Altruism

The Difficulty of Assessing Motives

Although the “altruism question” has been debated fiercely by religious, moral, and political philosophers for centuries, Batson and his colleagues were among the first to examine the issue in the controlled world of the psychological laboratory. These experiments, cleverly designed as they are, operate on the basis of a rather simple premise: If people help others for self-oriented reasons, then helping will not occur when such reasons or motives are eliminated. However, if helping is driven by other motives, it will persist in the absence of self-interest. In the laboratory, Batson and his colleagues created a situation in which participants were exposed to a person needing help and a justification for not helping was provided—for example, participants were led to believe that the person in need deserved his or her problems, that helping would be extremely difficult, or that, when asked to help, most other people would decline. One experiment induced empathy for the person in need by asking participants to alter their perspective (for example, participants were told, “Try to imagine how the person feels” or “Put yourself in the victim's shoes”). When participants felt more empathy, they helped others, even in the face of plausible reasons not to extend help. Such results led Batson to propose the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which holds that empathic emotions such as sympathy, compassion, and tenderness evoke a desire to help the person for whom the empathy is felt. Results from dozens of similar experiments have supported this hypothesis.

...