The popular 1990s television show Friends had an episode in which the good-hearted Phoebe and her struggling actor friend Joey debate whether it is possible to engage in truly altruistic behavior (Curtis & Jensen, 1998). Phoebe claims that she constantly acts for the benefit of others. But when Joey catches Phoebe admitting that it makes her feel good to put smiles on other people’s faces, it highlights a seemingly selfish side to Phoebe’s benevolence. If helping makes us feel good or enhances our self-esteem, we could argue that it benefits us as well as the recipient of the help. Is Joey right? Recall the distinction we made earlier between egoistic and altruistic motivations for helping. Is every act of helping inherently egoistic in some way? Or is true altruism possible? Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on sitcoms to answer this question. Researchers have developed theories and carried out studies to try to differentiate selfish from selfless acts of helping.

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Helping others can bring material benefits. Strong reciprocity norms all but guarantee that giving a little help to others might mean that you can count on them for help down the road. A social exchange theory approach to helping focuses on such egoistic motivations for helping. It maintains that people provide help to someone else when the benefits of helping and the costs of not helping (either to oneself or the other person) outweigh the potential costs of helping and the benefits of not helping (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). It may sound like the kind of theory an accountant would dream up, but it is not so difficult to imagine carrying out this kind of mental calculation in some situations. Imagine that you are driving down the highway and see a car get a flat tire and pull off the road. Would you stop to help? Sure, you might be able to help the stranded motorist change his tire (a clear benefit to helping), but if you don’t stop, he will probably just call a tow truck (a rather low cost to not helping). You might feel good about yourself for helping (another benefit), but you could also end up getting pretty greasy and grimy on the side of the road (a clear cost). According to social exchange theory, the decision to help is determined by some quick mental calculations involving consideration of such benefits and costs.

On the other side of the scale are the possible benefits of helping. Obviously the person in need stands to benefit from what you actually do. But there are other, less tangible benefits to helping. When the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, he included these words of wisdom in his acceptance speech: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” Research backs up these words. People who generally feel compassion for others also feel better about themselves (Crocker et al., 2010). When people help others for intrinsic reasons, that is, reasons that align with their core values (see the discussion of self-determination theory in chapter 6), both they and the recipients of their help feel a boost to their well-being (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). People even report feeling happier after spending money on others than spending the same amount on themselves (Dunn et al., 2008). We are particularly happy when we help someone we feel close to (Aknin et al., 2011). These are exactly the kinds of benefits that Phoebe derives from helping other people, but the question remains: Does that make her selfless acts actually selfish?

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According to Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism model (Batson et al., 1981), people might very well provide help to others to get certain psychological payoffs. But this rational approach to helping applies only to situations in which people feel no real connection to another person. When your next-door neighbor is stressed out over moving, you might pitch in and pack a few boxes because you have the afternoon free and you know you would feel guilty if you didn’t. But you might not skip your favorite class or switch a shift at work to load her things onto a moving van—unless, that is, you feel a true sense of empathy for her situation. When a person empathizes with another person who is suffering or in need of help, he or she takes the perspective of that person and may even vicariously experience the pain, confusion, and other negative states that person might be feeling. If your neighbor is moving out because of a difficult breakup, the type you’ve experienced yourself, you easily might be able to imagine what she is going through and even feel her sadness. If this is the case, your motivation for stuffing dishes into boxes of packing peanuts might be to reduce her sense of suffering. Thus, Batson has argued that the road to true altruism is paved with empathy. More precisely, the capacity for empathy allows people to understand someone else’s distress, and when they empathize with another’s plight, they offer to lend a hand regardless of their selfish interests.

Is this true? Research shows that empathy can be an emotionally powerful experience. When people vicariously feel another person’s emotion, their brains show activation in the same areas that are activated when they themselves feel the same emotion (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006; Preston & de Waal, 2002). What’s more, studies show strong correlations between empathy and helping. For example, people are particularly likely to help others whom they feel similar to and like. These are also the people with whom they find it easiest to empathize (Batson et al., 2007; Coke et al., 1978). Also, do you remember how exposure to prosocial media, such as helping-oriented video games, can promote prosocial behavior? Follow-up research points to empathy as the key factor explaining this effect (Prot et al., 2013). The more adolescents and young adults engaged with prosocial movies, TV shows, and video games, the more empathy they felt for others and, as a result, the more likely they were to help others. Indeed, this finding held true for men and women of all ages and across seven different countries.

Thus, empathy is a powerful spur to prosocial behavior. But remember that the empathy-altruism model makes a stronger claim: that empathy will encourage helping even when the costs to the helper are high. To test this, Batson and colleagues designed a series of studies testing whether people who felt empathy for another person in need would be equally likely to help regardless of the costs of helping. The researchers reasoned that in situations where it is easy not to help, but people help anyway, they help for the good of the other person, not simply to relieve their own discomfort or guilt regarding the other person’s plight.

