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Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

Empathy-altruism hypothesis definition.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that feelings of empathy for another person produce an altruistic motivation to increase that person’s welfare. In the empathy-altruism hypothesis, the term empathy refers to feelings of compassion, sympathy, tenderness, and the like. Altruism refers to a motivational state in which the goal is to increase another person’s welfare as an end in itself. (Altruistic acts are what are ordinarily called “good deeds.”) Note that this definition of altruism is different from the typical usage of the term, which is usually defined to mean an act of helping that involves considerable personal costs to the helper. Overall, the empathy-altruism hypothesis has generated a large body of research that answers important questions about why people help and fail to help, and offers insights into the roles played by different types of motives underlying human social behavior.

Background and Importance of Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

Evidence and Alternative Explanations of Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

The empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that those feeling high levels of empathy for a person in need will be more likely to help than will those feeling less empathy. This prediction is well supported by research. However, a number of egoistic alternative explanations have been proposed to explain these findings. For example, those feeling high levels of empathy may feel more distress and, consequently, may be more likely to help because they are egoistically motivated to reduce their own distress. Another possibility is that those feeling high levels of empathy are more likely to help because they are more egoistically motivated to avoid feeling bad about themselves or looking bad in the eyes of others should they fail to help. Similarly, those feeling high levels of empathy may be more likely to help because they are more egoistically motivated to feel good about themselves or to look good in the eyes of others should they help. Determining whether these and other egoistic explanations can explain the high rates of helping among those feeling high levels of empathy has generated much scientific debate and empirical research. With few exceptions, evidence from dozens of experiments over the past 30 years has provided support for the empathy-altruism hypothesis over all the available egoistic explanations and, by extension, for the claim that humans are indeed capable of altruism.

Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis Implications

In addition to investigating the nature of the motivation associated with empathy, researchers studying the empathy-altruism hypothesis have discovered a number of other interesting phenomena. For example, those feeling high levels of empathy tend to experience more negative mood than those feeling low levels of empathy when their attempt to help the person for whom empathy is felt is unsuccessful. These findings suggest that feeling high levels of empathy for others may lead to negative outcomes for those feeling empathy when altruistic goals are unattainable. Other findings show that those feeling high levels of empathy tend to behave unjustly or are willing to harm the welfare of a group to which they belong when such behavior will benefit a person for whom empathy is felt. These findings demonstrate that, at least under certain conditions, altruism can undermine other prosocial objectives, such as maintaining justice or working for the common good.

Although altruism at times may be harmful to those feeling empathy, it does appear to be very beneficial to those individuals for whom empathy is felt. For example, research shows that individuals who feel high levels of empathy will actually avoid helping the person for whom empathy is felt in the short term when doing so promotes the long-term welfare of that individual. These findings suggest that altruistically motivated individuals may be more sensitive to the needs of those for whom empathy is felt compared to individuals who are not altruistically motivated to help. Finally, leading individuals to feel empathy for members of stigmatized or disadvantaged groups appears to produce not only a tendency to help members of those groups, but also promotes positive attitudes toward the groups as a whole. These findings suggest that empathy may be useful for reducing prejudice and discrimination.

The available research offers strong support for the claim that humans are indeed capable of altruism. Even though altruism appears to be beneficial to individuals for whom empathy is felt, it may lead to negative outcomes for the altruistically motivated person in some circumstances. Also, altruism may lead helpers to benefit the person for whom empathy is felt at the expense of others. Although the debate over human altruism may not be completely resolved any time soon, the empathy-altruism hypothesis nonetheless presents an intriguing and complex picture of human motivation worthy of continued scientific attention.

References:

• Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Towards a social-psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Batson, C. D., & Shaw, L. L. (1991). Evidence for altruism: Toward a pluralism of prosocial motives. Psychological Inquiry, 2, 107-122.

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Altruism: How to Cultivate Selfless Behavior

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Verywell / Zoe Hansen

• Explaining Altruism

Is Being Altruistic Good?

Fostering altruism, potential pitfalls of altruism.

Altruism is the unselfish concern for other people—doing things simply out of a desire to help, not because you feel obligated to out of duty, loyalty, or religious reasons. It involves acting out of concern for the well-being of other people. 

In some cases, these acts of altruism lead people to jeopardize themselves to help others. Such behaviors are often performed unselfishly and without any expectations of reward. Other instances, known as reciprocal altruism, involve taking actions to help others with the expectation that they will offer help in return.

Examples of Altruism

Everyday life is filled with small acts of altruism, from holding the door for strangers to giving money to people in need. News stories often focus on grander cases of altruism, such as a man who dives into an icy river to rescue a drowning stranger or a donor who gives thousands of dollars to a local charity.

Some examples of altruism include:

• Doing something to help another person with no expectation of reward
• Forgoing things that may bring personal benefits if they create costs for others
• Helping someone despite personal costs or risks
• Sharing resources even in the face of scarcity
• Showing concern for someone else's well-being

Types of Altruism

Psychologists have identified several different types of altruistic behavior. These include:

• Genetic altruism : As the name suggests, this type of altruism involves engaging in altruistic acts that benefit close family members. For example, parents and other family members often engage in acts of sacrifice in order to provide for the needs of family members. 
• Reciprocal altruism : This type of altruism is based on a mutual give-and-take relationship. It involves helping another person now because they may one day be able to return the favor.
• Group-selected altruism : This involves engaging in altruistic acts for people based upon their group affiliation. People might direct their efforts toward helping people who are part of their social group or supporting social causes that benefit a specific group.
• Pure altruism : Also known as moral altruism, this form involves helping someone else, even when it is risky, without any reward. It is motivated by internalized values and morals.

What Causes Altruism?

While we may be familiar with altruism, social psychologists are interested in understanding why it occurs. What inspires these acts of kindness? What motivates people to risk their own lives to save a complete stranger?

Altruism is one aspect of what is known as prosocial behavior . Prosocial behavior refers to any action that benefits other people, no matter what the motive or how the giver benefits from the action.

While all altruistic acts are prosocial, not all prosocial behaviors are completely altruistic. We might help others for a variety of reasons such as guilt, obligation, duty, or even for rewards.

We're not sure why altruism exists, but psychologists have suggested a number of different explanations.

Psychologists have long debated whether some people are just born with a natural tendency to help others, a theory that suggests that altruism may be influenced by genetics.

Kin selection is an 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, thus ensuring the continuation of shared genes. The more closely the individuals are related, the more likely people are to help.

Prosocial behaviors such as altruism, cooperativeness, and empathy may also have a genetic basis.

Brain-Based Rewards

Altruism activates reward centers in the brain . Neurobiologists have found that when a person behaves altruistically, the pleasure centers of their brain become more active.

Engaging in compassionate actions activates the areas of the brain associated with the reward system. The positive feelings created by compassionate actions then reinforce altruistic behaviors.

Environment

Interactions and relationships with others have a major influence on altruistic behavior, and socialization may have a significant impact on altruistic actions in young children.

In one study, children who observed simple reciprocal acts of altruism were far more likely to exhibit altruistic actions. On the other hand, friendly but non-altruistic actions did not inspire the same results.

Modeling altruistic actions can be an important way to foster prosocial and compassionate actions in children.

Observing prosocial behavior seems to lead to helping behavior among adults as well (though the extent to which this occurs varies based on factors like gender, culture, and individual context).

Social Norms

Society's rules, norms, and expectations can also influence whether or not people engage in altruistic behavior. The norm of reciprocity , for example, is a social expectation in which we feel pressured to help others if they have already done something for us.

For example, if your friend loaned you money for lunch a few weeks ago, you'll probably feel compelled to reciprocate when they ask you if they can borrow $100. They did something for you, now you feel obligated to do something in return.

While the definition of altruism involves doing for others without reward, there may still be cognitive incentives that are not obvious. For example, we might help others to relieve our own distress or because being kind to others upholds our view of ourselves as kind people. Other cognitive explanations include:

• Empathy : People are more likely to engage in altruistic behavior when they feel empathy for the person in distress, a suggestion known as the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Children also tend to become more altruistic as their sense of empathy develops.
• Helping relieve negative feelings : Altruistic acts may help alleviate the negative feelings associated with seeing 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, but helping them reduces these negative feelings.

While altruism can have some drawbacks when taken to extremes, it is a positive force that can benefit both you and others. Altruism has a wide range of benefits, like:

• Better health : Behaving altruistically can improve physical health in a variety of ways. People who volunteer have better overall health, and regularly engaging in helping behaviors is linked to a significantly lower mortality.  
• Better mental well-being : Doing good things for other people can make you feel good about yourself and the world. Research shows that people experience increased happiness after doing good things for other people.
• Better romantic relationships : Being kind and compassionate can also lead to a better relationship with your partner, as kindness is one of the most important qualities that people across all cultures seek in a romantic partner.  

In addition to these benefits, engaging in altruism can also help improve social connections and relationships, which can ultimately play a part in improving health and wellness.

Some people come by altruistic tendencies naturally, but there are things you can do to help foster helpful behaviors in yourself and others. These include:

• Find inspiration : Look to inspirational people who engage in altruistic acts. Seeing others work to actively improve the lives of individuals and communities can inspire you to act altruistically in your own life.
• Practice empathy : Rather than distancing yourself from others, practice empathy by building connections and putting a human face on the problems you see. Consider how you would feel in that situation, and think about things that you can do to help make a difference.
• Set a goal : Find ways that you can regularly perform random acts of kindness for others. Look around you for people who may need help, or look for ways that you can volunteer in your community. Fix a meal for someone in need, help a friend with a chore, donate during a blood drive, or spend some time volunteering for a local organization.
• Make it a habit : Try to keep kindness in the forefront of your thoughts. For example, think about the altruistic acts you've performed, how they might have helped someone, and how you might repeat them going forward. Or, consider performing at least one act of kindness a day, and take some time to reflect on it.

There can be some possible drawbacks and difficulties to altruism, like:

• It can sometimes create risk. People may engage in altruistic acts that can place them in danger.
• It may sometimes lead people to neglect their own health, social, or financial needs in order to care for others.
• While acts of altruism may be done with good intentions, they don't always lead to positive outcomes.
• It may lead people to focus their efforts on one cause while neglecting others.

People who work in helping professions may find themselves emotionally overwhelmed by caring for and helping others. In a more severe example, a person who altruistically adopts animals may shift into animal hoarding , reaching a point where they can no longer house or care for the animals they have taken in.

Despite these potential problems, altruism is generally a positive force in the world, and it's a skill worth developing.

Cortes Barragan R, Dweck CS. Rethinking natural altruism: Simple reciprocal interactions trigger children's benevolence . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA . 2014;111(48):17071-4. doi:10.1073/pnas.1419408111

Sisco MR, Weber EU. Examining charitable giving in real-world online donations . Nat Commun . 2019;10(1):3968. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11852-z

Reuter M, Frenzel C, Walter NT, Markett S, Montag C. Investigating the genetic basis of altruism: The role of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism .  Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci . 2011;6(5):662-668. doi:10.1093/scan/nsq083

Klimecki OM, Leiberg S, Ricard M, Singer T. Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training . Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci . 2014;9(6):873-9. doi:10.1093/scan/nst060

Jung H, Seo E, Han E, Henderson MD, Patall EA. Prosocial modeling: A meta-analytic review and synthesis .  Psychol Bull . 2020;146(8):635-663. doi:10.1037/bul0000235

Poulin MJ, Brown SL, Dillard AJ, Smith DM. Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality . Am J Public Health . 2013;103(9):1649–55. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300876

Post SG. It’s good to be good: 2011 fifth annual scientific report on health, happiness and helping others .  IJPCM . 2011;1(4):814-829. doi:10.5750/ijpcm.v1i4.154

Thomas AG, Jonason PK, Blackburn JD, et al. Mate preference priorities in the East and West: A cross‐cultural test of the mate preference priority model .  J Pers . 2020;88(3):606-620. doi:10.1111/jopy.12514

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Article contents

Empathy and altruism.

• Eric L. Stocks Eric L. Stocks Department of Psychology and Counseling, University of Texas at Tyler
•  and  David A. Lishner David A. Lishner University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.272
• Published online: 24 October 2018

The term empathy has been used as a label for a broad range of phenomena, including feeling what another person is feeling, understanding another person’s point of view, and imagining oneself in another person’s situation. However, perhaps the most widely researched phenomenon that goes by this label involves an other-oriented emotional state that is congruent with the perceived welfare of another person. The feelings associated with empathy include sympathy, tenderness, and warmth toward the other person. Other variations of empathic emotions have been investigated too, including empathic joy, empathic embarrassment, and empathic anger. The term altruism has also been used as a label for a broad range of phenomena, including any type of helping behavior, personality traits associated with helpful persons, and biological influences that spur protection of genetically related others. However, a particularly fruitful research tradition has focused on altruism as a motivational state with the ultimate goal of protecting or promoting the welfare of a valued other. For example, the empathy–altruism hypothesis claims that empathy (construed as an other-oriented emotional state) evokes altruism (construed as a motivational state). Empathy and altruism, regardless of how they are construed, have important consequences for understanding human behavior in general, and for understanding social relationships and well-being in particular.

• vicarious emotions
• perspective taking
• prosocial behavior
• social motivation

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Empathy and Altruism

Introduction, general overviews.

• General Overview of Empathy
• When Do People Feel Empathy
• General Overview of Altruism
• If Altruism Exists, Is It a Good Thing?
• Non-Altruistic Explanations for Prosocial Behavior
• Other Factors That Affect Prosocial Behavior

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Empathy and Altruism by Eric L. Stocks , Taylor Clark LAST REVIEWED: 26 February 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 26 February 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0260

The word empathy has been used as a label for many different phenomena, including feeling what another person is feeling, understanding another person’s point of view, and imagining oneself in another person’s situation. Perhaps the most widely researched phenomenon called “empathy” involves an other-oriented emotional state that is congruent with the perceived welfare of another person. Feelings associated with empathy include sympathy, tenderness, and warmth toward the other person. Other manifestations of empathic emotions have been investigated, too, including empathic joy, empathic embarrassment, and empathic anger. As was the case with empathy, the term altruism has also been used as a label for a broad range of phenomena, including any type of prosocial behavior, as a collection of personality traits associated with helpful persons, and biological influences that evoke protective behaviors toward genetically related others. A particularly fruitful research tradition has focused on altruism as a motivational state with the ultimate goal of protecting or promoting the welfare of a valued other. For example, the empathy–altruism hypothesis claims that empathy (viewed here as an other-oriented emotional state) evokes an altruistic motivational state. Empathy and altruism, regardless of how they are construed, have important consequences for understanding human behavior and social relationships.

Batson 2011 provides a thorough overview of research on empathy and altruism, particularly with regard to the empathy–altruism hypothesis, and the author’s newer book Batson 2018 is the most recent review of the empathy–altruism literature. Hoffman 2000 discusses empathy as well, but with a focus on the development of empathy throughout the lifespan and how it relates to prosocial behavior. Also, the development of morality is discussed in this book. Stotland 1969 is a classic work on the topic of empathy. Stotland conducted the first empirical studies of empathy, and this research is discussed in his 1969 work. Piliavin, et al. 1981 provides a detailed examination of empathic arousal and the process of evaluating costs and rewards in the context of emergency intervention.

Batson, C. D. 2011. Altruism in humans . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Why do humans risk losing their lives in order to help others? And what motivates such altruistic behaviors? Research suggests the possibility that human beings have the ability to care for other people for their sakes rather than simply for reasons of self-interest.

Batson, C. D. 2018. A scientific search for altruism: Do we only care about ourselves? New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190651374.001.0001

This book updates Batson 2011 with more recent research. It addresses the main question in helping behavior research: do we only care about ourselves?

Hoffman, M. L. 2000. Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice . New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511805851

This volume provides an early comprehensive account of children’s prosocial moral development and the role of empathy in moral situations.

Piliavin, J. A., J. F. Dovidio, S. L. Gaertner, and R. D. Clark, III. 1981. Emergency intervention . New York: Academic Press.

Discusses psychological processes involved in emergency intervention. The primary mechanism discussed by Piliavin and colleagues is the Arousal: Cost-Reward Model.

Stotland, E. 1969. Exploratory investigations of empathy. In Advances in experimental social psychology . Vol. 4. Edited by L. Berkowitz, 271–313. New York: Academic Press.

Stotland published the first empirical investigations of empathy, and this paper summarizes the findings from these early studies.

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Altruism in Its Personal, Social, and Cultural Contexts: An Introduction

• First Online: 01 January 2013

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• Juris G. Draguns 2  

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Altruism is a complex, multifaceted concept that is difficult to define and challenging to investigate. At its core, it refers to intrinsically motivated action for the benefit of other human beings. Proponents of universal egoism attempt to reduce altruism to a surface manifestation of more fundamental, self-gratifying motives. Research over the last several decades has resulted in a partial paradigm shift toward the conclusion that altruism cannot be reduced to egotistic sources and that its roots are deeply embedded in human nature. A variety of research methods have been developed and are being vigorously pursued. They range from studies of altruistic behavior in social psychology experiments to naturalistic field and biographical approaches, sometimes supplemented by psychometric methods. Researchers have studied in exceptional situations as well as in daily lives and have introduced innovative approaches for its exploration. Several sources of altruistic motivation and conduct have emerged, ranging from biological to sociocultural. Yet a great many questions remain to be answered by multimethod and interdisciplinary inquiry before the biological, psychological, and cultural threads are integrated into a scientifically based understanding of human potential for altruism in its manifold modes of expression.

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Draguns, J.G. (2013). Altruism in Its Personal, Social, and Cultural Contexts: An Introduction. In: Vakoch, D. (eds) Altruism in Cross-Cultural Perspective. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6952-0_1

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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Empathy, altruism, and group identification.

• 1 Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
• 2 Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

This paper investigates the role of group identification in empathic emotion and its behavioral consequences. Our central idea is that group identification is the key to understanding the process in which empathic emotion causes helping behavior. Empathic emotion causes helping behavior because it involves group identification, which motivates helping behavior toward other members. This paper focuses on a hypothesis, which we call “self-other merging hypothesis (SMH),” according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. We argue that SMH should be interpreted in terms of group identification. The group identification interpretation of SMH is both behaviorally adequate (i.e., successfully predicts and explains the helping behavior in the experimental settings) and psychologically plausible (i.e., does not posit psychologically unrealistic beliefs, desires, etc.). Empathy-induced helping behavior, according to the group identification interpretation of the SMH, does not fit comfortably into the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy. We thus propose a new taxonomy according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is both altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level.

Introduction

This paper investigates the role of group identification (which is, roughly, the process by which one acquires a form of self-conception as a group member) in empathic emotion and its behavioral consequences. Our central idea is that group identification is the key to understanding the process in which empathic emotion causes helping behavior. Empathic emotion causes helping behavior because it involves group identification, which motivates helping behavior toward other group members.

Based on a series of influential experiments, Batson (1991 , 2011 , 2018) defends “the empathy-altruism hypothesis (EAH)” according to which empathic emotion generates altruistic motivation. For example, when person X empathizes with person Y, who is suffering, X’s empathy causes X to be altruistically motivated to help Y. Batson’s experiments convincingly show that empathy causes helping behavior; for example, X’s empathizing with Y causes X to help Y (or at least causes X to be disposed to help Y). However, empathy-induced helping behavior is open to multiple interpretations other than EAH. There are many alternative interpretations, including the view that empathy-induced helping behavior is egoistically motivated rather than altruistically motivated. 1 For instance, it is conceivable that X’s helping Y is due to X’s egoistic motivation to alleviate his own empathic distress [“the aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis (ARH)”]. X feels psychological distress when X empathizes with Y’s suffering. X helps Y because alleviating Y’s suffering is probably the best way to reduce X’s own empathic distress. X’s helping behavior is ultimately motivated by the egoistic concern for reducing X’s own empathic distress rather than by the altruistic concern for alleviating Y’s suffering.

This paper focuses on an account of empathy-induced helping behavior, which we call “the self-other merging hypothesis (SMH).” SMH can be formulated in different ways, but its basic idea is that X’s empathizing with Y causes a “merging” between X and Y. X helps Y because X is motivated by the concern for X’s own welfare and where, due to self-other merging, X’s “own welfare” includes Y’s welfare.

Whether one should accept EAH or SMH involves considering both empirical and theoretical issues, but this paper focuses on the latter. In particular, we focus on the interpretation of SMH. How should we interpret SMH? What does it mean to say that the “self” and the “other” are “merged”? Can there be an interpretation of SMH that is both conceptually coherent and psychologically plausible?

We will argue that the best interpretation of SMH appeals to the process of group identification (“Self-other Merging as Group Identification”); when empathizing with Y, X group identifies with Y, which motivates X to be helpful to Y. This interpretation of SMH (the “group identification interpretation”) is both (1) behaviorally adequate in the sense that it successfully predicts and explains the helping behavior exhibited in experimental settings and (2) is psychologically plausible in the sense that it does not attribute psychologically unrealistic beliefs, desires, etc. to X (e.g., the belief that X exists in two separate bodies).

We will then consider whether empathy-induced helping behavior is egoistic or altruistic (“Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?”). Assuming (the group identification interpretation of) SMH, empathy-induced helping behavior does not adhere to the traditional dichotomy between egoism and altruism. We thus propose a new taxonomy according to which X’s act of helping Y is altruistic at the individual level [because X is motivated by X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular (his/her/their) welfare rather than X’s first-person singular (my) welfare] and egoistic at the group level [because X is motivated by X’s concern for Y’s welfare insofar as it is constitutive of X’s first-person plural (our) welfare].

