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2 The Empathy‐Altruism Hypothesis
C. Daniel Batson
Think of all the time and energy we spend helping others. In addition to daily courtesies and kindnesses, we send money to aid disaster victims halfway around the world – and to save whales. We stay up all night with a friend who just suffered a broken relationship. We stop to comfort a lost and frightened child until his or her parent appears. Sometimes, the help is truly spectacular – as when Wesley Autrey jumped onto a subway track with the train bearing down in order to save a young man who fell while having a seizure. Or when rescuers in Nazi Europe risked their own lives and the lives of family members to shelter Jews.
Why do we do these things? What motivates such behavior? Is it true that “the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which the dear love of our own selves always proposes to be the gainer some way or other” (La Rochefoucauld, 1691, Maxim 82)? Or are we also capable of caring for others for their sakes, not just ours? That is, is altruism within the human motivational repertoire?
The significance of the latter possibility depends on what you think altruism is. If, like most behavioral and social scientists, you think of it as personally costly helping – or as helping to gain self‐administered rewards (e.g., a warm glow or avoidance of guilt) rather than to gain material and social rewards – the existence of altruism can’t be doubted. But to say we’re capable of such altruism tells us nothing we didn’t already know. These conceptions trivialize the centuries old egoism–altruism debate. In that debate, altruism refers to a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare; egoism refers to a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing our own welfare. The dominant view in Western thought has long been that our motivation is always exclusively egoistic – as La Rochefoucauld said.
Empathy‐Altruism Hypothesis
The empathy‐altruism hypothesis takes the motivational conceptions of altruism and egoism seriously. And, importantly, it challenges the dominant exclusive egoism view by proposing that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation. To understand this deceptively simple hypothesis, we need to be clear about what is meant both by empathic concern and by altruistic motivation.
Empathic concern
In the empathy‐altruism hypothesis, empathic concern refers to other‐oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need. This other‐oriented emotion has been called by several names other than empathic concern, including compassion, tenderness, sympathy, and pity. The label applied isn’t crucial. What’s crucial is that the emotion involves feeling for the other, not feeling as the other feels. (Feeling as is a currently popular conception of empathy employed by, for example, Paul Bloom [2016]; Nancy Eisenberg [Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987], and Tania Singer [De Vignemont & Singer, 2006].) Empathic concern also is not a combination of other‐oriented emotion and motivation. Although many people use the terms compassion and sympathy to refer to the emotional state I am calling empathic concern, there are some scholars who use one or both of these terms to refer to other‐oriented motivation as well as to emotion, making the terms more equivalent to the whole empathy‐altruism hypothesis (see, for example, Goetz, Keltner, & Simon‐Thomas, 2010; Wispé, 1986). For me, empathic concern produces motivation but is not itself a motivational state. I think the question of the nature of the motivation produced by empathic concern – egoistic or altruistic – should be left open for empirical investigation, not finessed by definitional decree.
To further clarify what is meant by empathic concern, let me add four quick points:
1 To say that the other‐oriented emotion is “congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need,” refers to a congruence of valence. The emotion’s valence is negative because the perceived welfare of a person in need is negative. But this congruence doesn’t mean that the empathizer and the person in need are feeling the same negative emotion. It would be congruent, for example, to feel sad or sorry for someone who’s upset and afraid. Or to feel compassion for the unconscious victim of a mugging (as did the Good Samaritan: Luke 10:33), even though an unconscious victim is feeling nothing at all.
2 Although the term empathy is broad enough to include situations in which there is no perceived need – such as when we feel empathic joy at a friend’s good fortune (Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1989; Stotland, 1969) – not all empathic emotion is hypothesized to produce altruistic motivation. The empathy‐altruism hypothesis refers specifically to empathic concern felt when another is perceived to be in need, because without a perceived need, there’s no reason to increase the other’s welfare.
3 Empathic concern isn’t a single, discrete emotion but includes a whole constellation of emotions. It includes feelings that people report as sympathy, compassion, softheartedness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern, grief, and more.
4 Although feelings of sympathy and compassion are inherently other‐oriented, we can feel sorrow, distress, and concern that is self‐oriented – as when something bad happens directly to us. Both other‐oriented and self‐oriented versions of these emotions may be described as feeling sorry or sad, upset or distressed, concerned or grieved. This breadth of usage invites confusion. The relevant psychological distinction doesn’t lie in the emotional label used – sad, distressed, concerned – but in whose welfare is the focus of the emotion. Are we feeling sad, distressed, concerned for the other? Or are we feeling this way as a result of what has befallen us (including, perhaps, the experience of seeing the other suffer)?
In recent years, the term empathy has been applied to a range of psychological phenomena in addition to the other‐oriented emotion just described (see Batson, 2009, for a partial review). Here’s a quick list:
Knowing another’s thoughts and feelings.
Adopting the posture or matching the neural response of another.
Coming to feel as another feels.
Feeling personal distress at witnessing another’s suffering.
Imagining how you would think and feel in another’s place.
Imagining how another thinks and feels.
A general disposition (trait) to feel for others.
Each of these phenomena is distinct from empathic concern. The empathy‐altruism hypothesis makes no claim that any of them produces altruistic motivation except if and when it evokes empathic concern. Further, the hypothesis makes no claim that any of them is either necessary or sufficient to produce empathic concern.
Altruistic motivation
As said earlier, altruism in the egoism–altruism debate refers to a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare. It’s juxtaposed to egoism, defined as a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing our own welfare. As these definitions highlight, altruism and egoism have much in common. Each refers to a motivational state; each is concerned with the ultimate goal of that motivational state; and, for each, the ultimate goal is to increase someone’s welfare. These common features provide the context for focusing on the crucial difference: