Empathy-based helping: is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Behavioral Science

Background:

• Theories of altruism propose selfless helping driven by empathy.
• An alternative egoistic account suggests helping is motivated by a desire to alleviate personal distress.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test whether empathic helping is motivated by selfless concern for others or egoistic relief of personal sadness.
• To differentiate between selfless and egoistic motivations in helping behavior.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted using a paradigm designed to contrast selfless and egoistic helping predictions.
• Empathic orientation, personal sadness, and helping behavior were experimentally manipulated and measured.

Main Results:

• Empathy for a victim increased personal sadness.
• Helping behavior was predicted by levels of personal sadness, not empathy scores, when these were experimentally separated.
• Participants given a placebo drug to "fix" their mood did not help, despite high empathy, suggesting mood relief was the motivator.

Conclusions:

• Results support an egoistic interpretation of helping under conditions of high empathy.
• The desire to relieve personal sadness, rather than selfless concern, appears to motivate helping when empathy is high.