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

According to Batson’s EAH, empathy or empathic concern is a possible source of altruistic motivation. X’s empathy for Y can make X altruistic toward Y. The two key concepts in EAH, “altruism” and “empathy,” are characterized as follows.

“Altruistic” behavior is defined as the one that is motivated by a state (e.g., a desire) “with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare” ( Batson, 2018 , p. 22). For instance, X’s act of helping Y is altruistic if the act is motivated by X’s ultimate desire to increase the welfare of Y. To say that X’s desire to increase the welfare of Y is “ultimate” is to say that X desires the increased welfare of Y for its own sake, rather than it being instrumental in achieving some other goal, such as X’s selfish goal of feeling good that comes with helping Y.

“Empathy” or “empathic concern” is defined as an “other oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need” ( Batson, 2018 , p. 29). 2 Here are some clarificatory notes on Batson’s definition. First, the “congruence” here is not necessarily the congruence of emotion (e.g., X feels the same emotion as Y) but rather of valence (e.g., both X and Y feel something negative). Second, “empathic concern” is an umbrella term that includes a range of other-oriented emotions for someone in need, such as sympathy, compassion, tenderness, soft-heartedness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, and grief. Third, the emotions under the umbrella of “empathic concern” are “other-oriented” in the sense that they involve feeling for the other (e.g., X’s sympathy for Y, X’s compassion for Y, and X’s sorry for Y).

Batson and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments to test EAH. In the “Katie Banks experiment” ( Coke et al., 1978 ), for example, participants took a capsule (a placebo, unbeknown to them) and were either told that the capsule would have the effect of relaxing them (the relaxation side-effect condition) or that the capsule would have the effect of arousing them (the arousal side-effect condition). Participants then heard a news report on Katie Banks, who had been suffering and struggling after the tragic loss of her parents in an accident (this news report was, unbeknown to participants, entirely fictional). Participants were then either instructed to imagine how Katie felt about her situation (the imagine-her condition) or to observe the broadcasting techniques used in the news report (the observe condition). After hearing the news report, participants were presented with an opportunity to help Katie. The result was that participants in the relaxation side-effect/imagine-her condition were more likely to offer help to Katie than those in other conditions (the arousal side-effect/imagine-her condition, the relaxation side-effect/observe condition, and the arousal side-effect/observe condition). This suggests that the empathic imagining of Katie’s suffering increased the probability of helping behavior. Participants in the arousal side-effect/imagine-her condition were less likely to offer help, probably because their affective arousal (due to empathic imagining) was explained away as an effect of the capsule and hence it failed to be identified as empathic concern for Katie.

Thus, empathy does induce helping behavior. The crucial question is whether empathy-induced helping behavior is genuinely altruistic. According to EAH, empathy-induced helping behavior is genuinely altruistic. Participants in the relaxation side-effect/imagine-her condition offered help because empathizing with Katie induced the non-instrumental desire to help her. However, the behavior can also be explained as egoistic rather than altruistic. One such egoistic interpretation is provided by ARH: these participants exhibited helping behavior due to the egoistic desire to alleviate the negative emotion or distress caused by empathizing with Katie’s suffering. By empathizing with Katie’s suffering, participants felt a negative-valenced and distressful emotion, which motivated them reduce this emotion by helping to alleviate Katie’s suffering.

Note that there is an important asymmetry between egoistic hypotheses, such as ARH, and altruistic hypotheses, such as EAH. Altruistic hypotheses say that humans can be altruistically motivated; they do not rule out the possibility of egoistically motivated behavior. In contrast, egoistic hypotheses say that humans cannot be altruistically motivated; they do rule out the possibility of altruistically motivated behavior. Suppose that empathy-induced helping behavior in the Katie Banks experiment has a mixed set of motivations; some altruistic motivation to alleviate Katie’s suffering for its own sake and some egoistic motivation to alleviate one’s own empathic distress. This case of mixed motivation is coherent with altruistic hypotheses (because they do not rule out the possibility of egoistic motivation) but not with egoistic hypotheses (because they do rule out the possibility of altruistic motivation).

To see which hypothesis is correct, Batson and colleagues conducted the “Elaine experiment” ( Batson et al., 1981 ). In this experiment, female participants observed a young woman named Elaine (who, unbeknown to participants, was a fictional person) through a computer monitor. Participants watched as Elaine received uncomfortable electric shocks. Participants were either informed that Elaine’s values and interests were very similar to their own (the similar-victim condition) or were very different (the dissimilar-victim condition). It turned out, however, that Elaine was especially sensitive to the shock, and participants were asked to help her by receiving the shock on her behalf. In one condition (the difficult-escape condition), participants were told that they had to stay in the experiment and watch Elaine receiving shocks if they did not volunteer to take her place. In the other condition (the easy-escape condition), they were told that they could leave if they did not volunteer. The result was that in the similar-victim condition, in which empathy is assumed to be elicited, ease of escape did not reduce the likelihood of the participant helping Elaine. This result contradicts ARH, according to which participants are motivated to reduce their own distress, and supports EAH, according to which participants are motivated to increase Elaine’s welfare. Ease of escape did reduce the likelihood of participants helping Elaine in the dissimilar-victim condition, which can be explained by the fact that participants in this condition had little altruistic motivation to help Elaine; they only had the egoistic motivation to get out of a rather uncomfortable experiment.

This is, however, not a conclusive refutation of ARH. For example, there is still room to argue that participants did not escape because they cared about Elaine’s well-being, but rather because they believed that a physical escape would not bring a psychological escape; leaving the experiment would not alleviate their empathic distress. But this idea is also challenged by the experiments conducted by Stocks et al. (2009) , which suggests that empathy promotes helping behavior even when a psychological escape is available.

The Self-Other Merging Hypothesis

Although EAH has been supported by several studies, it is still a controversial hypothesis. Our focus in this paper is the debate on EAH and SMH. 3 SMH can be formulated in different ways, but its basic idea is that X’s empathizing with Y causes a “merging” between X and Y. X helps Y because X is motivated by the concern for X’s own welfare and where, due to self-other merging, X’s “own welfare” includes Y’s welfare.

Among the proponents of SMH, 4 we focus on Cialdini et al. (1997) whose work plays the central role in the debate on EAH and SMH. Cialdini et al. (1997) conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that the real cause of altruistic behavior is “oneness” or “self-other merging.”

In one of their experiments, the participants (introductory psychology students, including both males and females, at Arizona State University) were assigned to one of the conditions below and were asked to imagine a person who is associated with the assigned condition:

1. The near-stranger condition: “a man/woman you do not really know…someone you would recognize from class, but not say ‘hello’ to if you passed each other on campus.”

2. The acquaintance condition: “a man/woman who you do not know really well, but you would stop and chat with him/her for a few minutes if you passed each other on campus.”

3. The good friend condition: “a man/woman who is a friend of yours, who you sometimes go out with outside of school.”

4. The family member condition: “your closest male/female family member, a sibling if possible.”

All participants were asked to think about a situation where the person they imagined had been evicted from their apartment. Then, they indicated to what extent they wanted to help the imagined person, choosing from seven options, ranging from being totally unhelpful (i.e., doing nothing) to being extremely helpful (i.e., offering to let the imagined person live with the participant rent-free). After that, participants indicated the extent of “oneness” with the imagined person on a seven-point scale, ranging from “not at all” to “extremely.” In addition, Cialdini and colleagues used the inclusion of other in self scale to evaluate participants’ feelings of “oneness”. 5 The participants also indicated their empathic concern, sadness, and personal distress on a seven-point scale.

The result suggests that closeness of relationship is correlated with greater empathic concern as well as greater oneness and that empathic concern and oneness are predictive of helping behavior. Crucially, when oneness is statistically controlled, empathic concern is not predictive of helping. In contrast, when empathic concern is controlled, oneness is still predictive of helping behavior. Cialdini and colleagues take this result to show that the primary cause of helping behavior is “oneness” or “self-other merging” and that empathy plays only a mediatory role: “Upon experiencing empathic concern for another, then, an individual is consequently informed of a likely degree of oneness with that other, and prosocial action is more probable as a result” ( Cialdini et al., 1997 , p. 491).

If the self-other merging is the real cause of helping behavior, then, it becomes less clear whether the helping behavior exhibited in experimental settings is truly altruistic. Cialdini and colleagues thus state that SMH “seriously undermines the logic of the empathy-altruism hypothesis” by compromising “the distinction between selflessness and selfishness” ( Cialdini et al., 1997 , p. 481). Note that Cialdini and colleagues do not claim that the helping behavior exhibited in experimental settings is egoistic. It is not altruistic, nor egoistic, but nonaltruistic . SMH, according to Cialdini and colleagues, goes beyond the traditional dichotomy between egoism and altruism.

Self-Other Merging As Group Identification

May’s challenge.

Batson responded to Cialdini and colleagues by conducting experiments that cast doubt on SMH ( Batson et al., 1997 ) and by indicating the methodological problems present in the experiments by Cialdini and colleagues ( Batson, 2018 , Chapter 10). These empirical issues about SMH, however, are outside the scope of this paper. Our focus is rather on the theoretical issues surrounding SMH, particularly the theoretical issue of how to interpret SMH. How should we interpret SMH? What does it mean to say that the “self” and the “other” are “merged”? Can there be an interpretation of SMH that is both conceptually coherent and psychologically plausible?

May (2011 , 2018) examines three possible interpretations of SMH and argues that all face serious difficulties. According to the first interpretation (let us call it “the peculiar belief interpretation”), when X empathizes with Y, X believes that they exist simultaneously in two separate bodies (i.e., in the body of X and in the body of Y). The peculiar belief interpretation is problematic because it is psychologically unrealistic that people have such a wildly implausible belief when they empathize with others. Cialdini and colleagues themselves also seem to deny this possibility when they write: “What is merged is conceptual, not physical. We are not suggesting that individuals with overlapping identities confuse their physical beings or situations with those of the other” ( Cialdini et al., 1997 , p. 482). According to the second interpretation (“the indeterminate identity interpretation”), when X empathizes with Y, the personal identities of X and Y become indeterminate. The indeterminate identity interpretation is problematic because it is empirically unclear whether humans have the psychological ability to represent indeterminate identities of persons. Another problem, according to May, is that the indeterminate identity interpretation cannot explain the helping behavior exhibited in experimental settings because X’s act of helping Y is possible only if X represents Y to be another person, distinct from oneself. According to the third interpretation (“the property interpretation”), when X empathizes with Y, X believes that some of X’s aspects or properties are in Y’s body (while X and Y are represented as distinct persons). The property interpretation faces the same problem as the peculiar belief interpretation: it is psychologically unrealistic that X believes that some of X’s aspects or properties are in Y’s body. May also points out that even if we accept that X holds such a belief, we still need to attribute some altruistic motivation to X in order to account for X helping Y. It is not clear why X, non-altruistically motivated, helps Y just because X’s properties or aspects are in Y’s body.

May thus concludes that SMH is in serious trouble: “the self-other merging explanation fails to explain the empathy-helping relationship on conceptual grounds, regardless of the experiments Cialdini et al. (1997) report” ( May, 2011 , p. 26).

The Group Identification Interpretation

May’s challenge is important not because it is a conclusive objection to SMH (arguably, May’s reading of Cialdini and colleagues is not very charitable) but rather because it is useful for clarifying what needs to be done in order to defend SMH. Generalizing May’s challenge, a plausible interpretation of SMH needs to meet the following conditions:

1. It must be behaviorally adequate in the sense that SMH, thus interpreted, successfully predicts and explains the helping behavior exhibited in experimental settings.

2. It must be psychologically plausible in the sense that SMH, thus interpreted, does not posit psychologically unrealistic beliefs, desires, etc.

May’s objection to the peculiar belief interpretation is that it is not psychologically plausible; it attributes psychologically unrealistic beliefs to people. It is psychologically unrealistic, for example, that a participant in the Elaine experiment – let us call him “Reynie” – believes that he exists in two separate bodies. One of May’s objections to the indeterminate identity interpretation is that it is not behaviorally adequate; it fails to explain helping behavior. Reynie’s act of helping Elaine is possible only if Reynie represents Elaine as another person, distinct from himself.

We will argue that there is a plausible interpretation of SMH, which is very likely to be behaviorally adequate and psychologically plausible. This interpretation, which we call “the group identification interpretation,” understands self-other merging as the process in which self and other merge into one group. More precisely, self-other merging involves group identification, where group identification is understood as the process in which one achieves a form of self-conception as a group member. 6 One’s self-conception as a group member manifests in using the first-person plural (we) referring to oneself and other group members; for example, one’s self-conception as a “Harvard dad” manifests in using the first-person plural (we) when referring to oneself and others in the Harvard community (e.g., in the context of the Harvard-Yale football game). It has been suggested in social psychology and philosophy that group identification plays a crucial role in collective, cooperative, and collaborative behaviors ( Turner, 1982 ; Brewer, 1991 ; Pacherie, 2013 ; Salice and Miyazono, 2020 ); a person’s self-conception as a Harvard dad can, for example, facilitate collective, cooperative, and collaborative behaviors with others in the Harvard community.

The group identification interpretation of SMH amounts to the following: X’s empathy-induced helping behavior toward Y is explained by the fact that when X empathizes with Y, X group identifies with Y and thereby comes to conceive of Y’s welfare as being constitutive of X’s first-person plural (our) welfare. Some clarifications are in order.

First, the group identification interpretation of SMH provides us with an account of empathy-induced helping behavior (e.g., Reynie’s empathy-induced helping behavior toward Elaine) rather than helping behavior in general. It is compatible with the possibility that helping behavior in some cases is not caused by empathy and has nothing to do with group identification.

Second, according to the group identification interpretation, when empathy causes helping behavior (e.g., Reynie’s empathy with Elaine causes him to help her), it does so because of group identification (e.g., Reynie’s group identification with Elaine). It is compatible with the possibility that empathy does not always cause helping behavior, or that group identification does not always cause helping behavior.

Third, the group identification interpretation is not committed to the idea that group identification is necessarily associated with empathy. It is compatible with the possibility that group identification happens without empathy in some cases, or that empathy-independent group identification causes helping behavior in some cases (see our distinction between “empathy-induced, group identification-driven helping behavior” and “group identification-driven helping behavior” in “The Traditional Dichotomy”).

Fourth, the group identification interpretation is compatible with different theories of group and social identity. It is theoretically neutral on what groups are and how they work; for example, whether groups are grounded in common features (such as common values and interests between Elaine and Reynie) or shared activities (such as emotional sharing between Elaine and Reynie).

Let us now closely examine the group identification interpretation. The group identification interpretation is psychologically plausible, which is especially clear when we compare the group identification interpretation with the peculiar belief interpretation. The peculiar belief interpretation is not psychologically plausible because it is psychologically unrealistic that Reynie believes that he exists in two separate bodies. The group identification interpretation is different from the peculiar belief interpretation for two reasons. The first reason relates to the content of group identification. The group identification interpretation does not attribute a belief with psychologically unrealistic content – such as the content that he exists in two separate bodies – to Reynie. The group identification interpretation involves the idea that Reynie and Elaine share a social identity, but it does not involve the idea that Reynie exists in two separate bodies (in his body and in Elaine’s body).

The second reason relates to the attitude of group identification. The group identification interpretation does not attribute a belief to Reynie in the first place. Salice and Miyazono (2020) propose a non-doxastic account of group identification, according to which group identification is cashed out in terms of non-doxastic representations. They reject the idea that group identification is a doxastic process in which, for example, X comes to believe that X is a member of a particular group; such a belief does not account for the motivational force of group identification. Rather, group identification involves a “pushmi-pullyu representation” ( Millikan, 1995 , 2004 ): when X group identifies, X forms a representation with both descriptive content (e.g., describing oneself as a member of a group) as well as directive content (e.g., directing oneself to behave as a group member). Generally, pushmi-pullyu representations are representational states that are evolutionarily and structurally primitive. Pushmi-pullyu representations have both descriptive content and directive content, while beliefs have descriptive content only. Pushmi-pullyu representations are intrinsically motivating without being combined with a conative state, while beliefs are not intrinsically motivating.

The group identification interpretation is behaviorally adequate. Experimental studies, in particular the ones in the minimal group paradigm (for an overview, see Diehl, 1990 ), show that group identification motivates pro-group behavior. In a classic study by Tajfel et al. (1971) , for example, a person with the self-conception as a Kandinsky-lover (as opposed to a Klee-lover) was motivated to be helpful to other Kandinsky-lovers (as opposed to Klee-lovers). In the experiment, participants first indicated their aesthetic preferences in response to given pairs of paintings. Based on their preferences, they were told that they were either Kandinsky-lovers or Klee-lovers (while, unbeknownst to them, they were randomly assigned to either the Kandinsky-lover group or the Klee-lover group). In the next task, participants were asked to distribute real monetary rewards to other participants. During this task, in-group favoritism was observed: Kandinsky-lovers favored other Kandinsky-lovers and Klee-lovers favored other Klee-lovers.

The group identification interpretation is theoretically plausible because it enables a unified and parsimonious account of helping behavior in both the minimal group studies by Tajfel and colleagues and the empathy-altruism studies by Batson and colleagues. 7 Other things being equal, it is better to have a single and unified account of helping behavior in two sets of studies rather than to have two different accounts. Helping behavior in both sets of studies is driven by the process of group identification. In the Klee-Kandinsky experiment, for example, a participant, let us call him “Sticky,” self-identifies as a Kandinsky-lover, which motivates him to be helpful to other Kandinsky-lovers. Similarly, when Reynie empathizes with Elaine in the Elaine experiment, he group identifies with Elaine, which motivates him to be helpful to Elaine.

The group identification interpretation is also empirically plausible because there are in fact important similarities between how these two sets of studies were conducted and what the participants were asked to do in them. First, participants in both the Klee-Kandinsky experiment and the Elaine experiment went through similar processes: They were, for instance, informed of the similarities between themselves and a person and then offered an opportunity to be helpful to the person. Sticky, in the Klee-Kandinsky experiment, was first informed of other Kandinsky-lovers and was then offered the opportunity to be helpful to them. Reynie, in the Elaine experiment, was first informed of the similarities between himself and Elaine and was then offered the opportunity to be helpful to Elaine. Second, the responses of participants were similar: for instance, they both helped a person. Sticky was helpful to other Kandinsky-lovers and Reynie was helpful to Elaine. These remarkable structural similarities between the Klee-Kandinsky experiment and the Elaine experiment make it empirically plausible that they share the same psychological explanation, which is exactly what the group identification interpretation offers.

Empathy and Self-Conscious Emotions

According to the group identification interpretation of SMH, when X empathizes with Y, X group identifies with Y. There are at least two different interpretations of how empathy leads to group identification. According to what we call “the causal interpretation,” the relationship between empathy and group identification is causal; group identification is caused by empathy. X’s empathizing with Y causes X to group identify with Y because, for example, empathy highlights some commonalities between X and Y, which causally trigger the process of group identification. 8 In contrast, according to what we call “the constitutive interpretation,” the relationship between empathy and group identification is constitutive; group identification is constitutive of empathy. It is not the case that first X empathizes with Y, which then causes X to group identify with Y. Rather, X’s empathizing with Y already involves X group identifying with Y. In other words, it is part of X’s empathizing with Y that X group identifies with Y and conceives Y to be a constitutive part of X’s social self.

Both interpretations are coherent and, for the purpose of this paper, we are neutral on this issue. Arguably, however, the constitutive interpretation is more interesting than the causal interpretation from a philosophical point of view. In this context, it is useful to compare empathy with self-conscious emotions, such as pride or shame. Salice and Montes Sánchez (2016) argue that other-induced self-conscious emotion is based on group identification. For instance, when a father is proud of his daughter for winning a Nobel Prize, the father group identifies with his daughter: “When you feel proud of your daughter, the emotion is still about yourself, your self, but this is about your self insofar as it is your social self. Seeing yourself as a member of a group, the actions and/or achievements of the other members acquire relevance when it comes to assessing your social self, and this is what triggers the emotive response” ( Salice and Montes Sánchez, 2016 , p. 7). Linguistically, it is natural to say that “the father is proud of his daughter,” which seems to indicate that the father’s pride is about his daughter as opposed to the father himself, but Salice and Montes Sánchez think that the linguistic expression does not reveal what the pride is really about. They distinguish the “target” of self-conscious emotions from their “focus”; the daughter and her achievement are the focus of the father’s pride (and that is what the linguistic expression “the father is proud of his daughter” reveals), but the pride is about the father’s social self, which is the target of the pride.

This proposal provides us with a plausible solution to a puzzle concerning two ideas that are independently plausible but incongruous with one another. The first idea is that self-conscious emotions are essentially first-personal (e.g., pride is essentially about oneself) and the second idea is that self-conscious emotions can be induced by what somebody else does (e.g., a father can be proud of what his daughter has achieved). These two ideas are in fact compatible with each other, according to Salice and Montes Sánchez. It is certainly true that a father can be proud of his daughter for winning a Nobel Prize (the second idea), but the father’s pride is not merely about his daughter; the father pride is rather about his daughter as a constitutive part of the father’s social self (the first idea).

