Altruism and Empathy

Ms. Sana Shaheen

 Altruism refers to a specific form of motivation for one organism, usually

 When we observe another person in need, evidence suggests that there are
two common types of emotional responses: feelings of personal distress and
feelings of empathy.
 Feelings of personal distress include feeling upset, disturbed, troubled,
worried, etc.
 In contrast, feelings of empathy include feeling empathetic, kind, caring, etc.
 These different emotional responses result in different motivational
outcomes. When we experience personal distress, we appear to experience
egoistic motivation to reduce our own distress. When we experience
empathy, we seem to experience altruistic motivation to reduce the other’s
distress.
 If one’s ultimate goal in benefiting another is to increase the other’s
welfare, then the motivation is altruistic.
 If the ultimate goal is to increase one’s own welfare, then the motivation is
egoistic.
 We shall use the term altruism to refer to this specific form of motivation and
the term helping to refer to behavior that benefits another.
Types of Altruism

 Reciprocal Altruism
 Nepotistic Altruism
 Preferential Altruism
 Reciprocal Altruism: is the idea that if we help other people now, they will
return the favours should we need their help in the future. Reciprocal
altruism means that people even may help total strangers, based on the
assumption that doing so is useful because it may lead others to help them
(when help is most needed) in the future. For example, when two students
take notes for each other in classes that they miss or when neighbours care
for each other’s pets while one of them is away.
 Nepotistic Altruism: also known as reproductive altruism, is where you act
altruistically towards people closely related to oneself. The main focus of
nepotistic altruism is the outcome of the act, meaning the motivation is for
the kin to survive. For example, helping your family member.
 Preferential Altruism: is helping an individual at a cost to oneself, although one could
just ignore the person. Basically this type of altruism would be about strangers,
people that have no relationship to the actor. There are no expectations for a
reward. The motivations behind this type of altruism rely on the individual's subjective
motivations, this could be for selfless reasons or they could also be about an
individual's self- drive, to help people and fulfilling an intrinsic goal. For example,
donates blood to someone, volunteer at the homeless shelter.
A Basic Question: Is Altruism part of
Human Nature?
 Biological Reasons: According to evolutionary theory that proposes that
people are more likely to help those who are blood relatives because it will
increase the odds of gene transmission to future generations. The theory
suggests that altruism towards close relatives occurs in order to ensure the
continuation of shared genes. The more closely the individuals are
related, the more likely people are to help.
 Neurological Reasons: The parts of the brain that are most involved in
empathy, altruism, and helping are the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex,
areas that are responsible for emotion and emotion regulation. Altruism
activates reward centers in the brain. Neurobiologists have found that when
engaged in an altruistic act, the pleasure centers of the brain become
active. Neuroscience found that engaging in compassionate actions activates
the areas of the brain associated with the reward-system including the
dopaminergic ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum. The positive
feelings created by compassionate actions then reinforce altruistic behaviors.
 Social Norms: The outcome of reinforcement for and modelling of helping is
the development of social norms of morality, standards of behavior that we
see as appropriate and desirable regarding helping. One norm that we all are
aware of and that we attempt to teach our children is based on the
principles of equity and exchange. The reciprocity norm is a social norm
reminding us that we should follow the principles of reciprocal altruism-if
someone helps us, then we should help that person in the future, and we
should help people now with the expectation that they will help us later if we
need it.
 Cognitive Reasons: While the definition of altruism involves doing for others
without reward, there may still be cognitive incentives that aren't
obvious. We might help others to relieve our own distress or because
being kind to others upholds our view of ourselves as kind, empathetic
people. Other cognitive explanations include:
 Empathy: Researchers suggest that people are more likely to engage in altruistic
behavior when they feel empathy for the person who is in distress, a suggestion
known as the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Researchers have found that children
tend to become more altruistic as their sense of empathy develops.
 Helping Relieve Negative Feelings: Other experts have proposed that altruistic
acts help relieve the negative feelings created by observing someone else in
distress, an idea referred to as the negative-state relief model. Essentially, seeing
another person in trouble causes us to feel upset, distressed, or uncomfortable, so
helping the person in trouble helps reduce these negative feelings.
The Empathy Motive and Empathy-
Altruism Hypothesis
 Empathy is an emotional response to the perceived plight of another person. One view of
empathy is that it involves the ability to match another person's emotions. Instead of
this mimic-like reproduction of another person's emotions, however, empathy may
entail a sense of tenderheartedness toward that other person.
 University of Kansas social psychologist C. Daniel Batson has described this latter
empathy in his 1991 book, The Altruism Question. For Batson, altruism involves
human behaviors that are aimed at promoting another person's well-being. Batson
and colleagues do not deny that some forms of altruism may occur because of egotism,
but their shared view is that, under some circumstances, these egotistical motives cannot
account for the helping (Batson et al., 2002). Indeed, in careful tests of what has come to
be called the empathy-altruism hypothesis (Batson, 1991), findings show that there are
instances in which egotism does not appear to explain such helping behaviors. Moreover,
the evidence also supports the view that having empathy for another leads to a greater
likelihood of helping that other person.
 Considerable evidence supports the idea that feeling empathy for a person in
need leads to increased helping of that person. To observe an empathy-
helping relationship, however, tells us nothing about the nature of the
motivation that underlies this relationship.
 Increasing the other person’s welfare could be an ultimate goal, an
instrumental goal sought as a means to the ultimate goal of gaining one or
more self benefits, or both. That is, the motivation could be altruistic,
egoistic, or both.
 Three general classes of self-benefits can result from helping a person for
whom one feels empathy.
Forms of Egotism-Motivated Altruism

