjects were experiencing but not by their empathy scores. In the second experiment, enhanced sadness was again associated with empathy for a victim. However, subjects who were led to perceive that their moods could not be altered through helping (because of the temporary action of a "mood-fixing" placebo drug) were not helpful, despite high levels of empathic emotion. The results were interpreted as providing support for an egoistically based interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy.

Keywords

PsychologyEmpathySocial psychologyProsocial behavior

MeSH Terms

AltruismEmpathyFemaleHelping BehaviorHumansMotivationSetPsychology

Related Publications

Publication Info

Year
1987
Type
article
Volume
52
Issue
4
Pages
749-758
Citations
638
Access
Closed

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Cite This

Robert B. Cialdini, Mark Schaller, Donald Houlihan et al. (1987). Empathy-based helping: Is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 52 (4) , 749-758. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.4.749

Identifiers

DOI
10.1037/0022-3514.52.4.749
PMID
3572736

Data Quality

Data completeness: 81%