Salice and Montes Sánchez’s proposal might be applied to empathy as well. Batson’s definition of empathy or empathic concern as an “other-oriented emotion” seems to suggest that when X empathizes with Y, X’s empathic emotion is about Y rather than X. But there is an alternative account of empathy, which is analogous to Salice and Montes Sánchez’s account of self-conscious emotions: when X empathizes with Y, X’s empathy is not merely about Y; X’s empathy for Y is about Y as a constitutive part of X’s social self. When Reynie empathizes with Elaine in the Elaine experiment, for example, Reynie’s empathy is not merely about Elaine; rather Reynie’s empathy is about Elaine as a constitutive part of Reynie’s social self. Linguistically, it is natural to say that “Reynie empathizes with Elaine,” which seems to indicate that Reynie’s empathy is about Elaine as opposed to Reynie himself. But perhaps the linguistic expression does not reveal what empathy is really about. Following Salice and Montes Sánchez, we might distinguish the “target” of empathy from its “focus”; Elaine and her suffering are the focus of Reynie’s empathy, but the empathy is about Reynie’s social self, which is the target of his empathy.

This proposal is coherent with the constitutive interpretation according to which group identification is constitutive of empathy. It is not the case that Reynie first empathizes with Elaine, which then causes him to group identify with Elaine. Rather, Reynie’s empathizing with Elaine already involves him group identifying with Elaine. In other words, it is part of Reynie’s empathizing with Elaine that Reynie group identifies with Elaine and conceives Elaine to be a constitutive part of his social self.

Objections and Responses

We will now discuss two possible objections to the group identification interpretation.

The first objection might be that group identification typically happens when the group in question has some desirable characteristics. Identifying oneself with a positive and desirable group can bring some psychological benefits, such as enhanced self-esteem. For example, by identifying himself as a “Harvard dad,” a father’s self-esteem can be enhanced. However, if this is how group identification works in general, then it is hard to see how group identification can happen in the context of Batson’s empathy-altruism studies. Unlike the Harvard community, the group of Reynie and Elaine does not seem to have any particularly desirable characteristics. Unlike group identifying as a “Harvard dad,” group identifying with Elaine does not enhance Reynie’s self-esteem at all. On the contrary, such group identification might threaten Reynie’s self-esteem given Elaine’s undesirable situation (Elaine is, after all, in an undesirable position where she is at risk of suffering from electrical shocks).

Our response to this objection is that group identification is not intrinsically related to self-esteem. The role of self-esteem in group identification has been studied and discussed ( Rubin and Hewstone, 1998 ; Hewstone et al., 2002 ), but it is clear that self-esteem does not explain everything about group identification. In particular, self-esteem does not seem to explain group identification in the minimal group experiments. For example, Tajfel et al. (1971) observed that group identification as an over-estimator (i.e., someone who over-estimates the number of dots on a screen) or under-estimator (i.e., someone who under-estimates the number of dots on a screen) caused in-group favoritism; over-estimators favored other over-estimators and under-estimators favored other under-estimators. It is difficult to see how group identification as an over-estimator or an under-estimator can enhance one’s self-esteem. The minimal group experiments seem to show that group identification can be driven by similarities (e.g., the person is an over-estimator just like you) rather than desirability (e.g., it is desirable to be an over-estimator).

Relatedly, Salice and Montes Sánchez (2016) reject the idea that group identification is motivated by a concern for self-esteem. The self-esteem hypothesis is certainly plausible as an account of a father’s pride in his daughter’s accomplishments. The father’s pride is based on him group identifying with his daughter, which does seem to enhance his self-esteem. But the self-esteem hypothesis is implausible as an account of a father feeling ashamed of his daughter’s actions (e.g., her mistakes and crimes). The father’s shame is, according to Salice and Montes Sánchez, based on him group identifying with his daughter, which does not enhance his self-esteem at all. The father’s self-esteem is threatened, rather than enhanced, when he group identifies with her.

The second objection might be that group identification cannot explain empathy-induced helping behavior because the latter has a broader scope than the former. X’s empathy can extend beyond the boundary of X’s own group. X can empathize with Y, and can be motivated to be helpful to Y, even though X and Y do not share a psychologically significant group (e.g., school, workplace, hometown, nationality, or ethnic origin). For example, we can empathize with a woman who is trapped in a building on fire and can be motivated to go into the building and save her life, even though she is a complete stranger to us. Or, we can empathize with suffering children in Africa and can be motivated to donate money to alleviate their suffering, even though we do not know anything about who they are. These cases appear to be the counterexamples for the group identification interpretation which explains empathy-induced helping behavior in terms of group identification.

This is certainly an important objection to our proposal, but there are several possible responses. The responses can be divided into two groups. First, we might insist that group identification does occur even in these difficult cases; for example, we actually group identify with suffering children in Africa. These cases are not counterexamples because they do involve group identification. Second, we might deny the assumption that the helping behavior in these difficult cases is caused by empathy; for example, it is not the case that empathy causes us to go into the building on fire to save the woman’s life. These cases are not counterexamples because they have nothing to do with empathy-induced helping behavior.

Let us start with the first response. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that we do not share a psychologically significant group with the suffering children in Africa. However, this does not rule out the possibility that we group identify with the African children. In general, X’s group identification with Y does not presuppose that X and Y share a psychologically significant group. Group identification can be driven by rather trivial groups, which was nicely demonstrated in the minimal group studies. Trivial groups that are instantly created, such as the “Kandinsky-lovers” or “over-estimators” groups, can trigger group identification and motivate in-group helping behavior. In the Elaine experiment, Reynie was informed of the similarities between himself and Elaine. It is not surprising at all that the informed similarities were enough for Reynie to group identify with Elaine.

How does group identification with the African children work, exactly? In the present case, we do not even know whether the children are Kandinsky-lovers or Klee-lovers, whether they are over-estimators or under-estimators, etc. A suggestion would be that group identification in this case is grounded in empathic affective mirroring. 9 We put ourselves into the shoes of a suffering child in Africa and empathically share her suffering. The shared experience of suffering creates a salient similarity between the child and us, which facilitates our group identification with her.

Let us move on to the second response. As we already noted, the group identification interpretation is an account of empathy-induced helping behavior rather than helping behavior in general. It does not say anything about the helping behavior that is not caused by empathy. Now, it is possible that the act of rescuing the woman in the building on fire is not caused by empathy in the first place. In fact, saving a person’s life in the context of an emergency does not seem to require empathy. As Bloom notes, we can be motivated to save a child from drowning without empathizing with the child: “You do not need empathy to realize that it’s wrong to let a child drown. Any normal person would just wade in and scoop up the child, without bothering with any of this empathic hoo-ha” ( Bloom, 2016 , p. 22). The helping behavior within a group boundary is explained by empathy, while the helping behavior beyond a group boundary (e.g., helping African children who we know almost nothing about, helping a stranger in the building on fire, etc.) might be explained by reason or domain-general reasoning processes. Again, Bloom notes: “it is reason that leads us to recognize, despite what our feelings tell us, that a child in a faraway land matters as much as our neighbor’s child” ( Bloom, 2016 , p. 51).

Of course, it is possible to modify the case in such a way that the act of rescuing the woman in the building on fire is likely to be caused by empathy. However, with such a revision, this case becomes less problematic for the group identification interpretation. For instance, we might modify the case in such a way that we are very likely to empathize with the woman in the building on fire because of the vivid memory of our own experience of being trapped in a building on fire. However, this revised case might not be very problematic for the group identification interpretation; we can easily group identify with the woman in this case because of the salient similarity between the woman and us; that is, the shared experience of being trapped in a building on fire.

Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?

The traditional dichotomy.

The rest of this paper will discuss whether empathy-induced helping behavior is egoistic or altruistic in light of the group identification interpretation of SMH. If the group identification interpretation of SMH is correct, is empathy-induced helping behavior egoistic or altruistic?

According to the group identification interpretation of SMH, empathy-induced helping behavior, such as the behavior exhibited in Batson’s experiments, is driven by group identification. For example, when Reynie empathizes with Elaine, he group identifies with her, which drives him to help her. Let us call such helping behavior “empathy-induced, group identification-driven helping behavior” (EGHB). EGHB is a form of what we call “group identification-driven helping behavior” (GHB). GHB can be, but does not have to be, induced by empathy. If it is induced by empathy, then it counts as EGHB. If it is not induced by empathy, then it does not count as EGHB. For instance, Reynie’s helping behavior toward Elaine is EGHB, while Sticky’s helping behavior toward other Kandinsky-lovers is GHB but probably not EGHB.

EGHB does not comfortably fit in the traditional category of egoistic behavior. EGHB seems to be different from purely egoistic helping behavior in which X helping Y is motivated by X’s concern for X’s first-person singular (my) welfare (e.g., alleviating my empathic distress). X’s EGHB toward Y seems to be motivated by something beyond X’s first-person singular welfare. For example, Reynie’s EGHB in the Elaine experiment seems to be motivated by something other than Reynie’s concern for his first-person singular welfare.

This observation can be challenged. A challenge is that group identification is, in general, motivated by the egoistic concern for one’s own self-esteem; group identification aims to enhance one’s own self-esteem by identifying oneself with a group that has some desirable characteristics. However, as previously argued, the self-esteem hypothesis cannot be the full explanation of group identification. The self-esteem account is especially problematic in the kind of cases we are interested in because Reynie group identifying with Elaine does not seem to enhance Reynie’s self-esteem. Another problem is that even if the group identification itself is egoistically motivated, it does not automatically follow from this that EGHB is also egoistically motivated. It is at least conceivable that, on the one hand, the act of conceiving of oneself as a group member is motivated by the egoistic goal of enhancing one’s own self-esteem, while, on the other hand, the act of helping other group members is not motivated by the same egoistic goal.

Another challenge is that EGHB is motivated by the egoistic expectation of reciprocity, such as the egoistic expectation that group members who you have helped will also help you in the future. But there are some difficulties with this proposal. For example, EGHB can happen even when there is almost no chance of reciprocity (e.g., empathy-induced monetary donations to alleviate the suffering of children in Africa). Still, some might insist that the reciprocity account can be defended from an evolutionary perspective; the evolutionary role of EGHB might be, for example, to facilitate reciprocal helping in groups. We do not rule out such a possibility, but it has little to do with our discussion of egoism and altruism. Biological aims or purposes need to be carefully distinguished from a person’s aims or purposes. It could be argued that the biological aim of the psychological mechanisms for EGHB is to facilitate reciprocal helping and that these psychological mechanisms have been selected for their contribution to reciprocal helping. But this does not imply that Reynie is personally motivated by the egoistic expectation that Elaine will help him in the future. As Batson points out, the evolutionary reciprocity account “says nothing about whether we ever seek to promote another’s welfare for his or her sake rather than our own” ( Batson, 2018 , p. 17).

Thus, EGHB does not fit nicely into the traditional category of egoistic behavior. But EGHB does not fit comfortably into the traditional category of altruistic behavior either. EGHB seems to be different from purely altruistic helping behavior in which X helping Y is motivated by X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular (his/her/their) welfare (e.g., alleviating her suffering), which is conceived to be distinct from X’s welfare. X’s EGHB toward Y seems to be motivated by X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular welfare insofar as Y’s third-person singular welfare is constitutive of X’s first-person plural (our) welfare. For example, Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine seems to be motivated by Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare insofar as Elaine’s third-person singular welfare is constitutive of Reynie’s first-person plural (our) welfare.

One might think is that Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to his concern for his first-person plural welfare. Reynie does not have a non-instrumental concern for Elaine’s welfare, which suggests that Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is not altruistic in any interesting sense – it is simply egoistic after all. Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is analogous to the egoistic helping behavior where X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to X’s egoistic motivation for alleviating X’s own empathic distress. In both cases, the concern for the third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to the ultimate concern for first-person (singular or plural) welfare.

However, we resist the interpretation that Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to his concern for his own first-person plural welfare. There is a crucial disanalogy between Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine and X’s egoistic helping behavior toward Y for the sake of alleviating X’s own empathic distress. In the latter case, X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to X’s concern for X’s first-person singular welfare. This is due to the fact that X’s first-person singular welfare and Y’s third-person singular welfare are ontologically independent of each other; X’s first-person singular welfare is causally influenced by, but not constituted by, Y’s third-person singular welfare. In the former case, in contrast, Reynie’s first-person plural welfare is constituted by, but is not causally influenced by, Elaine’s third-person singular welfare. Reynie’s first-person plural welfare and Elaine’s third-person singular welfare are not ontologically independent from one another – the latter is a constitutive part of the former. But then it would be inappropriate to say that Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare is only instrumental to Reynie’s concern for his first-person plural welfare. Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare is not distinct from his concern for his first-person plural welfare. It is part of having concern for his first-person plural welfare that Reynie has (non-instrumental) concern for Elaine’s third-person singular welfare. In general, it is part of having concern for Y that one has (non-instrumental) concern for X, when X is constitutive of Y.

A New Taxonomy

It is difficult to locate EGHB in the traditional dichotomy between egoism and altruism. Should we conclude, then, that EGHB is neither egoistic nor altruistic? This is certainly a plausible option for some actions, in particular those that appear to have nothing to do with anybody’s welfare, such as the act of working on a great painting for its own sake rather than for one’s own reputation as a painter. But this option is implausible for EGHB, which is obviously related to the motivation for increasing somebody’s welfare.

The discussions above suggest that it is difficult to locate EGHB in the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy not because our understanding of EGHB is insufficient but rather because the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy is inadequate. It is inadequate because the possibility of EGHB (and GHB in general) is not taken into account in the traditional dichotomy in the first place. Cialdini and colleagues make a similar point when they say that SMH goes beyond “the distinction between selflessness and selfishness” ( Cialdini et al., 1997 , p. 482).

This problem does not just concern EGHB, it also concerns GHB in general. For example, let us consider the following example by Salice and Satne:

Imagine that Alba and Simon are members of a small alpine community. Recently, there was discussion within the community about the idea of building a small bridge over the adjacent brook in order to reach the next village down in the valley. In contrast to Simon, Alba does not have a desire to build a new bridge, but she is not opposed to it either. Eventually, the community convenes to make a decision. Alba cannot attend the meeting, but she is informed afterward that the group decided to build the bridge, in so doing they have also distributed the responsibilities regarding who will be doing what: for instance, Alba is to produce the list of necessary materials to build the bridge and Simon is involved in seeking these materials from providers. […] Alba is not averse to the idea of the bridge (nor is she in favor of it) and she usually takes care of the kind of duties that the community has assigned to her. The only thing that matters for her is that the community decided in favor of building the bridge, which can be phrased as (from Alba’s perspective): we intend to build the bridge ( Salice and Satne, 2020 , p. 615).

In this case, Alba and Simon cooperate in such a way that Alba helps Simon to find the necessary materials. Alba’s act of helping Simon can reasonably be understood as an example of GHB, although it is probably not induced by empathizing – it is probably not EGHB. Is Alba’s GHB egoistic or altruistic? Salice and Satne remain neutral on this question, which is probably (partly) due to the difficulty of locating GHB in the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy. On the one hand, Alba’s GHB toward Simon seems to be different from a purely egoistic helping behavior where Alba’s act of helping Simon is motivated by Alba’s concern for her own first-person singular (my) welfare (e.g., achieving my good reputation). Alba’s GHB toward Simon seems to be motivated by something other than Alba’s concern for her first-person singular welfare. On the other hand, Alba’s GHB toward Simon seems to be different from a purely altruistic helping behavior where Alba’s act of helping Simon is motivated by her concern for Simon’s third-person singular (his) welfare (e.g., solving his problems), which is conceived to be independent of Alba’s welfare. Alba’s GHB toward Simon seems to be motivated by her concern for Simon’s third-person singular welfare insofar as Simon’s third-person singular welfare is constitutive of Alba’s first-person plural (our) welfare.

What we need, then, is a new taxonomy in which EGHB (and GHB in general) is taken into account. We propose to distinguish the egoistic/altruistic distinction at the individual level from the egoistic/altruistic distinction at the group level such that EGHB (and GHB in general) can be regarded as altruistic at the individual level and as egoistic at the group level simultaneously. Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is motivated by his concern for Elaine’s welfare. Elaine’s welfare, which is the target of Reynie’s concern, is third-person singular (her) welfare rather than first-person singular (my) welfare at the individual level, which is why Reynie’s EGHB is altruistic at the individual level, while Elaine’s welfare is constitutive of first-person plural (our) welfare rather than third-person plural (their) welfare at the group level, which is why Reynie’s EGHB is egoistic at the group level.

EGHB is altruistic at the individual level in the sense that, for example, Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is motivated by Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s third-person singular (her) 10 welfare rather than Reynie’s first-person singular (my) welfare at the individual level. This explains why EGHB is different from purely egoistic helping behavior in which X helping Y is motivated by X’s concern for X’s first-person singular (my) welfare (e.g., alleviating my psychological distress). Purely egoistic helping behavior is egoistic at the individual level in the sense that it is motivated by the concern for first-person singular (my) welfare, while EGHB is altruistic at the individual level in the sense that it is motivated by the concern for third-person singular (his/her/their) welfare.

At the same time, EGHB is egoistic at the group level in the sense that, for example, Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is motivated by Reynie’s concern for Elaine’s welfare in so far as Elaine’s welfare is constitutive of Reynie’s first-person plural (our) welfare at the group level. 11 This explains why EGHB is different from purely altruistic helping behavior in which X helping Y is motivated by X’s concern for Y’s third-person singular (his/her/their) welfare (e.g., alleviating her suffering), which is conceived to be independent of X’s welfare. Both purely altruistic helping behavior and EGHB are altruistic at the individual level in the sense that they are motivated by the concern for third-person singular (his/her/their) welfare rather than first-person singular (my) welfare. Unlike purely altruistic helping behavior, however, EGHB is egoistic at the group level in the sense that it is motivated by third-person singular welfare insofar as it is constitutive of first-person plural (our) welfare rather than third-person plural (their) welfare.

Thus, we have reached an answer to our question as to whether the empathy-induced helping behavior is egoistic or altruistic according to the group identification interpretation of SMH. Our answer is that it is both egoistic and altruistic. More precisely, it is altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level.

Our central idea was that group identification is the key to understanding the process in which empathy motivates helping behavior. Empathy motivates helping behavior because it involves group identification, which motivates helping behavior toward other group members.

Our focus was on SMH according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. We argued that SMH should be interpreted in terms of group identification. The group identification interpretation of SMH is both behaviorally adequate (i.e., successfully predicts and explains the helping behavior in the experimental settings) and psychologically plausible (i.e., does not posit psychologically unrealistic beliefs and desires; “Self-other Merging as Group Identification”) Empathy-induced helping behavior, according to the group identification interpretation of the SMH, does not fit comfortably into the traditional egoism/altruism dichotomy. We thus proposed a new taxonomy according to which empathy-induced helping behavior is both altruistic at the individual level and egoistic at the group level (“Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?”).

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

All authors listed, have made substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

KM acknowledges the support of JSPS KAKENHI (grant number 21H00464).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The handling Editor declared a past co-authorship with one of the author KM.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We thank the organizers and participants of 3rd CNY Moral Psychology Workshop (December 4th 2021, online) where we presented a draft of this paper and received useful feedback. We also thank helpful comments and suggestions by Uku Tooming, Zhen Li, Olle Blomberg, and two reviewers.

1. ^ Useful literature reviews include Stich et al. (2010) , Doris et al. (2020) , and Miyazono and Bortolotti (2021 , Chapter 5).

2. ^ Batson (2018) carefully distinguishes “empathic concern” from other psychological states and traits called “empathy,” including: (1) knowing another person’s thoughts and feelings; (2) feeling as another feels; (3) imagining how another feels; (4) imagining how you would feel in another’s place; (4) feeling self-oriented distress (including anxiety or unease) at witnessing another’s suffering; and (5) a general disposition, or trait, to feel for others.

3. ^ SMH is often taken to be an alternative to EAH, but the relationship between SMH and EAH is complex, or so we argue. As we will see in “Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?”, our interpretation of SMH (the group identification interpretation) implies that EAH is correct at least in the individual level (but not in the group level); that is, the empathy-induced helping behavior is altruistic at the individual level (but not in the group level). See “Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?” for details.

4. ^ Batson (2018) distinguishes four versions of SMH. According to the first version, “Self-Other Identification,” when X empathizes with Y, X “identifies” with Y ( Hornstein, 1978 ; Lerner, 1980 ). According to the second version, “Including the Other in the Self,” when X empathizes with Y, X sees Y as part of what X thinks of as “me” ( Wegner, 1980 ; Aron and Aron, 1986 ). According to the third version, “Seeing Aspects of the Self in the Other,” when X empathizes with Y, X sees aspects of oneself in Y ( Davis et al., 1996 ; Cialdini et al., 1997 ). According to the fourth version, “Self and Other as Interchangeable Exemplars of Shared Group Identity,” when X empathizes with Y, X sees oneself and Y as interchangeable members of the same group – as equivalent exemplars of a shared group identity ( Turner, 1987 ). Note, however, that Batson’s classification of SMH can be disputed; see the footnote 6.

5. ^ This scale consists of seven sets of two circles each. In the first pair, the circles are completely separated; they gradually overlap in the following pairs, and they completely overlap in the last pair. For details, see Aron et al. (1992) .