 The helping person gets public praise or even a monetary reward, along with self-
praise for having done that which is good.
 The helping person avoids social or personal punishments for failing to help.
 The helping person may lessen his or her personal distress at seeing another's
trauma.
• The empathy-altruism hypothesis does not deny that these self-benefits of
empathy-induced helping exist. It claims, however, that with regard to the
motivation evoked by empathy, these self-benefits are unintended
consequences of reaching the ultimate goal of reducing the other’s need.
1. Aversive-Arousal Reduction: The most frequently proposed
egoistic explanation of the empathy-helping relationship is
aversive-arousal reduction. According to this explanation,
feeling empathy for someone who is suffering is unpleasant,
and empathically aroused individuals help in order to eliminate
their empathic feelings. Benefiting the person for whom
empathy is felt is simply a means to this self-serving end.
Researchers have tested the aversive-arousal reduction
explanation against the empathy altruism hypothesis by varying
the ease of escape from further exposure to a person in need
without helping. Because empathic arousal is a result of
witnessing the person’s suffering, either terminating this
suffering by helping or terminating exposure to it by escaping
should reduce one’s own aversive arousal.
Escape does not, however, enable one to reach the altruistic goal of relieving the
other’s distress. Therefore, the aversive-arousal explanation predicts
elimination of the empathy-helping relationship when escape is easy; the
empathy-altruism hypothesis does not.
Results of experiments testing these competing predictions have consistently
supported the empathy-altruism hypothesis, not the aversive-arousal reduction
explanation. These results cast serious doubt on this popular egoistic
explanation.
 2. Empathy-Specific Punishment: A second egoistic explanation claims
that people learn through socialization that additional obligation to help, and
so additional shame and guilt for failure to help, is attendant on feeling
empathy for someone in need. As a result, when people feel empathy, they
are faced with impending social or self-censure beyond any general
punishment associated with not helping. They say to themselves, “What will
others think or what will I think of myself, if I don’t help when I feel like
this?” and then they help out of an egoistic desire to avoid these empathy-
specific punishments. Once again, experiments designed to test this
explanation have consistently failed to support it; instead, results have
consistently supported the empathy altruism hypothesis.
3. Empathy-Specific Reward: The third major egoistic explanation claims
that people learn through socialization that special rewards in the form of
praise, honor, and pride are attendant on helping a person for whom they feel
empathy. As a result, when people feel empathy, they think of these rewards
and help out of an egoistic desire to gain them.
Cultivating Altruism

 For clues to how to help someone become more altruistic, we call upon the
very processes of egotism and empathy that we have used to explain altruism.
Egotism-Based Approaches to Enhancing
Altruistic Actions
 In our experiences in working with clients in psychotherapy, we have found
that people often may incorrectly assume that feeling good about themselves
is not part of rendering help. Whatever the historical roots, however, it is
inaccurate to conclude that helping another and feeling good about oneself
are incompatible. Thus, this is one of the first lessons we use in enabling
people to realize that they can help and, because of such actions, have
higher esteem. Furthermore, we have found that people seem to take delight
in learning that it is legitimate to feel good about helping others.
 One way to unleash such positive feelings is to have the person engage in
community volunteer work. Local agencies dealing with children, people
with disabilities, older people who are alone, and hospitals all need
volunteers to render aid. Although this form of helping may begin as voluntary
experiences, we have witnessed instances in which our clients have changed
their professions to involve activities where they support others and get paid
for it. Our more general point, however, is that it feels good to help other
people, and this simple premise has guided some of our efforts at channelling
people into volunteer positions.
Empathy-Based Approaches to Enhancing
Altruistic Actions
 A way to increase peoples' likelihood of helping is to teach them to have
greater empathy for the circumstances of other people.
 How can such empathy be promoted? One simple approach is to have a
person interact more frequently with people who need help. Then, once
the individual truly begins to understand the perspectives and motives of the
people who are being helped, this insight breaks down the propensity to view
interpersonal matters in terms of "us versus them!'
 Another means of enhancing empathy is to point out similarities with another person
that may not have been obvious. These similarities can be as simple as having grown up in
the same part of the country, having done work of the same type, having endured
comparable hardships, and so on. The shared characteristics of people often are much
greater than any of us may realize, and these parallels in life circumstances make people
understand that we all are part of the same "grand journey".
One final approach for promoting empathy involves working with those people
who especially want to see themselves as different from others (see Snyder &
Frornkin, 1980). Uniqueness is something that most people desire to some degree
but, taken to an extreme, makes it very difficult for the person to make contact
and interact with others. Such people must be taught how they do share
characteristics with others and how their illusory specialness needs may be
preventing them from deriving pleasure from interacting with other people
(Lynn & Snyder, 2002).
One personal mini-experiment that you can perform on yourself is to imagine
another person and then list all the things (physical, psychological, etc.) that
you have in common with this person. This exercise, in our experience,
increases the propensity of a person to "walk in the shoes" of another-with
greater empathy the result.
Benefits of Altruism:

 It promotes positive physiological changes in the brain associated with happiness