One study examined whether similarity between the self and someone in need leads to feelings of empathy and, consequently, more helping, regardless of the costs of helping (Batson et al., 1981). Imagine you are a participant in this study. You arrive at a laboratory along with another participant named Elaine. After completing an initial preference survey, you learn that the two of you either share the same tastes in magazines and other preferences or have very different tastes. Elaine is randomly assigned to complete a performance task under stressful circumstances; you are assigned to observe and form an impression of her either during the entire study or only during her first set of trials. It sounds pretty straightforward. But the stress that Elaine is exposed to consists of repeated mild but painful electric shocks. After her first round of shocks, Elaine is obviously anxious and explains that she is unusually fearful of electricity. The experimenter isn’t sure what to do but after giving it some thought turns to you and suggests that perhaps you could switch places with Elaine. Would you volunteer? Would it matter whether you feel similar to or dissimilar to Elaine? Would it matter if you were not going to have to watch her take any more shocks or if the study procedure called for you to observe a second round of trials?

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Look at the two bars on the left of FIGURE 13.1. When people didn’t feel especially similar to Elaine and so were not likely to feel empathy for her, 64% volunteered to trade places with her if they would otherwise have to watch her endure another set of shocks. However, if they didn’t have to watch her take any more shocks, it was easy for them simply to leave the study, and in fact only 18% stayed to help. In the absence of empathy, these participants relied on a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to help, and they determined that by not helping and simply removing themselves from the situation, they wouldn’t suffer costs. But now look at the two bars on the right. When participants were made to feel similar to Elaine, a situation we know can increase empathy, 80 to 90% of participants stayed and took her place regardless of whether they had an easy means to escape. This is one of many experiments in which Batson and colleagues have demonstrated that feelings of empathy lead to helping even when the cost of not helping is low—that is, even when it would be easy simply to ignore the person in need (Batson, 2011).

Feeling empathy for someone in need is an important precursor to providing help, and as we just saw, it will lead people to step up even at some cost to themselves. But sometimes, people might perceive the costs as being too high. In these cases, people will sometimes choose to avoid experiencing empathy in the first place. For example, in one study, participants were told that they could choose to listen to one of two personal appeals from a homeless man, one that would likely make them empathize with his plight or a more objective account of his situation (Shaw et al., 1994). When making this choice, some participants were aware that later they would have to decide whether to volunteer either an hour of time writing fund-raising letters on this man’s behalf (a relatively small investment of time) or spend several hours providing emotional and social support to him (a much larger investment of time). When knowing they would face a decision of whether to commit a significant amount of time helping the homeless man, about two thirds opted to hear the objective account, knowing that this would elicit less empathy and sadness. In contrast, when they knew the request for help would be much smaller, only one third asked to hear the objective story, and two thirds were willing to have their heartstrings plucked by the more emotional appeal. Empathy can be such a powerful emotion that people sometimes actively avoid situations that would make them empathize with others.

Although Batson has been a champion of altruism, critics have argued that empathy is not always about what another person feels. They grant that when people empathize with someone in need, they feel that person’s pain. But they point out that the pain becomes their pain, such that the motivation to help really traces back to reducing one’s own pain—that is, egoistic motivation. The idea that people help to reduce their own distress has been labeled the negative state relief hypothesis (Cialdini et al., 1987). From this point of view, alleviating another person’s sadness is merely a means to an end of alleviating our own. To test this account, Cialdini and colleagues recreated Batson’s study in which participants observed Elaine receiving shocks. They found that even when participants were asked to take Elaine’s perspective and feel her pain, they didn’t volunteer to trade places with her if something else happened to improve their mood, such as receiving praise or money. In a second experiment, some participants were led to believe that nothing they could do would change how they were feeling because a “mood-fixing pill” they had taken would leave them in the same emotional state for the duration of the study. These participants, who felt incapable of making themselves feel better, also were quite unlikely to help, even though they reported a good deal of empathy for the person in need. These findings suggest that the link between empathy and helping is still ultimately about the self. After all, because taking the perspective of another leads you to include the other in your own self-concept (Aron et al., 1992; Cialdini et al., 1997), helping someone you feel connected to in some way might inevitably be motivated by a desire to help yourself, or at least what seems like a version of you.

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The debate over the existence of a pure altruistic motive consumed research on prosocial behavior during the 1980s, with papers from one camp shot like can-nonballs at the other side. Batson’s team countered with evidence that empathy increases helping, even when people can expect that some other good event will boost their mood (Batson et al., 1989). Also, when taking another’s perspective, people are most likely to help the person specifically with the problem they are confronting; people are not motivated to provide help that would be irrelevant (Dovidio et al., 1990). This, too, suggests that people can be sensitive to another’s needs and work to alleviate another person’s pain rather than merely to reduce their own sadness or guilt. Furthermore, isn’t feeling another person’s distress—allowing it to affect you—usually a sign that you really care about the other person’s well-being?

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When the dust from all of these studies settled, what did we learn? Researchers use meta-analysis to aggregate evidence across many studies investigating the same question. The meta-analyses on altruism did not provide a great deal of support for the negative state relief hypothesis (Carlson & Miller, 1987; Miller & Carlson, 1990). Moreover, recent neuroscience evidence suggests that there are qualitatively distinct neural responses to imagining what someone else is feeling when he or she is in pain and imagining your own experience of pain if you were in another person’s place (Lamm et al., 2007). Although we might be like Joey, helping just to make ourselves feel better when we don’t empathize with others, Phoebe might have been right in claiming that the primary motive behind her helpful nature was a genuine altruistic concern with the welfare for others.

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