6. ^ The group identification interpretation belongs to the fourth category (“Self and Other as Interchangeable Exemplars of Shared Group Identity”) in Batson’s classification of SMH, which we mentioned in the footnote 4. However, this does not necessarily imply that our proposal is radically different from Cialdini’s proposal that is classified in the third category (“Seeing Aspects of the Self in the Other”) by Batson. Despite Batson’s distinction between the third category and the fourth category, there are some important similarities between our proposal and Cialdini’s proposal. As we will see in “Discussion: Is Empathy-Induced Helping Egoistic or Altruistic?” for example, both blur the traditional dichotomy between egoism and altruism.

7. ^ It is not our claim, however, that the minimal group studies by Tajfel and colleagues and the empathy-altruism studies by Batson and colleagues are exactly the same. An important difference between them is that empathy plays a crucial role in the latter but not in the former. Our claim here is rather that there is a crucial common factor in the helping behavior in the two sets of studies; that is, group identification. For a related issue, see our distinction between “empathy-induced, group identification-driven helping behavior” and “group identification-driven helping behavior” in “The Traditional Dichotomy”.

8. ^ The causal interpretation is coherent with the idea by Cialdini and colleagues that the primary role of empathy is to serve as an affective signal of self-other merging: “When one feels empathic concern, it is normally due to the perspective taking that attends relationship closeness and that leads to self-other overlap. Upon experiencing empathic concern for another, then, an individual is consequently informed of a likely degree of oneness with that other, and prosocial action is more probable as a result” ( Cialdini et al., 1997 , p. 491).

9. ^ Affective mirroring might not be the same as empathy itself. At least they are different according to Batson’s (2018) classification. The latter requires the congruence of valence (e.g., both X and Y feel something negative), while the former requires the congruence of feeling (e.g., X and Y share the same feeling or similar feelings). Still, Batson does not deny that affective mirroring and empathy tend to co-occur in real-life cases.

10. ^ Alternatively, Reynie’s stance toward Elaine is second-personal ( Darwall, 2009 ; Tomasello, 2016 ); for Reynie, Elaine’s welfare is something second-personal ( your welfare) rather than third-personal ( her welfare). Either way, what is crucial here is that Reynie’s EGHB toward Elaine is motivated by Reynie’s concern for something other than his first-person singular (my) welfare at the individual level.

11. ^ For the same reason, Alba’s GHB toward Simon is egoistic at the group level in the sense that it is motivated by Alba’s concern for Simon’s welfare in so far as Simon’s welfare is constitutive of Alba’s first-person plural welfare at the group level. One might think, however, that Alba’s concern is both egoistic and altruistic at the group level given the assumption that Alba’s community is identical with Simon’s community. Alba (egoistically) cares about her own community; in doing so she (altruistically) cares about Simon’s community at the same time. At least in our taxonomy, however, Alba’s GHB is egoistic and not altruistic at the group level. When Alba group-identifies with Simon, what she cares about is her community = Simon’s community which, for Alba, is something first-personal rather than third-personal at the group level; our community rather than their community.

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Keywords: empathy, empathic emotion, altruism, group identification, self-other merging

Citation: Miyazono K and Inarimori K (2021) Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification. Front. Psychol . 12:749315. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.749315

Received: 29 July 2021; Accepted: 16 November 2021; Published: 14 December 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Miyazono and Inarimori. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Kengo Miyazono, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Behavior is normally described as altruistic when it is motivated by a desire to benefit someone other than oneself for that person’s sake. The term is used as the contrary of “self-interested” or “selfish” or “egoistic”—words applied to behavior that is motivated solely by the desire to benefit oneself. “Malicious” designates an even greater contrast: it applies to behavior that expresses a desire to harm others simply for the sake of harming them.

Sometimes, however, the word is used more broadly to refer to behavior that benefits others, regardless of its motive. Altruism in this broad sense might be attributed to certain kinds of non-human animals—mother bears, for example, who protect their cubs from attack, and in doing so put their own lives in danger. So used, there is no implication that such adult bears act “for the sake” of their young (Sober and Wilson 1998: 6).

This essay will discuss altruism in the former sense, as behavior undertaken deliberately to help someone other than the agent for that other individual’s sake. There is a large and growing empirical literature on altruism, which asks whether there is an evolutionary or biological basis for human altruism, and whether non -human species exhibit it or something similar to it. These issues are addressed by the entries on empirical approaches to altruism and biological altruism .

It is commonly assumed that we ought to be altruistic at least to some extent. But to what extent? And is altruism necessarily admirable? Why should one act for the sake of others and not only for one’s own sake? For that matter, do people in fact act out of altruism, or is all behavior ultimately self-interested?

1.1 Mixed motives and pure altruism

1.2 self-sacrifice, strong and weak altruism, 1.3 moral motives and altruistic motives, 1.4 well-being and perfection, 2.1 psychological egoism: strong and weak versions, 2.2 an empirical argument for psychological egoism, 2.3 an a priori argument for psychological egoism, 2.4 hunger and desire, 2.5 desire and motivation, 2.6 pure altruism and self-sacrifice, 2.7 does egoism exist, 3. self and others: some radical metaphysical alternatives, 4.1 eudaimonism, 4.2 impartial reason, 4.3 nagel and the impersonal standpoint, 4.4 sentimentalism and fellow feeling, 5. kant on sympathy and duty, 6. sentimentalism revisited, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is altruism.

Before proceeding, further clarification of the term “altruism” is called for.

Altruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good to others, but also those undertaken in order to avoid or prevent harm to them. Suppose, for example, someone drives her car extra cautiously because she sees that she is in an area where children are playing, and she wants to insure that she injures no one. It would be appropriate to say that her caution is altruistically motivated. She is not trying to make those children better off, but she is being careful not to make them worse off. She does this because she genuinely cares about them for their sake.

Furthermore, altruistic acts need not involve self-sacrifice, and they remain altruistic even when they are performed from a mixture of motives, some of which are self-interested. The driver in the preceding example may have plenty of time to get where she is going; slowing down and paying extra attention may not be contrary to her own good. Even so, her act counts as altruistic if one of her motives for being cautious is her concern for the children for their sake. She may also be aware that if she injures a child, she could be punished for reckless driving, which she of course wants to avoid for self-interested reasons. So, her caution is both altruistic and self-interested; it is not motivated by only one kind of reason. We should not be confused by the fact that “self-interested” and “altruistic” are opposites. A single motive cannot be characterized in both ways; but a single act can be undertaken from both motives.

If someone performs an act entirely from altruistic motives—if, that is, self-interested motives are entirely absent—we can describe her act as a case of “pure” altruism. We should be careful to distinguish purely altruistic behavior from self-sacrificing behavior: the former involves no gain for oneself, whereas the latter involves some loss. If someone has a theater ticket that he cannot use because he is ill, and he calls the box office so that the ticket can be used by someone else, that is a case of pure altruism, but it involves no sacrifice.

Consider someone whose deliberations are always guided by this principle: “I shall never do anything unless doing so is best for me”. Such an individual is refusing ever to sacrifice his well-being even to the slightest degree. But in view of the terminological points just made, he could have altruistic motives for some of what he does—or even for much or all that he does! On any given occasion, he could have mixed motives: he is careful always to do what is best for himself, but that allows him also to be motivated by the perception that what he does is also good for others.

It would be odd or misleading to say that such an individual is an altruistic person. Many people would criticize him for being insufficiently altruistic. It is part of common sense morality that one should be willing to compromise with other people—to cooperate with others in ways that require one to accept what is less good for oneself than some other alternative, so that others can have their fair share.

These reflections lead to a peculiar result: each act undertaken by such an individual could be altruistically motivated, and yet we are reluctant, and reasonably so, to say that he is an altruistic person. The best way to accommodate both ideas, which seem to be in tension, would be to make a distinction between two uses of the word “altruism”. An act is altruistic in the strong sense if is undertaken in spite of the perception that it involves some loss of one’s well-being. An act is altruistic in the weak sense if it is motivated, at least in part, by the fact that it benefits someone else or the fact that it will not injure anyone else. The individual described two paragraphs above is someone who never acts altruistically in the strong sense. That policy seems objectionable to many people—even though he may act altruistically in the weak sense on many occasions.

Some of what we do in our interactions with other people is morally motivated but not altruistic. Suppose A has borrowed a book from B and has promised to return it within a week. When A returns the book by the deadline, his motive might be described as moral: he has freely made a promise, and he takes himself to have an obligation to keep such promises. His motive is simply to keep his word; this is not an example of altruism. But if A gives B a book as a gift, thinking that B will enjoy it and find it useful, he is acting simply out of a desire to benefit B . His motive in this case is altruistic.

Similarly, suppose a mother refrains from giving her adult son advice about a certain matter because she thinks that it is not her place to do so—it would be interfering too much in his private affairs. Even so, she might also think that he would benefit from receiving her advice; she respects his autonomy but fears that as a result he will decide badly. Her restraint is morally motivated, but it would not normally be described as an act of altruism.

As these examples indicate, the notion of altruism is applicable not to every morally motivated treatment of others, but more narrowly to what is done out of a concern for the good of others—in other words, for their well-being. Altruistic acts might be described as charitable or benevolent or kind, for these words also convey the idea of acting for the good of others, and not merely rightly towards others.

Often the individuals who are the “targets” of altruistic behavior are selected for such treatment because of a personal tie between the benefactor and the beneficiary. If A was extraordinarily kind to B when B was a child, and at a later time B is in a position to help A out of a difficult situation, the help B gives to A is altruistically motivated, even though their common past explains why it is A that B has chosen to help (rather than a stranger in need). Here it is assumed that B is not promoting A ’s well-being as a mere means to his own ( B ’s) own well-being. If that were so, B would not be benefiting A for A ’s sake, but only for B ’s sake. (A further assumption is that B is not motivated simply by a sense that he owes repayment to A ; rather, he not only feels indebted to A but also genuinely cares about him.) The people whom we treat altruistically are often those to whom we have a sentimental attachment, or towards whom we feel grateful. But that is not the only possibility. Some altruistic acts are motivated simply by a recognition of the great need of those who benefit from them, and the benefactor and beneficiary may be strangers to each other.

That an act is altruistically motivated does not entail that it is justified or praiseworthy. A may mistakenly think that she is enhancing the well-being of B ; B might also mistakenly think that she is benefiting from A ’s efforts. We could say that in such cases there is something admirable about A ’s motive, but nonetheless judge that she ought not to have acted as she did.

As noted above, altruistic acts are guided by assumptions made by the agent about the well-being of some other individual or group. What well-being consists in is a disputed matter, but it is uncontroversial that a distinction must be drawn between (i) what constitutes well-being and (ii) what is a necessary means towards or a pre-condition of well-being. This kind of distinction is familiar, and is applicable in all sorts of cases. For example, we distinguish between what a breakfast consists in (cereal, juice, coffee) and the things one needs in order to eat breakfast (spoons, glasses, mugs). There is no such thing as eating breakfast but not eating anything that breakfast consists in. In the same way, well-being must be sought and fostered by seeking and fostering the good or goods in which well-being consists. Rival theories of well-being are competing ways of answering the question: what are its constituents? After we have answered that question, we need to address the further question of how best to obtain those constituents. (Contemporary discussions of well-being can be found in Badhwar 2014; Feldman 1994, 2010; Fletcher 2016; Griffin 1986; Kraut 2007; Sumner 1996 Tiberius 2018.)

Well-being admits of degrees: the more one has of the good or goods in which it consists, the better off one is. It would be an awkward manner of speaking to say of someone: “she has well-being”. A more natural way to express that idea would be to use such terms as these: “she is faring well”, “she is well off”, “she is flourishing”, “her life is going well for her”. The constituents of well-being can also be spoken of as benefits or advantages—but when one uses these terms to refer to well-being, one must recognize that these benefits or advantages are constituents of well-being, and not merely of instrumental value. Benefits and advantages, in other words, fall into two categories: those that are good for someone merely because they foster other goods, and those that are good for someone in that they are constituents of that individual’s well-being.

A distinction must be drawn between being good at something and having what is good for oneself. It is one thing to say, “he is good at acting” and another to say “acting is good for him”. Philosophers speak of the former as “perfectionist value” and the latter as “prudential value”. That is because when one tries to be good at something, one hopes to move closer to the ideal of perfection. Prudential value is the kind of good that it would be in someone’s interest to obtain—it is another term that belongs to the group we have been discussing: “well-being”, “welfare”, “benefit”, and so on.

Even though perfectionist and prudential value must be distinguished, it should not be inferred that that being good at something is not a constituent of well-being. To return to the example used in the preceding paragraph: if someone has great talent as an actor and enjoys acting and every aspect of theatrical life, it is plausible to say that his well-being consists, at least to some extent, in his enjoyment of these activities. There are two different facts in play here: (i) he is an excellent actor, and (ii) being an excellent actor is good for him (not as a mere means, but as a component of his well-being). The value referred to in (i) is perfectionist value, and in (ii) prudential value. It would be prudent of him, in other words, to continue to excel as an actor.

These points about well-being and excellence are pertinent to a study of altruism because they help guard against a too narrow conception of the sorts of goods that an altruist might promote in others. Altruists do not aim only at the relief of suffering or the avoidance of harm—they also try to provide positive benefits to others for their sake. What counts as a benefit depends on what the correct theory of well-being is, but it is widely and plausibly assumed that certain kinds of excellence are components of a good life. For example, someone who founds a school that trains children to excel in the arts and sciences, or in sports, simply so that they will enjoy exercising such skills, would be regarded as a great public benefactor and philanthropist. Similarly, teachers and parents who foster in their students and children a love of literature and the skills needed to appreciate it would be viewed as altruists, if they are motivated by the thought that by themselves these activities are benefits to those students and children.

However, it is possible for someone to be dedicated to excellence and at the same time to be utterly indifferent to human well-being—and when this happens, we have no inclination to say that such a person is motivated by altruism. Someone might be devoted to a subject—mathematics, or philosophy, or literature—rather than to the well-being of those who study and master that subject. For example, imagine a student of literature who cares deeply about James Joyce’s Ulysses , because he takes it to be one of the supreme achievements of the human mind. He does not want that novel merely to gather dust on library shelves—it deserves readers who love and understand it, and so the skills needed to appreciate it must be kept alive from one generation to another. This kind of devotion to perfectionist value is not a form of altruism.

For an act to be altruistically motivated is for the benefactor —not the beneficiary—to have a certain attitude towards it. A child who acquires from a tennis instructor the skills of a good athlete and a love of the game may simply think of tennis as great fun—not as something that benefits him or as a constituent of his life going well. The child does not need to practice his skills because he believes that doing so is good for him: that is not a necessary condition of his being the beneficiary of an altruistic act. Similarly, someone might deny that physical suffering counts as something that is bad for him. (He should deny this, according to the Stoics.) But on any plausible theory of well-being, he is wrong about that; someone who aims to diminish the pain of another individual, out of a concern for that individual’s well-being, is acting altruistically.

To take another example, consider someone who develops a love of philosophy and immerses herself in the subject. When she asks herself whether she is doing this for her own good, she may reply that her reasons are quite different. She may say, “philosophy is worthwhile in itself”. Or: “I want to solve the mind-body problem and the free will problem because these are deep and important issues”. If we suggested to her that her philosophical struggles are a component of her well-being, she might regard that as a strange way of looking at things. But her view is not authoritative—whether she is right depends on what the best theory of well-being is. Others who care about her could plausibly believe that her love of philosophy is a component of her well-being, because it constitutes an enrichment and deepening of her mind, which is of value to her in itself, whether or not it leads to some further result. If they help her pursue her philosophical interests simply for her sake, their motives would be altruistic, even if she herself does not care about philosophy because she thinks it is good for her.

2. Does altruism exist?

According to a doctrine called “psychological egoism”, all human action is ultimately motivated by self-interest. The psychological egoist can agree with the idea, endorsed by common sense, that we often seek to benefit others besides ourselves; but he says that when we do so, that is because we regard helping others as a mere means to our own good. According to the psychological egoist, we do not care about others for their sake. Altruism, in other words, does not exist.

Since we have distinguished several different ways of using the term “altruism”, it will be helpful to make similar distinctions between different varieties of psychological egoism. Recall that an act is altruistic in the weak sense if it is motivated, at least in part, by the fact that it benefits someone else (or the fact that it will not injure anyone else). Psychological egoism, as defined in the preceding paragraph, denies that altruism in this sense exists. That is the strongest form of this doctrine; it is usually what philosophers have in mind when they discuss psychological egoism. But we can imagine weaker versions. One of them would deny that altruism is ever pure; it would say, in other words, that whenever we act, one of our motives is a desire for our own good. Another weaker form of psychological egoism would hold that we never voluntarily do what we foresee will sacrifice our well-being to some extent. This third form of psychological egoism would admit that sometimes one of our reasons for acting is the good we do for others for their sake; but it claims that we never act for the good of others when we think that doing so would make us worse off.

Someone might arrive at one or another of these forms of psychological egoism because she takes herself to be a keen observer of the human scene, and her acquaintance with other people has convinced her that this is how they are motivated. But that way of justifying psychological egoism has a serious weakness. Others can say to this psychological egoist:

Perhaps the people you know are like this. But my experience of the world is rather different from yours. I know many people who try to benefit others for their sake. I myself act altruistically. So, at most, your theory applies only to the people in your social world.

The psychological egoist can respond to this criticism in either of two ways. First, she might claim that his doctrine is supported by experimental evidence. That is, she might believe that (i) the subjects studied by psychologists in carefully conducted experiments have been shown to be not purely altruistic, or (more strongly) that these subjects ultimately care only about their own good; and (ii) that we can infer from these experiments that all human beings are motivated in the same way.

This is a disputed matter. There is experimental evidence that casts doubt on psychological egoism in its strong and in weaker forms, but the controversy continues (see Batson 2011; Stich et al. 2010).

A second response on the part of the psychological egoist would consist in an a priori philosophical argument for one or another version of that doctrine. According to this line of thinking, we can see “from the armchair”—that is, without seeking empirical confirmation of any sort—that psychological egoism (in one of its forms) must be true.

How might such an argument go? Drawing upon some ideas that can be found in Plato’s dialogues, we might affirm two premises: (i) What motivates us to act is always a desire; (ii) all desires are to be understood on the model of hunger (see Meno 77c; Symposium 199e–200a, 204e).

To elaborate on the idea behind (ii): When we are hungry, our hunger has an object: food (or perhaps some particular kind of food). But we do not want to ingest the food for its own sake; what we are really after is the feeling of satisfaction that we expect to get as a result of eating. Ingesting this or that piece of food is something we want, but only as a means of achieving a sense of satisfaction or satiation.

If all desire is understood in the same way, and all motivation takes the form of desire, then we can infer that psychological egoism in its strong form is true (and therefore its weaker versions are also true). Consider an action that seems, on the surface, to be altruistically motivated: I give you a gift simply because I think you will like it. Now, since I want to give you this gift, and all desire should be understood as a kind of hunger, I am hungering after your feeling pleased, as I hunger after a piece of food. But just as no one wants to ingest a piece of food for its own sake, I do not want you to feel pleased for your sake; rather, what I am seeking is the feeling of satisfaction I will get when you are pleased, and your being pleased is simply the means by which I achieve satisfaction. Accordingly, we don’t have to be keen observers of other people or look within ourselves to arrive at psychological egoism. We can recognize that this doctrine is correct simply by thinking about the nature of motivation and desire.

But the assumption that all desires are like hunger in the relevant respect is open to question. Hunger is not satisfied if one still feels hungry after one has eaten. It seeks a certain kind of consciousness in oneself. But many kinds of desires are not like that. Suppose, for example, that I want my young children to be prosperous as adults long after I have died, and I take steps that increase to some small degree their chances of achieving that distant goal. What my desire is for is their prosperity far into the future, not my current or future feeling of satisfaction. I don’t know and cannot know whether the steps that I take will actually bring about the goal I seek; what I do know is that I will not be alive when they are adults, and so even if they are prosperous, that will give me no pleasure. (Since, by hypothesis I can only hope, and do not feel confident, that the provisions I make for them will actually produce the good results I seek for them, I get little current satisfaction from my act.) It would make no sense, therefore, to suggest that I do not want them to be prosperous for their sake, but only as a means to the achievement of some goal of my own. My goal is their well-being, not my own. In fact, if I allocate to them resources that I myself need, in the hope that doing so will make their lives better, I am doing something that one form of psychological egoism says is impossible: sacrificing my own good, to some degree, for the sake of others. If the psychological egoist claims that such self-sacrifice is impossible because all desire is like hunger, the reply should be that this model does not fit all cases of desire.

Recall the two premises used by the armchair psychological egoist: (i) What motivates us to act is always a desire; (ii) all desires are to be understood on the model of hunger. The second premise is implausible, as we have just seen; and, since both premises must be true for the argument to reach its conclusion, the argument can be rejected.

It is worth observing, however, that first premise of this argument is also open to question.

This thesis that what motivates us to act is always a desire should be accepted only if we have a good understanding of what a desire is. If a desire is simply identified with whatever internal state moves someone to act, then the claim, “what motivates us to act is always a desire”, when spelled out more fully, is a tautology. It says: “the internal state that moves us to act is always the internal state that moves us to act”. That is not a substantive insight into human psychology, but a statement of identity, of the form “ A = A ”. We might have thought we were learning something about what causes action by being told, “what motivates people is always a desire”, but if “desire” is just a term for whatever it is that motivates us, we are learning nothing (see Nagel 1970: 27–32).

