magazine issue 6 2008 / Issue 7

Altruism: Myth or Reality?

• written by Dan Batson & Nadia Ahmad
• edited by Hans IJzerman

Empathic Concern: A Possible Source of Altruistic Motivation

To be sure, Western thought has had advocates of altruism, including such prominent figures as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin. What do these advocates think produces altruistic motivation? In both earlier philosophical writing and more recent psychological work, the most frequently mentioned possible source of altruism is an other-oriented emotional reaction to seeing another person in need. This reaction has been called by many names, including sympathy, pity, compassion, soft-heartedness, and tenderness. We call it empathic concern. It is other-oriented in that it involves feeling for, not feeling as, the other. (Some researchers, such as Eisenberg, 2000, use empathy to refer to feeling as the other feels; we do not.) The proposal that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation to relieve the empathy-inducing need has been called theempathy- altruism hypothesis (Batson, 1991). 

There are three conspicuous self-benefits of empathy-induced helping, producing three egoistic alternatives to the empathy-altruism hypothesis: aversive- arousal reduction, punishment avoidance, and reward gain. Advocates of the empathy-altruism hypothesis do not deny that relieving the empathy-inducing need is likely to enable the helper to reduce aversive arousal, avoid punishments, and gain rewards. However, they claim that these self-benefits are not the ultimate goal of empathy-induced helping, only unintended consequences. Advocates of the egoistic alternatives disagree. They claim that one or more of these self-benefits is the ultimate goal of the motivation to help produced by empathy.

The (Psycho)Logical Puzzle: Inferring a Person’s Ultimate Goal

If empathy-induced helping benefits both the person in need and the helper, how are we to know which is the ultimate goal? This puzzle has led many scientists to give up on the question of the existence of altruism, concluding that it cannot be answered empirically. Their surrender seems premature. Often, we can make informed judgments about people’s ultimate goals. We can tell whether a student is really interested or only seeking a better grade (What happens to the student’s interest after the grades are turned in?), why a friend chose one job over another, and whether politicians mean what they say or are only after votes. And we can tell why someone does us a favor or is kind.