More evidence that empathy is a source of altruistic motivation.

Abstract

Additional evidence is provided that empathic emotion can evoke altruistic motivation to help. To provide this evidence, we employed Stotland's (1969) technique for manipulating empathy; subjects were exposed to a person in distress and instructed either to observe the victim's reactions (low empathy) or to imagine the victim's feelings (high empathy). As in previous research testing the empathy-altruism hypothesis, this empathy manipulation was crossed with a manipulation of ease of escape without helping (easy vs. difficult) to form a 2X2 design. Results patterned as predicted by the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Subjects in the low-empathy condition helped less when escape was easy than when it was difficult. This pattern suggested that their helping was directed toward the egoistic goal of reducing their own distress. Subjects in the highempathy condition, however, displayed a high rate of helping, even when escape was easy. This pattern suggested that their helping was directed toward the altruistic goal of reducing the distress of the person in need. Finally, analyses of subjects' self-reported emotional response provided additional support for the hypothesis that feeling a predominance of empathy rather than distress on witnessing someone in need can evoke altruistic motivation. Evidence for the empathy-altruism hypothesis continues to mount, Is the motivation to help ever, in any degree, truly altruistic? That is, is a helper's ultimate goal ever to increase the victim's welfare, or is the motivation underlying helping always egoistic, designed to increase the helper's own welfare? This question, carrying as it does implications for one's view of human nature (Hoffman, 1981), was a central question for many 18th and 19th century