Here is a different way of making the same point: As the words “desire” and “want” are often used, it makes good sense to say: “I don’t want to do this, but I think I ought to”. That is the sort of remark we often make when we take ourselves to have an unpleasant duty or obligation, or when we face a challenge that we expect to be difficult and stressful. In these sorts of situation, we do not hunger after the goal we move towards. So, as the word “desire” is often used, it is simply false that what motivates us to act is always a desire. Now, the psychological egoist who seeks an a priori defense of this doctrine might say:

when I claim that what motivates us to act is always a desire, I am not using the word “desire” as it is sometimes used. My usage is much broader. Among desires, in this broad sense, I include the belief that one ought to do something. In fact, it includes any internal state that causes someone to act.

Clearly, the thesis that what moves us is always a desire, when so understood, is empty.

The common sense terms we often use to explain why we help others do not need to refer to our own desires. You are in a public space and come across someone off-putting in appearance but who seems to need your help. He appears to be in pain, or confused, or needy in some way. Recognizing this, you take yourself to have a good reason to offer him your assistance. You think that you ought to ask him whether you can help—even though that will delay you and may cause you some trouble and discomfort. These ways of describing your motivation are all that is needed to explain why you offered him your help, and it is not necessary to add, “I wanted to help him”. Admittedly, when “desire” is used to designate whatever it is that motivates someone, it is true that you wanted to help him. But what does the explanatory work, in these cases, is your recognition of his need and your judgment that therefore you ought to offer your help. Saying, “I wanted to help him” would be misleading, since it would suggest that there was something pleasant that you expected to get by offering your assistance. After you have given him your help, it is true, you might think back on this encounter, and be pleased that you had done the right thing. But you might not—you might be worried that what you did actually made him worse off, despite your good intentions. And in any case, if you do look back with pleasure at your good deed, it does not follow that feeling good was your goal all along, and that you merely used him as a means to that end. That would follow only if desire by its very nature is a form of hunger.

Of the three forms of psychological egoism distinguished above, the one that is least open to objection is the weak form that holds that altruism is never pure. It claims that whenever we act, one of our motives is a desire for our own good. There is no good a priori argument for this thesis—or, at any rate, the a priori argument we have been considering for the strongest form of psychological egoism does not support it, because the two premises used in that argument are so implausible. But it might nonetheless be suggested that as a matter of fact we always do find some self-interested motivation that accompanies altruistically motivated behavior. It is difficult to refute that proposal. We should not pretend that we know all of the considerations and causes that underlie our behavior. Some of our motives are hidden, and there is too much going on in our minds for us to be aware of the whole of our psychology. So, for all we know, we might never be pure altruists.

But what of the other weak form of psychological egoism?—the one that admits that sometimes one of our reasons for acting is the good we do for others for their sake, but claims that we never act for the good of others when we think that doing so would make us worse off. It says, in other words, that we never voluntarily do what we foresee will sacrifice our well-being to some extent.

The first point to be made about this form of psychological egoism is that, once again, there is no a priori argument to support it. The two premises we have been examining—that all action is motivated by desire and all desire is like hunger—are implausible, and so they do not support the thesis that we never sacrifice our well-being to any degree. If this form of psychological egoism is to be sustained, its evidence would have to be drawn from the observation of each human being’s reasons for acting. It would have to say: when our motives are carefully scrutinized, it may indeed be found that although we do good to others for the sake of those others, we never do so when we think it would detract even slightly from our own well-being. In other words, we count the good of others as something that by itself gives us a reason, but it is always a weak reason, in that it is never as strong as reasons that derive from our self-interest.

We have no reason to suppose that human behavior is so uniform in its motivation. A far more plausible hypothesis about human motives is that they vary a great deal from one person to another. Some people are never altruistic; others are just as this weak form of psychological egoism says: they are altruistic, but only when they think this will not detract from their own well-being; and then there is a third and large category filled with people who, to some degree or other, are willing to sacrifice their well-being for others. Within this category there is wide range—some are willing to make only small sacrifices, others larger sacrifices, and some extraordinarily large sacrifices. This way of thinking has the great advantage of allowing our experience of each individual to provide us with the evidence by means of which we characterize him. We should not label everyone as an egoist on the basis of some a priori theory; rather, we should assess each person’s degree of egoism and altruism on the basis of what we can discern of their motives.

One further point should be made about our reasons for supposing that there is such a thing as altruism. Just as we can ask, “what entitles us to believe that altruism exists?” so we can ask: “what entitles us to believe that egoism exists?” Consider the possibility that whenever we act for our own good, we are not doing so only for our own sake, but also for the sake of someone else. On what grounds are we entitled to reject that possibility?

Once again, the egoist might reply that it is an a priori truth that all of our actions are ultimately motivated only by self-interest, but we have seen the weakness of the premises that support that argument. So, if the hypothesis that sometimes one acts only for one’s own sake is true, it must recommend itself to us because close observation of human behavior supports it. We must find actual cases of someone promoting his own good only for his own sake. It is no easier to be confident about such matters than it is easy to be confident that someone has acted out of purely altruistic motives. We realize that much of what we do for ourselves has consequences for other people as well, and we care to some degree about those other people. Perhaps our ultimate motivation always includes an other-regarding component. It is more difficult to find evidence against that suggestion than one might have thought.

To take matters to an extreme, it might be suggested that our ultimate motivation is always entirely other-regarding. According to this far-fetched hypothesis, whenever we act for our own good, we do so not at all for our own sake, but always entirely for the sake of someone else. The important point here is that the denial that altruism exists should be regarded with as much suspicion as this contrary denial, according to which people never act ultimately for their own good. Both are dubious universal generalizations. Both have far less plausibility than the common sense assumption that people sometimes act in purely egoistic ways, sometimes in purely altruistic ways, and often in ways that mix, in varying degrees, the good of oneself and the good of others.

An assumption that many people make about egoistic and altruistic motives is that it is more difficult to justify the latter than the former, or that the former do not require justification whereas the latter do. If someone asks himself, “Why should I take my own good to be a reason to do anything?” it is tempting to respond that something is amiss in the very asking of this question—perhaps because there can be no answer to it. Self-interest, it might be said, can be given no justification and needs none. By contrast, since other people are other , it seems as though some reason needs to be given for building a bridge from oneself to those others. In other words, we apparently have to find something in others that justifies our taking an interest in their well-being, whereas one need not seek something in oneself that would justify self-regard. (Perhaps what we find in others that justifies altruism is that they are just like oneself in important respects.) It is worth asking whether this apparent asymmetry between justifying self-interest and justifying altruism is real or only apparent.

One response to this question is that the asymmetry is illusory because the very distinction between oneself and others is artificial and an obstacle to clear thinking. One can begin to challenge the validity or importance of the distinction between self and others by noticing how many changes occur in the inner life of what is, conventionally speaking, a single “person”. The mind of a newborn, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle aged person, and an old person approaching death—these can have at least as many differences as do those who are conventionally counted as two distinct individuals. If a young man of twenty years sets aside money to provide for his retirement in old age, he is saving for someone who will be quite different from himself. Why should that not be called altruism rather than self-interest? Why does it matter whether it is called acting for his own good or for the good of another? (See Parfit 1984.)

Another kind of challenge to the validity of the distinction between self and others derives from the observation made by David Hume that when we look within and make an inventory of the contents of our mental life, we have no acquaintance with any entity that would provide a reference for the word “self”. Introspection can tell us something about sensations, feelings, and thoughts—but we do not have any experience of some entity that is the one who has these sensations, feelings, and thoughts. That point might be regarded as a reason to reject the common sense view that when you refer to yourself, and distinguish yourself from someone else, there is something real that you are talking about, or some valid distinction between yourself and others. It might be thought, in other words, that the ordinary distinction between altruistic and egoistic motives is misguided because there are no such things as selves.

A third metaphysical possibility is this: human beings cannot be understood one by one, as though each were a self-sufficient and fully real individual. That way of thinking about ourselves fails to recognize the profound way in which we are by our nature social beings. You and I and others are by our nature mere parts of some larger social unit. As an analogy, one might think of the human body and such parts of the body as fingers, hands, arms, legs, toes, torso, and so on. They cannot exist, much less function properly, in isolation. Similarly, it might be said that individual human beings are mere fragments of a larger social whole. Accordingly, instead of using the concepts expressed by the terms “self-interested” and “altruistic”, we should see ourselves as contributors to the success and well-functioning of the larger community to which we belong (see Brink 2003; Green 1883).

The remainder of this essay will set aside these unorthodox alternatives to the common sense metaphysical framework that we normally presuppose when we think about self-interested and altruistic motives. It would take us too far afield to examine them. We will continue to make these assumptions: First, a single individual human being persists over time from birth to death, even when the mental life of that individual undergoes many changes. Second, there is someone one is referring to when one talks about oneself, even though there is no object called the “self” that we detect introspectively. And the fact that we do not encounter such an object by introspection is no reason to doubt the validity of the distinction made between oneself and others. Third, although certain things (arms, legs, noses, etc.) are by their very nature parts of a whole, no human being is by nature a part in that same way. Rejecting these ideas, we will continue to assume, with common sense, that for each human being there is such a thing as what is good for that human being; and that the questions, “what is good for me?”, “what is good for that other individual, who is not me?” are different questions. Accordingly, it is one thing for a reason to be self-interested, and another for it to be altruistic (although of course one and the same act can be supported by both kinds of reasons).

Assuming, then, that the distinction between these motives is real, the questions we asked at the beginning of this section remain: Why ought one to be altruistic? Does one need a justification for being motivated in this way? Is egoistic motivation on a sounder footing than altruistic motivation, in that it stands in no need of justification?

4. Why care about others?

Radically different ways of answering these questions can be found in moral philosophy. The first makes self-interested motivation fundamental; it holds that we should be altruistic because it is in our interest to be so moved. That strategy is often attributed to the Greek and Roman philosophers of antiquity—Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans (see Annas 1993).

In the modern era, a second approach has come to the fore, built on the notion that moral thinking is not self-centered but impartial and impersonal. Its basic idea is that when we think morally about what to do, reason takes a god’s-eye perspective and sets aside the emotional bias we normally have in our own favor, or in favor of our circle of friends or our community. Here Kant 1785 is a representative figure, but so too are the utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham 1789, John Stuart Mill 1864, and Henry Sidgwick 1907.

A third approach, championed by David Hume (1739), Adam Smith (1759), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1840), gives sympathy, compassion, and personal affection—rather than impartial reason—a central role to play in the moral life. It holds that there is something extraordinarily valuable in the sentimental bonds that take hold among human beings—a feature of human life that is overlooked or distorted when morality is understood solely or primarily in impersonal terms and from a god’s-eye point of view. In favorable conditions, we naturally and emotionally respond to the weal and woe of others; we do not and should not look for reasons to do so. (The assorted ideas labeled “sentimentalism” in this entry are an amalgam of ideas derived loosely from the writings of Blum 1980; Noddings 1986; Slote 1992, 2001 2010, 2013; and others. The term is sometimes applied to a family of meta-ethical views that ground the meaning or justification of moral propositions in attitudes rather than response-independent facts (Blackburn 2001). Here, by contrast, sentimentalism is a ground-level thesis about what is most valuable in human relationships. It could be combined with meta-ethical sentimentalism, but need not be.)

These three approaches are hardly an exhaustive survey of all that has been said in the Western philosophical tradition about altruism. A fuller treatment would examine the Christian conception of love, as developed by thinkers of the medieval period. To a large extent, such figures as Augustine and Aquinas work within a eudaimonistic framework, although they are also influenced by the Neoplatonic picture of the visible world as an outpouring of the bountifulness of divine goodness. To the extent that rewards of heaven and the sufferings of hell play a role in a theocentric framework, there are instrumental reasons, for those who need them, to care for others. But there are other reasons as well. Other-regarding virtues like charity and justice are perfections of the human soul and are therefore components of our earthly well-being. Christian philosophy rejects Aristotle’s doctrine that divine being has no ethical qualities and makes no interventions in human life. God is a person who loves his creation, human beings above all. When we love others for themselves, we imitate God and express our love for him (Lewis 1960).

The term “eudaimonism” is often used by philosophers to refer to the ethical orientation of all or the major philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity. “ Eudaimonia ” is the ordinary Greek word they apply to the highest good. As Aristotle observes at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics , whenever we act, we aim at some good—but goods are not all at the same level. Lower goods are undertaken for the sake of more valuable goals, which are in turn pursued in order to achieve still better goods. This hierarchy of value cannot continue endlessly—a life must have some ultimate goal, something that is valuable in itself and not for the sake of anything still better. What that goal should be, Aristotle acknowledges, is a much disputed matter; but at any rate, everyone uses the word “ eudaimonia ” to designate that highest good. (“Happiness” is the standard translation, but “well-being” and “flourishing” may be closer to the Greek word’s meaning.)

Aristotle does not say that one’s ultimate goal should be one’s own well-being ( eudaimonia ) and no one else’s . On the contrary, he holds that the common good (the good of the whole political community) is superior to the good of a single individual. Nonetheless, it has become common among scholars of ancient ethics to attribute to Aristotle and the other major moral philosophers of antiquity the assumption that one’s ultimate goal should just be one’s own well-being.

Is this an implausible assumption? That is the accusation of many systems of modern moral philosophy, but one must be careful not to attribute to Greek and Roman ethics an extreme endorsement of selfishness. One way to see that this would be unfair is to recognize how important it is to Aristotle that we love others for their sake . That is a key ingredient of his lengthy discussion of friendship and love in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics . There he argues that (i) friendship is an ingredient of a good life, and (ii) to be a friend to someone (or at any rate a friend of the best sort) one must not treat him as a mere means to one’s own advantage or one’s own pleasure. He elaborates on (ii) by adding that in friendships of the best sort, each individual admires the other for the excellence of that other person’s character, and benefits him for that reason. It is clear, then, that he explicitly condemns those who treat others as mere means to their own ends. So, even if it is true that, according to Aristotle, one’s ultimate goal should be one’s own well-being (and no one else’s), he combines this with the denial that the good of others should be valued solely as a means to one’s own.

It is crucial, at this point, that we keep in mind the distinction, drawn above in section 1.4 , between (i) what constitutes well-being and (ii) what is a necessary means towards or a pre-condition of well-being. Aristotle argues that one’s well-being is constituted by the excellent use of one’s reason, and that such virtues as justice, courage, and generosity are among the qualities in which one’s good consists. When one acts with justice and generosity towards one’s family, or friends, or the larger community, that is good for oneself (one is achieving one’s ultimate goal) and it is also good for others—in fact, one’s action is motivated in part by the desire to benefit those others for their sake. If treating others justly and in accordance with the other ethical virtues were merely a means towards one’s own well-being, Aristotle’s framework for ethics would be objectionably self-regarding—and it would be difficult for it to endorse, without inconsistency, the thesis that we ought to benefit others for their sake.

We should recall a point made in section 1.1 : altruistic acts need not involve self-sacrifice, and they remain altruistic even when they are performed from a mixture of motives, some of which are self-interested. For Aristotle, altruism should always be accompanied by self-interested motives. His system of practical thought could be dismissed out of hand if one begins with the assumption that moral motivation must be purely altruistic, free from all taint of self-regard. Otherwise, it would not count as moral . That idea has some currency, and it is often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Kant. But on reflection, it is open to question. If it is the case that whenever one has a good reason to benefit someone else for that person’s sake, there is also a second good reason as well—namely, that in doing so one will also benefit oneself—it would be implausible to suppose that one should not let that second reason have any influence on one’s motivation.

Nonetheless, if another point made earlier is correct, there is a serious problem for Aristotle’s eudaimonism. In section 1.2 , we noted that someone is open to criticism if he is always guided by the principle, “I shall never do anything unless doing so is best for me”. Such a person seems insufficiently altruistic, insufficiently willing to make compromises for the good of others. He is (to use the term introduced earlier) never altruistic in the strong sense. Aristotle, it might be said, would have been on firmer ground if he had said that ultimately one should act for one’s own good and that of others . (To be fair to him, he does not deny this; on the other hand, he does say that treating others well never makes one worse off.)

If the project undertaken by Greek and Roman moral philosophy is to begin with the unquestioned assumption that one should never act contrary to one’s own good, and that one’s ultimate end should be only one’s own eudaimonia, it faces the serious objection that it will never be able, on this basis, to give proper recognition to the interests of others. The idea underlying this objection is that we should be directly concerned with others: the fact that an act one performs benefits someone else can already provide a reason for undertaking it, without having to be accompanied by a self -interested reason. There is no argument to be found in ancient ethics –none is offered—that purports to show that the only way to justify having other-regarding motives is by appealing to the good it does oneself to have them.

At the same time, that gives us no reason to dismiss out of hand the efforts made by these authors to show that in fact one does benefit by having altruistic motives. There is nothing morally offensive about asking the question: “is it good for someone to be a good person?” once it is understood that being a good person might be a component of well-being, not a means to further private ends. As noted earlier ( section 1.4 ), certain kinds of excellence are widely assumed to be components of a good life. The examples used there were excellence in the arts, the sciences, and sport. But excelling at ethical life is also a plausible example, since it consists in developing and exercising cognitive, emotional, and social skills that we are pleased and proud to have. In any case, it would be sheer dogmatism to close our minds and refuse to listen to the arguments found in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics that ethical virtue is of great value because it is a component (and for the Stoics the sole component) of one’s well-being.

We turn now to the idea, central to one modern approach to ethics, that when we think morally, we reason from an impartial or impersonal perspective. Moral thinking is not self-centered. Of course we all have an emotional bias that attaches special weight to self-interest, and we are often partial to our particular circle of friends or our community. But when we look at the world from a moral point of view, we try to set aside this self-centered framework. Taking a god’s eye perspective on things, we ask ourselves what one ought to do in this or that situation—not what would be good for me or my friends. It is as though we forget about locating ourselves as this particular person; we abstract away from our normal self-centered perspective and seek the solution to a practical problem that anyone similarly impartial would also arrive at.

We can find anticipations or analogues of this idea in ancient ethics—for example, in Plato’s and Aristotle’s recognition that the political community serves the common good rather the interest of some one class or faction; and in the Stoic belief that the cosmos is governed by a providential force that assigns to each of us a distinctive role by which we serve not just ourselves but also the whole. In the ideal city of Plato’s Republic , the family and private property are abolished within the elite classes, because these institutions interfere with the development of a common concern for all individuals. It is not clear how these ideas can be made to fit within a eudaimonistic framework. How can the good of the community serve as the highest standard of evaluation if one’s own good alone is one’s highest end? One way of looking at the history of ethics would be to say that modern ethics salvages the impartialism that occasionally appears in ancient ethics, and rightly abandons its attempt to derive a justification of altruism from a prior commitment to self-interest. Contemporary eudaimonists, of course, would tell a different story (see, for example Annas 1993; LeBar 2013; Russell 2012).

The notion of impartiality has thus far been described in highly general terms, and it is important to see that there are different ways of making it more concrete. One way of doing so is adopted by utilitarians, and more generally, by consequentialists. (The utilitarianism of Bentham 1789, Mill 1864, and Sidgwick 1907 holds that one is to maximize the greatest balance of pleasure over pain—treating pleasure and the absence of pain as the sole constituents of well-being. Consequentialism abstracts away from this hedonistic component of utilitarianism; it requires one to maximize the greatest balance of good over bad. See Driver 2012.) In their calculus, no individual’s good is given greater weight or importance than any other’s. Your own good, therefore, is not to be treated by you as having greater weight as a reason than anyone else’s, simply because it is your own good. The well-being of a human being (or of a sentient creature) is what provides one with a reason to act: that is why one has a reason to take one’s own good into consideration in practical thinking. But the same point applies equally and with equal force to the well-being of anyone else.

But that is not the only way of taking the general notion of impartiality and making it more specific. The general idea, as stated earlier, is that moral thinking, unlike prudential thinking, is not self-centered. One can make this idea more concrete by taking it to mean that there is a single set of rules or norms that apply equally to all human beings, and so the standard by which one answers the question, “what should I do in this situation?” is the standard by which one answers the question, “what should anyone do in this situation?” Someone whose practical reasoning is guided by this condition is abiding by an ideal of impartiality. He makes no special exceptions for himself or his friends.

Suppose, for example, that you are a lifeguard and one afternoon you must choose between swimming north to rescue one group and swimming south to rescue another. The northern group includes your friend, but the southern group, full of strangers, is much larger. The ideal of impartiality described in the previous paragraph does not by itself determine what one should do in this situation; what it requires is simply that it should make no difference that the lifeguard faced with this dilemma is you (and the northern group includes your friend). What you should do, if you are the lifeguard, is what any lifeguard ought to do in that situation. If it is right to take friendship into consideration, when making this decision, then it would be right for anyone to do so. (What would be right, in that case, would be for each individual to choose the good of his or her friend over the good of strangers.)

The consequentialist has a more radical interpretation of what impartiality means and requires. His ideal of impartiality does not allow the lifeguard to take into consideration the fact that by swimming north he will be able to save his friend. After all, the well-being of his friend is not made more valuable simply because that person is his friend. Just as my good is not made more valuable than the good of others simply because it is my good, so too the well-being of my friend deserves no extra weight because he is a friend of mine . So, the lifeguard, according to the consequentialist, must choose to save one group rather than the other solely on the basis of the greater balance of good over bad.

The consequentialist will correctly point out that quite often one is in a better position to promote one’s own good than that of others. As a rule, I have more knowledge about what is good for me than I have about what is good for strangers. It often requires fewer resources for me to benefit myself than to benefit others. I know immediately when I am hungry without having to ask, and I know what kind of food I like. But additional steps are needed to find out when others are hungry and which food they like. These sorts of facts about one’s special relationship to oneself might allow the consequentialist to justify giving somewhat more attention to one’s own well-being than that of anyone else. Even so, there is only one individual who is me; and the number of other individuals whom I can benefit, if I make the effort, is very large. When all of these factors are taken into consideration, it will often be the case that self-interested reasons ought to give way to altruistic motives.

Consequentialism evidently does not recognize certain ways in which each human being has a special relation to her own well-being—a relation different from the one she has to the well-being of others. When each of us becomes an adult, we are normally charged with the special responsibility of having to look after our own welfare. Young children are not expected to be in command of their own lives; they are not yet competent to occupy this role. But the point of their education is to train them so that as adults they can be responsible for themselves. A fully mature person is rightly expected by others to care for someone in particular—namely herself. She is given room to make decisions about her own life but is not given the same kind and degree of authority over the lives of others. If she would like to devote herself to others, she cannot simply do so without receiving their permission, or without taking other steps that make her entry into their lives permissible. Consequentialism, by contrast, regards all adult human beings as equally responsible for the well-being of all. It does not take seriously the idea that our social relations are governed by a division of labor that charges each with a special responsibility for herself—and certain others as well (one’s children, one’s friends, and so on.)

According to the weaker interpretation of impartiality described above, moral rules reflect this division of labor. (By the “weaker interpretation” is meant the thesis that moral thinking avoids being self-centered because it upholds a single set of rules or norms that apply equally to all human beings.) Consider, for example, the duty we normally have to help others, even when they are strangers. If someone is in need, and asks for your assistance, that gives you a reason to help him, and you should do so, provided that compliance with such appeals is not overly burdensome . Notice the escape clause: it builds into the duty to aid others a recognition of the importance of each person having a significant degree of control over his own life. Common sense morality assumes that what we owe to others might call for some sacrifice of our own good, but also that in the ordinary business of life the degree of sacrifice should fall within certain limits, so that we can make good use of the responsibility we have been given as adults to seek our own good. The balance struck by moral rules between the claims of self-interest and the claims of others is what makes it possible for those rules to be recognized and accepted as appropriate. These rules leave us free to volunteer to make greater sacrifices; but such greater sacrifices are not required of us except in extraordinary circumstances (wars, disasters, emergencies).

The three approaches to altruism that we have examined thus far give three rather different answers to the question: “why should one act for the sake of others and not only for one’s own sake?”

Eudaimonism replies that those who act for the sake of others are benefited by having an altruistic disposition.

The consequentialist’s answer begins with the claim that one’s own well-being ought to be of concern to oneself simply because it is someone’s well-being; it should not be of importance to oneself simply because it is one’s own well-being. There is, in other words, no reason why a benefit should go to you rather than someone else just because you are the one who would be receiving it. Accordingly, if one assumes, as one should, that one should act for one’s own sake, then one has no less a reason to act for the good of anyone and everyone else.

If we adopt a weaker interpretation of impartiality, we see the justification of altruism simply by seeing that we have a duty to aid other people in certain circumstances. The moral rule that requires us to help others is a rule that calls upon us to help them not as a means to our own good, but simply in virtue of their need. And we see the rule as justified by recognizing that it strikes a proper balance between our self-concern and the appropriate claims of others.

Notice that both consequentialism and the weaker impartialist position are compatible with the eudaimonist’s thesis that having altruistic motives is a component of one’s own well-being. What these two forms of impartialism reject is the stronger eudaimonistic thesis that one’s ultimate goal should be one’s own well-being and that alone.

That stronger eudaimonistic thesis and consequentialism stand at opposite poles from each other, in the following respect: The first of these poles elevates the self to a position of primacy, since it is only one’s own well-being that constitutes one’s ultimate goal; by contrast, consequentialism, at the opposite extreme, deflates the self to the point where it has no more claim to one’s attention than does any other individual. The weak impartialist attempts to occupy a middle ground.

Yet another conception of impartiality—and a novel argument for the rationality of altruism—can be found in the work of Thomas Nagel. In The Possibility of Altruism (1970), he seeks to undermine both psychological egoism, in its strong form, as defined in section 2.1 above, and its normative counterpart (sometimes called “rational egoism or “ethical egoism”), which holds that one ought to have no direct concern with the good of others. Indirect concern, the ethical egoist grants, can be justified: the good of others may be instrumental to one’s own good, or one might happen to have a sentimental attachment to others. But absent these contingent relations to others, one has, according to the ethical egoist, no reason to care about their well-being.

Nagel doubts that anyone actually is a psychological egoist (1970: 84–85), but his major concern is to refute ethical egoism, by showing that altruism is a rational requirement on action. His idea is not simply that we ought in certain circumstances to help others for their sake; it is also that we are acting irrationally if we do not. That is because it is required of us as rational beings to view ourselves and others from what Nagel calls “the impersonal standpoint”. As he puts it,

to recognize others fully as persons requires a conception of oneself as identical with a particular, impersonally specifiable inhabitant of the world, among others of a similar nature. (1970: 100)

Nagel likens the impersonal standpoint to the prudential policy of regarding all times in one’s life as equal in importance. One has reason not to be indifferent to one’s future because the present moment is not more reason-giving simply by virtue of being present. Similarly, he holds, one has reason not to be indifferent to other people, because the fact that some individual is me is not more reason-giving simply because he is me. Terms like “now” and “later, ” “me and not me” point to no differences that make a rational difference. A time that is later eventually becomes a time that is now; that is why it is arbitrary and irrational to discount the future simply because it is future. Giving greater weight to someone’s good because that person is me is no less irrational.

The “impersonal standpoint”, as Nagel conceives it, is a view of the world from outside it, one that deprives one of information about which individual in that world one is. (It is, in the phrase Nagel chose as the title of his 1986 book, The View From Nowhere .) From this perspective, one need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist—one need not maximize the good, but can abide by the constraints of principles of the right. But certain principles are ruled out from the impersonal standpoint: egoism is, as well as any other principle that gives one individual or group a reason not shared by all others. For example, if someone has reason to avoid pain, that must be because pain—anyone’s pain—is to be avoided. So, it cannot be the case that although I have a reason to avoid pain, others are permitted to be indifferent to my plight, as if that pain were not an objectively bad thing, something that gives only the person who feels it a reason to oppose it. Nagel called such reasons “objective”, as contrasted with “subjective”. Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (1984) , speaks instead of “agent-relative” and “agent neutral” reasons, and subsequently Nagel himself adopted these terms. The critique of egoism in The Possibility of Altruism rests on the thesis that all genuine reasons are agent neutral.

What Nagel’s position and utilitarianism have in common is a perspective that is the opposite of the self-centered world of rational egoism: from the point of view of this self-less perspective, each individual is just a tiny part of a vast universe of moral subjects, each of no more importance or value than any other. Our common sense point of view, moving from our inner life looking outward, lulls us into a massive kind of insularity—a tendency to downplay or ignore the fact that we are just one individual of no greater importance than any other. We put ourselves at the center of our world, and this can only be corrected by stepping back, leaving out of our picture the particular individual one is, and making general judgments about how human beings should behave towards each other. From this perspective, when one person ought to do something, some related requirement is imposed on all others as well –some “ought” statement applies to each.

Nagel is faced with the problem of how to explain why self-interest is not regularly swamped by agent-neutral reasons. If anyone’s pain imposes on all other moral agents a requirement of some sort, then one person’s pain is everyone’s problem. As Nagel says in The View From Nowhere , (using the term “objective standpoint” for the impersonal standpoint),

when we take up the objective standpoint, the problem is not that values seem to disappear but that there are too many of them, coming from every life and drowning out those that arise from our own. (1986: 147)

It would be consistent with this picture to add that the weight of reasons that derive from the situation of other people is extremely small and becomes increasingly so, as they are added together. Therefore, it might be said, they do not often outweigh reasons of self-interest. But that would be an ad hoc stipulation, and would differ only slightly from the egoist’s thesis that the good of others has no independent weight. It is hard to believe that we are forced to choose between ethical egoism (which says that only one’s own pain ought to be one’s direct concern) and Nagel’s conception of impartiality (according to which everyone’s pain ought to weigh on me, because that of others is as bad as my own). The first demands no altruism of us, the second too much.

Some philosophers would say that the approaches to altruism discussed thus far are missing an important—perhaps the most important—ingredient in moral motivation. These approaches, one might say, make altruism a matter of the head, but it is much more a matter of the heart. The eudaimonist can say that we should have a certain amount of fellow feeling, but justifies that emotional response by giving a self-interested reason for being so motivated. The consequentialist seems to leave no legitimate room in our moral thinking for the friendly feelings and love we have for particular individuals, for these sentiments are often at odds with the project of increasing the total amount of good in the world. The weak impartialist says that in certain situations we are to be moved by the good of others, but that is only because there is a moral rule, striking a reasonable balance between oneself and others, that requires one to do so. All three approaches—so the objection goes—are too cold and calculating. They call upon us to treat others in accordance with a formula or rule or general policy. What is most important in human relationships cannot be captured by an approach that begins with a general rule about how to treat others, and justifies a certain way of treating each particular individual simply by applying that general rule.

It would miss the point of this critique if one said, in response, that having an emotional response to the good of others is an effective means of getting oneself to give them the aid they need. (For example, the consequentialist can say that this doctrine does call upon us to act on the basis of friendly feelings and love towards particular individuals, because over the long run relationships solidified by such sentiments are likely to result in a greater balance of good over bad than would colder relationships.) But a defender of the critique put forward in the preceding paragraph would reply that one’s emotional response to the good or ill of others can be assessed as appropriate independently of the effectiveness of one’s emotions as motivators of action. When we feel compassion for the suffering of a particular individual, that reaction is already justified; the suffering of another ought to elicit such a response simply because that is the appropriate reaction. Consider, as an analogy, the proper reaction to the death of a loved one; this calls forth grief and ought to do so, even though grief cannot undo one’s loss. In the same way, it could be said that altruistic feelings are the appropriate response to the good and ill of others, quite apart from whether those feelings lead to results. That does not imply that it does not matter whether one does anything for the good of others. One ought to alleviate their suffering and seek their well-being; that is because this is the proper behavioral expression of one’s feeling for them. If, in the face of the suffering of others, one feels nothing and offers no help, the fundamental flaw in one’s response is one’s emotional indifference, and a secondary flaw is the failure to act that flows from that emotional defect.

According to this “sentimentalist” approach to altruism, the question, “why should one act for the sake of others and not only for one’s own sake?” should not be answered by appealing to some notion of impartiality or some conception of well-being. That would be no better than trying to justify grief by way of impartiality or well-being. The sentimentalist simply asks us to recognize that the situation of this or that human being (or animal) rightly calls forth a certain emotional response, and the help we give is the proper expression of that sentiment.

To assess the role that sympathy should play in our relations with other human beings, it will be helpful to consider Kant’s discussion of this question in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). He notes that

many souls are so compassionately disposed that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them. (4:398)

He is by no means contemptuous of them—on the contrary, he says that they “deserve praise and encouragement” (4:398). But not the highest praise or the strongest encouragement.

What they do not deserve, he says, is our “esteem”, because their motivation “has no genuinely moral worth”. That is because the “maxim” of what they do “lacks the moral merit of such actions done not out of inclination but out of duty” (4:398). Kant means that these people are not following a rule when they help others—a rule, rationally acceptable to all, according to which all those who are in such and such circumstances ought to be helped because it is morally right to do so. (The term “such and such circumstances” is a place-holder for a phrase stating in general terms what those circumstances are.) These compassionate people act instead on an emotional basis: they are pained by the misfortunes of others, and they know that if they offer their help, they will give themselves pleasure. That is a good motive, Kant thinks, but it ought not to be one’s sole or primary reason for helping others.

Kant elaborates on his claim by imagining a transformation in one of these sympathetic and compassionate people: suppose someone’s misfortunes have brought him sorrows that extinguish his feeling for others. He retains his power to “assist others in distress” but now “their adversity no longer stir[s] him”. He feels no “inclination” to help them, but does so nonetheless, simply because he believes he has a moral duty to do so. Kant says that when this happens, this man’s character and his action have “ moral worth”—whereas they had none before. His motive is now “incomparably the highest”—not only is it better than before, but, because it is now a moral motive, it has a kind of value that takes priority over every other kind (4:398).

What should we make of this? To begin with, we should acknowledge that if someone assists another person because he is aware of that person’s suffering and is distressed by it, he may not be acting for the most admirable of motives. For example, if you hear someone crying, and this leads you to help him, you may be motivated solely by your desire for a good night’s sleep, which you could not have had, had he continued to cry. Alleviating his pain was not your ultimate end –it was just a way to quiet him down, so that you could enjoy some peace. We might say that you “did a good thing”, but you don’t deserve any praise or admiration for doing so. But this falls far short of vindicating Kant’s claim. This is not really a case of acting compassionately, because it was not that other person’s suffering you cared about—only his crying, and only because this distressed you.

Before we move closer to the sort of case that Kant is discussing, it will be helpful to engage in a thought experiment due to Robert Nozick (1974: 42–5). He imagines an “experience machine” in which a neuroscientist manipulates your brain so that you can have any experiences of your choosing. Those experiences would be illusory, but they could be as lifelike, rich, and complex as you choose. You might, for example, enter the machine in order to have an experience exactly like that of climbing Mt. Everest; you would be lying on a table with your brain attached to the machine, but it would be exactly as though you were facing great danger, wind, cold, snow, and so on. Nozick claimed that we would not choose to plug into the machine, and rightly so, because there is much of value beyond the experiential component of our lives.

With this device in mind, let’s return to Kant’s compassionate souls who “without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, … find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them”. We can offer them the opportunity to plug into the experience machine, and it would then seem to them as if they were “spreading joy around them”. They would not in fact be helping anyone, but it would seem to them as though they were, and that would fill them with joy. Clearly, there would be little or nothing to admire in those who would enter the machine on these terms. But what about a compassionate person who refuses this offer, and prefers to find joy in actually helping people—not merely in seeming to help them? To be more precise, we might offer someone the following choice: (a) You will experience great joy in the machine, imagining yourself to be helping others; (b) you will experience less joy outside the machine, but it will be joy taken in actually helping others. A genuinely compassionate person would choose (b). He would be giving up a certain amount of pleasure in order to be of use to others. And there is certainly something admirable about that.

According to Kant, however, there is still something of great worth that is missing in the motivation of this genuinely compassionate person, willing though he is to make some sacrifice in his own well-being for the sake of others. His reason for helping is not that it would be morally wrong to fail to do so—wrong because he would be violating a moral rule that makes it a duty for him to help them. What motivates him to aid others is simply that he is inclined to do so. If he did not take any pleasure in being of assistance, he would not do so.

We should agree with Kant that there are situations in which it would be morally wrong for one person to refuse to help another, whether that person has fellow feeling for others or not. For example, suppose a child needs to be taken to the hospital, and it so happens that you can do so at some small cost or inconvenience to yourself. Although this child is a stranger to you, you are someone who finds children adorable and likes to be with them. And so you willingly accompany the child to the hospital. Your love of children is admirable, but you would still be subject to criticism, if that were your sole motivation for assisting this child. By hypothesis, in the situation we are imagining, it would be wrong to refuse—and yet the wrongness of refusing, by hypothesis, is not one of your motives.

But Kant’s point is of limited application, for there are many other kinds of situation in which assisting others for their sake is admirable but not a moral duty. Suppose, for example, a novelist takes time away from her work each day in order to read to blind people in her community. She does not have a moral obligation to assist those people; she helps them because she loves books and she wants to spread the joy she takes in literature to others. Perhaps at some point in the future, her interests will change—she might no longer write novels, and she might get no pleasure from reading to others. She might then no longer volunteer to read to the blind. Kant must say that the help given by this writer does not deserve our “esteem” and “has no genuinely moral worth”, because she acts from inclination rather than duty. But it is implausible to withhold these words of praise. The author does not read to others merely as a means to advance her career or her own well-being. Although she enjoys reading to others, she may believe that it would be better for her to spend more of her time working on her own writing projects. She makes some sacrifices because she believes that other people’s lives will improve if she can instill in them the joy she takes in these books. Surely her motives have “moral worth” in the normal sense of that term: her reason for acting is to help others.

Recall Kant’s thought experiment in which a person full of sympathy and compassion suffers severe misfortunes that extinguish all of his feeling for others. He is still able to benefit others, and he still has a strong sense of duty. Kant seems to be implying that if such an individual continues to “assist others in distress” because he sees that he has a duty to do so, then there is no moral defect in him at all. His motivation, on the contrary, is exemplary, because it has “moral worth” (unlike the motivation of the individual who is moved by inclination and fellow feeling). Surely Kant is right that we ought not to lower our opinion of him merely because he has experienced severe misfortunes—assuming that he did not bring them on himself. He says that the adversity of others “no longer stir[s]” this poor soul, and presumably he would add that this emotional condition is not this unfortunate man’s fault either. But even if there is nothing blameworthy in this man’s emotional indifference to the good of others, it is also true that his relationship with others has been damaged . He cannot respond to others as he should. Lacking any inclination to spread joy to others, when he undertakes projects that fulfill his duty to promote their happiness or diminish their unhappiness, he will do so in a joyless, dutiful manner, thereby tarnishing the relationship he ought to have with them. If, for example, he volunteers to read to the blind, he will be unable to communicate to them a love of literature—for he himself feels no “inner pleasure” when he reads, and has no inclination to help others, due to his own suffering. When he receives news of his adult children’s misfortunes, he will not respond with sympathy or compassion—such news will simply leave him cold (although he will fulfill his parental duties, if his assistance is morally required). It would be appropriate, then, to say that this man exhibits significant moral defects. He lacks the motivation to act towards others as he should, and to feel for others as he should.

We are now in a better position to sort through the package of ideas labeled “sentimentalism” in preceding sections, and to recognize that some are far more plausible than others.

First, we should accept the sentimentalist thesis that one’s feelings can be assessed as fitting or unfitting on grounds other than their causal effect on one’s actions. We should, for example, care about what happens to our children even when we can do nothing to help them; that emotional response is appropriate because it is part of what it is to be a good parent. This point allows us to concede that in certain situations one ought to try to suppress an emotional response that would normally be appropriate. If one has a duty to minister to many people who are suffering, one may be more effective in aiding them if one keeps oneself from feeling the emotions that are fitting. A nurse working in a war zone, for example, might save more lives if she trains herself, for now, to feel little emotion when she hears the moans and cries of the wounded. She has reason to feel compassion, but that is overridden by stronger reasons to act effectively to relieve their burden.

A closely related sentimentalist point that should be accepted is that aiding someone in need, but doing so in a manifestly cold, affectless, or hostile manner is, in many situations, a defective response.

A second idea associated with sentimentalism in section 4.4 was this:

what is most important in human relationships cannot be captured by an approach that begins with a general rule about how to treat others, and justifies a certain way of treating each particular individual simply by applying that general rule.

The kernel of truth in this statement is that some of the most valuable components of our lives are not available by following a rule. We do not fall in love with people by applying a general principle, standard, or criterion about whom we ought to fall in love with. We do not develop a passion for mathematics, or history, or tennis, by seeing these pursuits as specific instances of something more general that we care about. Some of the most valuable components of our lives are available to us only if they arise spontaneously from feelings that respond to the lovable features of the world or the people in it.

But that leaves a great deal of room for the project of treating people in accordance with rules that we accept because they survive our rational scrutiny. For example, it would be absurd to suggest that we should abstain from torturing someone if (but only if) we have an untutored and negative emotional reaction to torturing him. With respect to torture, we need to respond to a general question: are there circumstances in which it would be justified? (And to answer that question, we must first ask: what is torture?) The only way to address these questions is one in which we reason our way towards a general policy—a rule, however simple or complex, that governs the use of torture. And surely such a rule should be impartial—it should be a single rule that applies to all, not tailored to serve the interests of some nations or factions to which we belong.

The same point applies to questions about everyday rules that govern such acts as promise-keeping, lying, theft, and other kinds of suspect behavior. Here too we rightly expect each other to have a general policy, one that takes these sorts of actions to be wrong in normal circumstances. That a promise has been freely made is normally a decisive reason for keeping it; someone who keeps a promise only if he has a positive feeling about doing so would not be treating others as they rightly expect to be treated. (For opposing views, see Dancy 2004; Ridge and McKeever 2006.)

A third question about the relation between our sentiments and altruism arises when we ask about the proper basis for charitable giving. Consider, for example, someone who donates money to an organization devoted to fighting cancer, and chooses to do so because his mother has died of cancer. His gift is an expression of his love for her; it is meant, of course, to do good to others, but those others are chosen as beneficiaries because he takes the reduction of this disease to be an appropriate expression of his feelings for her. Utilitarianism cannot easily accept this form of altruism, since it begins with the premise that charitable acts, like everything else, are right only if they do the most good—and it could easily be the case that money allocated to cancer research would do more good if donated to some other humanitarian cause. But if one does not presuppose the truth of utilitarianism, it is not difficult to defend the practice of choosing one charity over another on the basis of one’s sentimental attachments. If friendships and other loving relationships have a proper place in our lives even if they do not maximize the good, then sentiment is an appropriate basis for altruism. (For an opposing view, see Singer 2015.)

That does not entail that it is always right to follow our feelings when we decide whether to help this person or organization rather than that. Suppose you belong to a group dedicated to reducing the number of people who die in drowning accidents, and you are on your way to an essential meeting of this organization. If you miss the meeting, let us suppose, the group will have to suspend its operations for many months—with the result that the number of drownings will remain high. On your way, you pass a child who is in danger of drowning, and cries for your help. You must choose: either you can save this one child, or you can attend the meeting and thereby save many more from drowning. When you hear the child’s cries for help, you cannot help responding emotionally; it would be cold and calculating to pass him by, even if in doing so you will be saving many more. What ought you to do?

The fact that your emotions are fully aroused by the child’s cries does not have the same bearing on this issue as does the love felt by a son for his departed mother in the previous example. The drowning child whose cries fill you with compassionate feeling is a stranger to you. So your alternatives in this case are whether to help one stranger (the one who is tugging at your heartstrings) or many (whom you do not see or hear at the moment). It would not be implausible to hold that sentiment plays an appropriate role in altruism when it is the expression of a long-term and meaningful bond, but not when it is a short-lived reaction to the cries of a stranger.

We have found no reason to doubt that we both can and should be altruistic to some extent. To what extent? Utilitarians and consequentialists have an exact answer to that question: one is to give equal weight to the good of every human being (or every sentient creature), counting oneself as just one small part of that universal good. If that is more altruism than can be required of us, the better alternative is not to retreat to the other extreme (egoism). Rather, how much altruism is appropriate for an individual varies according to that individual’s situation in life.

Altruism is not necessarily admirable. It is to be admired only in circumstances in which it is appropriate to act for another’s sake—and only when what one aims to do for another really does benefit that individual. If one seeks what one takes to be the good of others for their sake, but is mistaken about what is really good for them, one’s action is defective. Altruism is fully admirable only when combined with a correct understanding of well-being.

What is wrong with those who do not care about others for their sake? It could be the case that such individuals are themselves worse off for their lack of altruistic motivation. That is what a eudaimonist must say, and we have not objected to that aspect of eudaimonism. It could also be the case that there is a failure of rationality among those who are never altruistic or insufficiently altruistic. But it should not be assumed that there must be something else that goes awry in those who are not altruistic or not altruistic enough, beyond the fact that when they ought to have cared about some individual other than themselves, they failed to do so.

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altruism: biological | altruism: empirical approaches | egoism | empathy | impartiality | morality: and evolutionary biology | moral particularism | reasons for action: agent-neutral vs. agent-relative | well-being

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Altruism is acting to help someone else at some cost to oneself. It can include a vast range of behaviors, from sacrificing one’s life to save others, to giving money to charity or volunteering at a soup kitchen, to simply waiting a few seconds to hold the door open for a stranger. Often, people behave altruistically when they see others in challenging circumstances and feel empathy and a desire to help.

• Why Altruism Is Important
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Altruistic urges and behaviors are an important part of the glue that binds families and social groups together, helping them to cooperate and thrive. Individuals who go out of their way to aid others often receive something in return—whether it’s an intangible reward, such as admiration and respect, or material support at a later time. Altruistic impulses and the reciprocation of kind deeds help ensure all members of a tight-knit group have backup when they need it.

It seems to be for most people. Cooperative behavior allowed our ancestors to survive under harsh conditions, and it still serves a purpose in a highly complex society.

Altruism can be viewed as both. In some sense, altruists put others’ interests ahead of their own—but giving to others often feels good and can result in longer-term gains for the giver. "Reciprocal altruism" is a term used by scientists for helping that is sustained by an eventual payoff from the person that receives help. 

Even when people don’t expect recognition or reward for a good deed, they often feel energized and happy afterward—a sensation sometimes called a "helper's high” or “warm glow.” It likely helps to reinforce altruistic behavior in those who feel it.

Many species benefit when individuals put service to the larger group ahead of their own personal interest. A variety of animals, from rats to bonobos to whales , have been caught engaging in apparently altruistic behavior.

Altruism isn’t always a strictly warm-and-fuzzy experience. Altruistic punishment is a term for a costly act that punishes someone in order to benefit others , such as intervening when someone is being bullied.

Most people are inclined to help out a best friend or a close family member in need. But how far does that kindness extend? Some people are clearly more or less altruistic than others—with callous psychopaths, perhaps, on the low end, people who risk their lives for strangers on the other end, and the rest of us in the middle. Many forces, both internal and external, likely underlie these individual differences in altruism.

Even young children feel good about sharing , and to some extent, altruistic tendencies may be built-in for most people. Many altruistic acts are reactive: Human beings respond compassionately when they see others in pain and in need of help. Of course, people also learn norms of altruism within their culture, including how much or how little generosity is considered acceptable.

Neurological, cultural, and other kinds of factors may cause some people to be more altruistic than others. So-called “extreme altruists” appear to differ from others in the size of their brains’ amygdala and their responsiveness to signs of distress. External influences such as a religious upbringing or socioeconomic status may also play a role.

Close relatives (such as parents and siblings) share many more of a person’s genes than others do. According to evolutionary theory, an interest in helping close kin spread those shared genes by surviving and reproducing—a sort of favoritism called kin selection —helps explain why humans are more likely to help those relatives than strangers or even distant family members.

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Daniel Batson and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

Perceived human-likeness and pleasantness across spectra. Each row corresponds to a different spectrum. Each x-axis depicts a spectrum of images that are meant to range from extremely machine-like to extremely human-like. The y-axes depict participants’ evaluation of the image’s human-likeness (left column) and pleasantness (right column). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Having selected a spectrum, we are now ready to use its constituent images as stimuli in our next behavioural experiment, hereafter Study 2. In particular, we recruited 730 participants who engaged in a one-shot Dictator Game (DG) and a one-shot Trust Game (TG) with bot associates that are each represented by a different image along the spectrum. Participants were informed that their associates are robots that have been programmed to interact socially with humans and are able to make decisions. After completing the DG and TG, participants were asked to evaluate each image along the two dimensions of mind perception; see the Supplementary Materials for more details.

Before presenting the DG and TG results, let us first present the participants’ evaluation of experience and agency. As shown in Fig.  2 , the different images vary markedly along the two dimensions of mind perception, thereby confirming our first hypothesis—the perceived experience and agency of a robot can be manipulated by varying the degree to which that robot resembles a human. The overall trend in perceived experience resembles that of human-likeness, as evidenced by the correlation between the two (grouped by image), which is strong and statistically significant ( \(r = 0.99, p < 0.001\) ). On the other hand, the overall trend in perceived agency resembles that of pleasantness. Indeed, the correlation between the two (grouped by image) is strong and statistically significant ( \(r = 0.90, p = 0.014\) ).

Perceived experience and agency across images. Participants’ perception of experience and agency given different images across our spectrum of choice. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

The results in Fig.  2 contribute to our understanding of the uncanny valley phenomenon. Overall, the perceived experience and agency tend to increase with human-likeness. The only exception to this rule occurs at the uncanny image, where the notable increase in perceived experience (compared to the image before it in the spectrum) is associated with a slight reduction (rather than an increase) in perceived agency. In other words, judging from the overall trend, one would expect the perceived agency of the uncanny image to be greater, bearing in mind the notable increase in perceived experience. This discrepancy may explain the eerie and repelling feelings associated with the uncanny valley.

Having demonstrated that the images in our spectrum vary along the two dimensions of mind perception, we now use this spectrum to examine how the perception of experience and agency influences altruism and trust in human–machine interactions. To this end, we analyse the amount of money that participants transferred in both the DG (which serves as a proxy for altruism) as well as the TG (which serves as a proxy for trust) when paired with different images across the spectrum. The results for the DG and the TG are depicted in Fig.  3 a,b, respectively.

Money transferred in DG and TG across images. The amount of money participants transferred to their bot partner in a one-shot Dictator Game ( a ) and a one-shot Trust Game ( b ) given different images across the spectrum. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

A simple linear regression reveals that the perception of experience accounts for the variance observed in money transfers in the DG (adjusted \(R^2 = 91\%\) , \(p = 0.002\) , \(\beta _1 = 0.141\) ). These findings support our hypothesis that perceiving experience in others is associated with showing altruism toward them. It should be noted that the average donation rate exceeds 20% when the bot image crosses the uncanny valley, making it comparable to the donation rates observed when interacting with humans in the DG 45 . Similarly, a simple linear regression reveals that the perception of agency accounts for most of the variance observed in money transfers in the TG (adjusted \(R^2 = 65\%\) , \(p = 0.030\) , \(\beta _1 = 0.228\) ). These findings support our hypothesis that perceiving agency in others is associated with trusting them. Note that, apart from the uncanny image, the average donation rate exceeds 50%, which is greater than the rate observed when interacting with humans in the TG 46 . This observation is in agreement with previous findings in the literature, showing that people trust machines more than humans due to their betrayal aversion 47 . We measured the correlation between the amount of money transferred in both games, and found it to be weak ( \(r \le\) 0.26) regardless of the image used. Finally, we note that amount of money transferred in both games tends to increase with human-likeness, except for the uncanny image, where the amount drops, especially in the case of the TG.

So far, our results have shown that perceiving experience in bots is associated with acting altruistically toward them, whereas perceiving agency in bots is associated with trusting them. However, our findings are not sufficient to establish a causal link, since the images used in our experiment may differ in various attributes other than just their perceived agency and experience. For example, it could be the case that the bot images also vary along the dimension of attractiveness, with the perfectly human-like image being the most attractive, and the uncanny image being the least attractive. If true, then attractiveness may be a confounder that influences not only trust and altruism, but also the perception of agency and experience. More broadly, the associations observed in our study could be driven by an attribute (other than the dimensions of mind perception) that varies along our spectrum.

To rule out this possibility, we conducted a third behavioral experiment with 150 new participants, hereafter Study 3. This is similar to Study 2 except that, instead of manipulating the bot’s image, we now hold the image constant and explicitly manipulate the bot’s agency and experience using textual descriptions. In particular, the bot’s experience is manipulated by writing: “This robot is [capable/not capable] of feeling pain”, while the bot’s agency is manipulated by writing: “This robot is [capable/not capable] of planning actions and exercising self-control.” These descriptions were inspired by previous research on mind perception 29 , 30 . Consequently, we have four distinct conditions: (1) agency and experience; (2) agency but no experience; (3) experience but no agency; and (4) no agency nor experience. We repeated this experiment using two different bot images: the second and the second to last in our spectrum. see Supplementary Note  4 for more details.

We first run the Kruskal-Wallis H test to evaluate whether manipulating the bot’s agency and experience influences the contributions made in DG and TG while controlling for the bot’s image. We find that the two bot images have no effect on the contributions made in the DG ( \(p = 0.76\) ) and the TG ( \(p = 0.37\) ). To put it differently, the explicit manipulation of agency and experience through textual descriptions nullifies the effect of the bot image, which was previously observed in Study 2. Additionally, we find that the contributions made in DG and TG differ significantly across the four conditions of Study 3 ( \(p < 0.001\) ). Figure  4 a,b depict the amount contributed in the DG and the TG, respectively, given each condition. As can be seen in Fig.  4 a, participants act more altruistically toward bots that are described as having experience, regardless of whether they have agency. These findings provide causal evidence that the perception of experience influences altruism. Similarly, as shown in Fig.  4 b, participants show greater trust in bots that are described as having agency, regardless of whether these bots have experience. These findings provide causal evidence that the perception of agency influences trust.

Money transferred in DG and TG in Study 3. The amount of money participants transferred to their bot partner in a one-shot Dictator Game ( a ) and a one-shot Trust Game ( b ) while explicitly varying the bot’s agency and experience. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. p -Value is calculated using Dunn test; \(^{*}\) p <0.1; \(^{**}\) p <0.05; \(^{***}\) p <0.01..

Our goal was to examine how mind perception influences trust and altruism in human–machine interaction. We conducted an experiment whereby people engage with bots in a one-shot Dictator Game (DG) and a one-shot Trust Game (TG) while varying the bot’s image along a spectrum ranging from extremely machine-like to extremely human-like appearances. We conducted another experiment whereby, instead of manipulating the bot’s image, we explicitly manipulated the bot’s agency and experience using textual description. The results of these experiments provide causal evidence in support of our main hypotheses, i.e., that the perception of experience influences altruism and that the perception of agency influences trust in human–machine interaction. More broadly, our findings provide the first evidence for what we call the “specificity of mind” hypothesis: Perceptions of different dimensions of the mind lead to different kinds of social behavior.

Our findings shed new light on the underlying mechanism behind altruism, showing that it depends on perceived experience. These results suggest that, in applications where people are required to act altruistically towards machines, designers need to emphasize the machine’s perceived capacity to feel, e.g., by giving it facial expressions. Our findings also shed new light on the mechanism underlying trust, showing that it is influenced by the perceived agency of the trustee. Indeed, trusting a machine requires endowing it with the ability to have control over, and take responsibility for, its own action (characteristics of agency). One practical implication of these findings is that imbuing robots with a sense of agency is crucial to cultivating trust in them. For instance, in service sectors such as banking, customer care, and career advice, manufacturers may consider designing robots that resemble human adults, since they are perceived to have greater agency than children 21 .

Finally, let us comment on the uncanny valley. In the literature, there have been several explanations for this phenomenon 40 , 42 , 43 , but none of them examines the dimensions of mind perception. The only exception is the work of Gray and Wegner 30 who showed that uncanny robots are perceived to have experience. This, in turn, makes people feel uneasy since they consider experience to be fundamentally lacking in machines. However, these findings were based on a comparison between just two robots: one with an uncanny appearance and another with a mechanical appearance. In contrast, when we examined a spectrum of robot images ranging from machine-like to human-like appearances, we found that the most human-like robots are perceived to have the greatest experience (Fig.  2 ) yet they are the farthest from the uncanny valley (Fig.  1 e, right panel), suggesting that the valley cannot be explained by the perception of experience alone. Furthermore, when images transform from machine-like to human-like, their perceived agency and experience are expected to increase, which is indeed the case for all bot images in our spectrum apart from the uncanny one. For that image, contrary to expectations, we found that the perceived experience increases notably (compared to the image falling just before it in the spectrum), while the perceived agency actually decreases slightly. These findings offer new insights into the mechanism underlying the uncanny valley, suggesting for the first time that the perception of agency might play a role in this phenomenon.

Our study underscores the significance of mind perception in shaping human–machine interactions. Understanding the nuances behind when and why people trust and cooperate with machines has never been more crucial, given the growing integration of machines in social and economic interactions. Although past work has highlighted a general link between mind perception and morality, this research is the first to demonstrate that the perception of different dimensions of the mind leads to different kinds of social behavior. Our study also touched on emerging issues related to morality and social robots, including how people treat machines and their affective reaction to human-like robots. Soon, we may be faced with moral decisions about not only other people but also machines, and these findings help to understand our behavior when that day comes.

Experimental procedures and measures

We needed to generate multiple spectra of robot images, each ranging from extremely machine-like to extremely human-like, with an uncanny image falling somewhere in between. We searched the Web for real-life humanoid robot images that are described as “uncanny” and meet the criteria proposed by Mathur and Reichling 48 , requiring a full face to be displayed, from the top of the head down to the chin, with both eyes visible. We identified five such images 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 . For each image, we used deep learning to make the image progressively human-like, and a graphics editor to make the image progressively machine-like, thereby producing a spectrum that corresponds to that image, see Supplementary Note  1 for more details.

The purpose of Study 1 was to identify the spectrum that best reproduces the uncanny valley phenomenon. Upon reading the consent form, participants were randomly assigned to one of the five spectra, and were asked to evaluate each image in that spectrum, displayed in random order. More specifically, following the design of Mathur and Reichling 48 , participants evaluated each image on a scale from − 100 to +100 according to human-likeness, pleasantness, trustworthiness, and feelings toward the image, see Supplementary Note  2 for more details. Furthermore, to ensure that our participants were paying attention, we added to the survey three attention-check questions, asking participants to set the slider to a specific, randomly chosen value. This way, we were able to identify those who were setting the slider without paying attention to the question at hand. To encourage participants to pay attention, we informed them that they would be paid an extra bonus of $1.00 (in addition to the participation fee) if they answered all attention-check questions correctly. Those who failed were subsequently excluded from our analysis. Moreover, we did not allow individuals to participate more than once in the study, to ensure that each individual evaluated exactly one spectrum.

Based on the outcome of Study 1, we selected the spectrum that best satisfied the following conditions: (i) the images become increasingly human-like; (ii) the images become increasingly pleasant, with the exception of a single image—the uncanny image—for which pleasantness drops notably. With our spectrum of choice, we were ready to run Study 2, where participants engage in a one-shot Dictator Game (DG) and a one-shot Trust Game (TG) with bot associates that are each represented by a different image along that spectrum. Upon reading the description of each game, participants were asked three comprehension-check questions to make sure they understood the rules. To encourage careful attention, participants were informed that they will be paid an extra bonus (in addition to the participation fee) if they answered all three questions correctly on their first attempt. Those who failed were asked to read the description once again before making another attempt; this was repeated until they got all questions correct. To study the relationship between participants’ perception of the chosen spectrum and their behavior when interacting with it, we invited the same individuals who took part in Study 1 to participate in Study 2, following a within-person design. We informed them that their associates are robots that have been programmed to interact socially with humans and are able to make decisions. For each participant, we randomly selected one of the two games (DG or TG), and asked them to play the selected game with six associates, in random order, each corresponding to a different image along the spectrum. The same process was then repeated for the other game. After completing the experimental games, participants were asked to evaluate each image, displayed in random order, according to experience and agency, see Supplementary Note  3 for more details.

Since all of our experiments involved playing the DG and TG with robots, it is unclear whether our findings can be generalized to the context of human-human interaction. This is because people’s behaviour may differ depending on whether their partner is a robot or a human, e.g., in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, people cooperate less when they are informed that their partner is a machine, regardless of the partner’s actual choices in the game 53 . However, such biases do not affect our analyses, since all our participants had robot partners (and they were explicitly informed about this fact), regardless of the game they were engaged in (DG or TG) and regardless of the bot image they were interacting with along the spectrum.

Data collection

All studies were programmed in Qualtrics. Participants were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk using the services of CloudResearch (previously TurkPrime 54 ). Only MTurk workers 18 years or older, located in the United States—as specified on their MTurk account and by their IP address—could see the HIT (Human Intelligence Task). To be eligible, workers also needed to have at least 100 HITs approved and an 85% approval rating. We also excluded workers from suspicious geolocations and those on the “universal exclude list,” both managed by CloudResearch. In addition to these filters, we only recruited CloudResearch Approved participants to enhance data quality, as these individuals have exhibited high levels of engagement and attention in prior tasks 55 , 56 . We also employed multiple measures to ensure once in a lifetime participation, such as organizing all HITs in a survey group, and using the ballot box stuffing option on Qualtrics.

Data collection for Study 1 took place between the 21 \({\textrm{st}}\) of April and the 21 \({\textrm{th}}\) of May, 2021. We aimed for 200 participants per spectrum, amounting to a total of 1000 participants. However, since we excluded those who failed to answer all attention questions correctly, we had to recruit additional participants, ending up with a total of 1109 participants, 1000 of which answered all questions correctly. Based on the outcome of Study 1, we selected the spectrum to be used in Study 2. We decided to recruit 300 additional individuals to take part in Study 1 and evaluate our spectrum of choice, yielding a total of 500 who evaluated that spectrum.

Data collection for Study 2 took place between the 3 \({\textrm{rd}}\) of October and the 22 \({\textrm{nd}}\) December, 2021. To this end, we invited the 500 participants who evaluated the chosen spectrum in Study 1 to take part in Study 2; only 253 individuals agreed to participate. To reach the desired sample size based on power analysis, we recruited 550 additional individuals to evaluate the chosen spectrum (as per Study 1) between the 10 \({\textrm{th}}\) and 14 \({\textrm{th}}\) of November, 2021. At least 1 week after their participation in Study 1, those individuals were invited to take part in Study 2. We incentivized them by offering a raffle of $50 Amazon gift vouchers to five randomly-chosen participants who complete Study 2. 477 out of the 550 agreed to participate, resulting in a total of 730 participants for Study 2.

Using the same platform and quality control criteria of recruiting participants in the earlier two studies, data collection for Study 3 took place between the 14 \({\textrm{th}}\) and the 15 \({\textrm{th}}\) March, 2024. We recruited 150 participants who did not participate in Study 1 and Study 2.

Compensation

Study 1 participants received a $0.50 participation fee in addition to a $1.00 bonus given only to those who answered all three attention check questions correctly. The average compensation in Study 1 was $1.50 (for those who answered correctly), and the average completion time was 7.38 minutes, yielding an hourly rate of $12.20. Study 2 participants received a $1.50 participation fee. They also received a bonus based on their earnings in the DG and TG, in addition to the bonus they received if they answered all comprehension check questions correctly on their first attempt ($0.25 for each game). The average compensation in Study 2 was $4.50, and the average completion time was 15.42 minutes, yielding an hourly rate of $17.51 (excluding the Amazon gift vouchers). The average compensation in Study 3 was $3.41, and the average completion time was 16.87 minutes, yielding an hourly rate of $12.13.

Sample composition

Participants who completed Study 1 were 57.57% female (all other participants identified as male or other), and 70.49% identified as White (all other participants identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian or Asian American, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino/a, Middle Eastern or North African, Other, or identified with multiple of these categories), with an average age of 38.71 (sd = 12.59). Participants who were invited to complete Study 2 were 55.75% female, and 73.56% identified as White, with an average age of 40.16 (sd = 12.91). Attrition rate between Study 1 and Study 2 was 30.5%. We compared those who returned for Study 2 to those who did not, we found no meaningful differences between the two samples in terms of gender, education, income, racial identification, and level of familiarity with the robot in our chosen spectrum, namely Saya, see Supplementary Tables  5 and 6 . Participants who completed Study 3 were 52% female and 48% male with an average age of 43.70 (sd = 11.72) and 76.67% identified as White. With the exception of one participant, none of the participants in Study 3 was familiar with any of the images used in the study.

Pre-registration

We pre-registered Studies 1 and 2 on both OSF (https://osf.io/a375c/) and AsPredicted (https://aspredicted.org/; AsPredicted #106712). The pre-registration on OSF took place prior to the analysis of the outcome data for Study 1; it focused primarily on evaluating the proposed Uncanny Valley spectra. In contrast, the pre-registration on AsPredicted took place prior to the analysis of the outcome data for Study 2; it focused on investigating the influence of mind perception on altruism and trust.

Ethical approval

All of our protocols received IRB approval by the NYU Abu Dhabi Internal Review Board (#19-2021), and all participants provided informed consent online to take part in the studies. All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.

Data availibility

The data can be found at the following repository: https://osf.io/a375c/ .

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Acknowledgements

M.O. gratefully acknowledges financial support from Tamkeen under the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005. K.M. acknowledges funding from the NYUAD Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES), funded by Tamkeen under the NYUAD Research Institute Award CG001.

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Mayada Oudah & Kinga Makovi

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Contributions

B.B. and T.R. conceived the study, combining the uncanny valley spectra with behavioral experiments and with the two dimensions of mind perception. M.O. and T.R. created the uncanny valley spectrum. M.O., K.M. and T.R. designed the experiments. M.O. conducted all the experiments, collected and analysed the data, and produced the figures. M.O. and B.B. ran statistical analyses. K.G., B.B., and T.R. wrote the manuscript. All authors interpreted the results.

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Correspondence to Balaraju Battu or Talal Rahwan .

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Oudah, M., Makovi, K., Gray, K. et al. Perception of experience influences altruism and perception of agency influences trust in human–machine interactions. Sci Rep 14 , 12410 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-63360-w

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-63360-w

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39 Empathy and Altruism

C. Daniel Batson, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.

Nadia Ahmad, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.

David A. Lishner, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin

• Published: 18 September 2012
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Do we humans ever, in any degree, care about others for their sakes and not simply for our own? Psychology has long assumed that everything humans do, no matter how nice and noble, is motivated by self-interest. However, research over the past three decades suggests that this assumption is wrong. This research has focused on the empathy—altruism hypothesis, which claims that empathic concern—an other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need—produces altruistic motivation—motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare. Results of the over 30 experiments designed to test this hypothesis against various egoistic alternatives have proved remarkably supportive, leading to the tentative conclusion that feeling empathic concern for a person in need does indeed evoke altruistic motivation to see that need relieved. Sources of altruistic motivation other than empathy also have been proposed, but as yet, there is not compelling research evidence to support these proposals. Two additional forms of prosocial motivation have also been proposed: collectivism and principlism. Collectivism—motivation with the ultimate goal of benefiting some group or collective as a whole—has been claimed to result from group identity. Principlism—motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding some moral principle—has long been advocated by religious teachers and moral philosophers. Whether either is a separate form of motivation, independent of and irreducible to egoism, is not yet clear. Research done to test for the existence of empathy-induced altruism may serve as a useful model for future research testing for the existence of collectivism and principlism. Theoretical and practical implications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis are briefly considered.

Altruism refers to a specific form of motivation for benefiting another. Although some biologists, economists, and psychologists speak of altruism as a type of helping behavior, this use fails to consider the motivation for the behavior, which is crucial for altruism. To the degree that one's ultimate goal in benefiting another is to increase the other's welfare, the motivation is altruistic. To the degree that the ultimate goal is to increase one's own welfare, the motivation is egoistic. Accordingly, we shall use the term “altruism” to refer to “a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare.” We shall use the term “helping” to refer to “behavior that benefits another, regardless of the ultimate goal.”

A Basic Question: Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?

Does altruism exist? Clearly, humans devote much time and energy to helping others. We send money to rescue famine victims halfway around the world—or to save whales. We stay up all night to comfort a friend who has just suffered a broken relationship. We stop on a busy highway to help a stranded motorist change a flat tire.

Proponents of universal egoism claim that everything we do, no matter how noble and beneficial to others, is really directed toward the ultimate goal of self-benefit. Some self-benefits of helping are obvious, as when we get material rewards and public praise or when we escape public censure. But even when we help in the absence of external rewards, we still may benefit. We may feel good about ourselves for being kind and caring or escape the guilt and shame we might feel if we did not help. We may do a friend a favor because we do not want to lose the friendship or because we expect to see the favor reciprocated. Seeing someone in distress may cause us to feel distress, and we may act to relieve that person's distress as an instrumental means to relieve our own.

Even heroes and martyrs can benefit from their acts of apparent selflessness. Consider the soldier who saves his comrades by diving on a grenade or a man who dies after relinquishing his place in a rescue craft. These persons may have acted to escape anticipated guilt and shame for letting others die. They may have acted to gain the admiration and praise of those left behind—or benefits in an anticipated afterlife. Perhaps they simply misjudged the situation, not thinking that their actions would cost them their lives. To suggest that heroic acts could be motivated by self-benefit may seem cynical, but the possibility must be faced if we are to responsibly address the question of whether altruism exists.

Altruism's proponents do not deny that the motivation for helping is often egoistic. However, they claim more. They claim that at least some of us, to some degree, under some circumstances, help with an ultimate goal of benefiting the person in need. They point out that even though we get self-benefits for helping, these benefits may not be the reason we helped. Rather than our ultimate goal (i.e., the state we are seeking), they may be unintended consequences.

Universal egoism has elegance and parsimony on its side in this debate. It is simpler to explain all human behavior in terms of self-benefit than to postulate a motivational pluralism in which both self-benefit and another's benefit can serve as ultimate goals. Perhaps for this reason, the majority view among Renaissance and post-Renaissance philosophers, as well as contemporary biologists, economists, and psychologists, is that we are, at heart, purely egoistic—we care for others only to the extent that their welfare affects ours (see Mansbridge, 1990 ; Wallach & Wallach, 1983 , for reviews).

Elegance and parsimony are important criteria in developing scientific explanations. However, adequate and accurate explanations are even more important. If altruistic motivation is within the human repertoire, then the picture of who we are as a species and what we are capable of doing is quite different than if it is not. So we need to know if altruism exists, even if this knowledge flies in the face of conventional wisdom and plays havoc with our assumptions about human nature. If altruism exists, it should provide an important cornerstone for positive psychology.

Empathic Emotion: A Possible Source of Altruistic Motivation

In both earlier philosophical writings and in more recent psychological works, the most frequently mentioned possible source of altruistic motivation is an other-oriented emotional reaction to seeing another person in need. This emotional reaction has variously been called “empathy” (Batson, 1987 ; Krebs, 1975 ; Stotland, 1969 ), “sympathy” (Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987 ; Heider, 1958 ; Wispé, 1986 , 1991 ), “sympathetic distress” (Hoffman, 1981 ), “tenderness” (McDougall, 1908 ), and “pity” or “compassion” (Hume, 1740/1896 ; Smith, 1759/1853 ). We shall call this other-oriented emotion “empathy.” It has been named as a source—if not the source—of altruism by philosophers ranging from Aquinas to Rousseau to Hume to Adam Smith, and by psychologists ranging from William McDougall to contemporary researchers such as Hoffman, Krebs, and Batson.

Formally, we define empathy as “an other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone else.” Four points may help clarify this definition. First, “congruent” here refers to the valence of the emotion—positive when the perceived welfare of the other is positive, negative when the perceived welfare is negative—not to the specific content of the emotion. One might, for example, feel sad or sorry for someone who is upset and afraid. Second, although this definition is broad enough to include feeling empathic joy at another's good fortune (Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1989 ; Stotland, 1969 ), it is the empathic emotion felt when another is perceived to be in need that is hypothesized to evoke altruistic motivation.

Third, empathic emotion as defined is not a single, discrete emotion but includes a whole constellation of feelings. It can include feelings of sympathy, compassion, soft-heartedness, tenderness, and the like—feelings that are inherently other-oriented. It can also include feelings of sorrow and sadness, of upset and distress, of concern and grief—feelings that can be, but are not always, other-oriented. Fourth, empathic feelings are other-oriented in the sense that they involve feeling for the other—feeling sorry for, distressed for, concerned for the other. It is also possible to feel sorrow, distress, or concern that is not oriented toward the other, 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 must be based not on whether these terms are used but on whose welfare is the focus of the emotional response. Is one feeling sad, distressed, or concerned for the other, or feeling these emotions more directly?

The other-oriented emotional response we are calling empathy should be distinguished from a number of related but conceptually distinct psychological states, each of which has at one time or another also been called empathy. These include (a) inferring another's internal state, (b) assuming the posture of an observed other, (c) coming to feel as another person feels, (d) intuiting or projecting oneself into another's situation, (e) imagining how another is feeling, (f) imagining how one would think and feel in another's place, and (h) being personally upset by another person's suffering (see Batson, Ahmad, Lishner, & Tsang, 2002 , for a more complete discussion of each of these states).

Other-oriented empathic emotion has often been thought to be the product of (a) perceiving another as in need and (b) adopting the other's perspective (i.e., imagining how the other is feeling). These two factors frequently have been combined to produce empathy in laboratory research (see Batson, 1991 , for a partial review). However, when we encounter a person in need in daily life without having been instructed to imagine how that person feels, as we often do, the antecedents of empathy are likely to be (a) perceiving the other as in need and (b) noninstrumental valuing of the other's welfare. Valuing the other's welfare not only produces a lively response to events that affect this person's welfare, much as we might respond to events that affect our own welfare; it also produces vigilance. We are on the lookout for events that might affect this person's welfare. As a result, valuing the other leads us spontaneously to adopt his or her perspective. We are predisposed to imagine how this person thinks and feels about events because his or her pleasure and pain have become part of our own value structure.

Empathic Emotion as Situational, Not Dispositional

The empathic emotion that has been proposed to be a source of altruistic motivation is a response to the plight of a specific individual (or individuals) in a specific need situation. It does not refer to a general disposition or personality trait. There may well be individual differences in the ability and inclination to experience empathic emotion (see Davis, 1994 , for a discussion), but attempts to measure these individual differences by standard retrospective self-report questionnaires seem suspect at best. Such questionnaires are more likely to tap a desire to see oneself and to be seen by others as empathic rather than to provide a valid measure of one's proclivity to actually be empathic.

Testing the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

The claim that feeling empathic emotion for someone in need evokes altruistic motivation to relieve that need has been called the “empathy-altruism hypothesis” (Batson, 1987 , 1991 ). According to this hypothesis, the more the empathy felt for a person in need, the more is the altruistic motivation to see the need relieved.

Considerable evidence supports the idea that feeling empathy for a person in need leads to increased helping of that person (Coke, Batson, & McDavis, 1978 ; Dovidio, Allen, & Schroeder, 1990 ; Krebs, 1975 ; see Batson, 1991 , and Eisenberg & Miller, 1987 , for reviews). 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. Helping enables one to (a) reduce one's empathic arousal, which may be experienced as aversive; (b) avoid possible social and self-punishments for failing to help; and (c) gain social and self-rewards for doing what is good and right. 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. Advocates of egoistic alternatives to the empathy—altruism hypothesis disagree; they claim that one or more of these self-benefits is the ultimate goal of empathy-induced helping. In the past several decades, more than 30 experiments have tested these three egoistic alternatives to the empathy—altruism hypothesis.

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. (To be effective, the escape must be psychological not simply physical—that is, escape from anticipated as well as experienced 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 (see Batson, 1991 ; Stocks, 2005 , for reviews of these experiments).

2. Empathy-Specific Punishment

A second egoistic explanation claims that people are socialized to feel obligation to help those for whom they feel empathy; failing to help such a target results in feelings of shame and guilt. As a result, when people feel empathy, they are faced with impending social or self-censure beyond any general punishment associated with failure to help. 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; results have instead consistently supported the empathy—altruism hypothesis (again, see Batson, 1991 ).

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.

A general form of this explanation has been tested in several experiments and received no support (studies 1 & 5, Batson et al., 1988 ; Batson & Weeks, 1996 ), but two variations have been proposed for which at least some support has been claimed. Best known is the negative-state relief explanation proposed by Cialdini et al. ( 1987 ), who suggested that the empathy experienced when witnessing another person's suffering is a negative affective state—a state of temporary sadness or sorrow—and the person feeling empathy helps in order to relieve this negative state.

At first glance, this negative-state explanation may appear to be the same as the aversive-arousal reduction explanation. Both explanations begin with the proposition that feeling empathy for someone in need involves a negative affective state. Yet, from this common starting point, they diverge. The aversive-arousal reduction explanation claims that the goal of helping is to eliminate the negative state; the negative-state relief explanation claims that the goal of helping is to gain mood-enhancing self-rewards that one has learned are associated with helping.

Although the negative-state relief explanation received some initial support (Cialdini et al., 1987 ; Schaller & Cialdini, 1988 ), subsequent researchers have found that this support was likely due to procedural artifacts (e.g., distractions). Experiments avoiding these artifacts have consistently supported the empathy—altruism hypothesis (Batson et al., 1989 ; Dovidio et al., 1990 ; Schroeder, Dovidio, Sibicky, Matthews, & Allen, 1988 ). It now seems clear that the motivation to help evoked by empathy is not directed toward the egoistic goal of negative-state relief.

A second variation on the empathy-specific reward explanation was proposed by Smith et al. ( 1989 ). They hypothesized that, rather than helping to gain the rewards of seeing oneself or being seen by others as a helpful person, empathically aroused individuals help in order to feel joy at the needy individual's relief: “It is proposed that the prospect of empathic joy, conveyed by feedback from the help recipient, is essential to the special tendency of empathic witnesses to help.… The empathically concerned witness … helps in order to be happy” (Smith et al., 1989 , p. 641).

Some early self-report data were supportive, but more rigorous experimental evidence has failed to support this empathic—joy hypothesis. Instead, experimental results have consistently supported the empathy—altruism hypothesis (Batson et al., 1991 ; Smith et al., 1989 ). The empathic-joy hypothesis, like other versions of the empathy-specific reward explanation, seems unable to account for the empathy—helping relationship.

A Tentative Conclusion

Reviewing the empathy—altruism research, as well as some recent literature in sociology, economics, political science, and biology, Piliavin and Charng ( 1990 ) observed:

There appears to be a “paradigm shift” away from the earlier position that behavior that appears to be altruistic must, under closer scrutiny, be revealed as reflecting egoistic motives. Rather, theory and data now being advanced are more compatible with the view that true altruism—acting with the goal of benefiting another—does exist and is a part of human nature. (p. 27)

Pending new evidence or a plausible new egoistic explanation of the existing evidence, this observation seems correct. It appears that the empathy–altruism hypothesis should—tentatively—be accepted as true.

Other Possible Sources of Altruistic Motivation

Several sources of altruistic motivation other than empathic emotion have been proposed, including an “altruistic personality” (Oliner & Oliner, 1988 ), principled moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1976 ), and internalized prosocial values (Staub, 1974 , 1989 ). There is some evidence that each of these potential sources is associated with increased motivation to help, but it is not yet clear that this motivation is altruistic. It may be, or it may be an instrumental means to the egoistic ultimate goals of maintaining one s positive self-concept or avoiding guilt (Batson, 1991 ; Batson, Bolen, Cross, & Neuringer-Benefiel, 1986 ; Carlo, Eisenberg, Troyer, Switzer, & Speer, 1991 ; Eisenberg et al., 1989 ). More and better research exploring these possibilities is needed.

Two Other Possible Prosocial Motives

Thinking beyond the egoism—altruism debate that has been a focus of attention and contention for the past three decades, there may be other forms of prosocial motivation for which the ultimate goal is neither to benefit self nor to benefit another individual. Two forms seem especially worthy of consideration: collectivism and principlism.

Collectivism

“Collectivism” is motivation to benefit a particular group as a whole. The ultimate goal is to increase the welfare of the group not to increase one's own welfare or that of specific others. Robyn Dawes and his colleagues put it succinctly: “Not me or thee but we” (Dawes, van de Kragt, & Orbell, 1988 ). They suggested that collectivist motivation is a product of group identity (Tajfel, 1981 ; Turner, 1987 ).

As with altruism, what looks like collectivism actually may be a subtle form of egoism. Perhaps attention to group welfare is simply an expression of enlightened self-interest. After all, if one recognizes that ignoring group needs and the public good in headlong pursuit of self-benefit will lead to less self-benefit in the long run, then one may decide to benefit the group as a means to maximize overall self-benefit. Certainly, appeals to enlightened self-interest are commonly used by politicians and social activists to encourage response to societal needs: They warn of the long-term consequences for oneself and one's children of pollution and squandering natural resources; they remind that if the plight of the poor becomes too severe, the well-off may face revolution. Such appeals seem to assume that collectivism is simply a form of egoism.

Principlism

Most moral philosophers argue for the importance of a prosocial motive other than egoism. Most since Kant ( 1785/1898 ) shun altruism and collectivism as well. Philosophers reject appeals to altruism, especially empathy-induced altruism, because feelings of empathy, sympathy, and compassion are judged to be too fickle and too circumscribed. Empathy is not felt for everyone in need, at least not in the same degree. They reject appeals to collectivism because group interest is bounded by the limits of the group. Collectivism not only permits but may even encourage doing harm to those outside the group. Given these problems with altruism and collectivism, moral philosophers typically advocate prosocial motivation with an ultimate goal of upholding a universal and impartial moral principle, such as justice (Rawls, 1971 ). This moral motivation has been called “principlism” (Batson, 1994 ).

As with altruism and collectivism, we need to understand the nature of principlism as a prosocial motive. Is acting with an ultimate goal of upholding a moral principle possible, or do we act in accord with moral principles only as an instrumental means to reach the ultimate goal of self-benefit? Certainly, there are conspicuous self-benefits to be gained from acting morally. One can gain the social and self-rewards of being seen and seeing oneself as a good person. One also can avoid the social and self-punishments of shame and guilt for failing to do the right thing. As Freud ( 1930 ) suggested, society may inculcate moral principles in the young in order to bridle their antisocial impulses by making it in their best personal interest to act morally (also see Campbell, 1975 ).

If the desire to uphold justice (or some other moral principle) is simply an instrumental goal on the way to the ultimate goal of self-benefit, then this desire is a subtle and sophisticated form of egoism. Alternatively, if upholding the principle is an ultimate goal and ensuing self-benefits are unintended consequences, then principlism can be considered a fourth type of prosocial motivation, independent of egoism, altruism, and collectivism.

Toward a General Model of Prosocial Motivation

Staub ( 1989 ) and Schwartz ( 1992 ) have for many years emphasized the importance of values as determinants of prosocial behavior. Batson ( 1994 ) has proposed a general model that links prosocial values and motives: The value underlying egoism is enhanced personal welfare; the value underlying altruism is the enhanced welfare of one or more individuals as individuals; the value underlying collectivism is enhanced group welfare; and the value underlying principlism is upholding a moral principle. Four experiments have provided evidence for the predicted link between empathic emotion—a source of altruistic motivation—and valuing another individual's welfare (Batson, Turk, Shaw, & Klein, 1995 ); the other value-motive links await test.

Prosocial values are usually assumed to be mutually supportive and cooperative; concerns for the welfare of others and of society are assumed to be moral (Hoffman, 1989 ; Staub, 1989 ). If, however, the different values evoke different ultimate goals and therefore different motives, they may at times conflict rather than cooperate. For example, concern for the welfare of a specific other person (altruism) may conflict not only with self-interest but also with concern for the welfare of the group as a whole (collectivism) or concern to uphold a moral principle (principlism). Evidence of such conflicts has been found (Batson, Batson et al., 1995 ; Batson, Klein, Highberger, & Shaw, 1995 ; Batson et al., 1999 ).

To entertain the possibility of multiple prosocial motives (egoism, altruism, collectivism, and principlism) based on multiple prosocial values (self, other, group, principle) begs for a better understanding of cognitive representation of the self-other relationship. Several representations have been proposed. Concern for another's welfare may be a product of (a) a sense of we-ness based on cognitive unit formation or identification with the other's situation (Hornstein, 1982 ; Lerner, 1982 ); (b) the self expanding to incorporate aspects of the other (Aron & Aron, 1986 ); (c) responding to aspects of the self seen in the other (Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997 ); (d) empathic feeling for the other, who remains distinct from self (Batson & Shaw, 1991 ; Jarymowicz, 1992 ); (e) the self being redefined at a group level, where me and thee become interchangeable parts of a self that is we (Dawes et al., 1988 ; Turner, 1987 ); or (f) the self dissolving in devotion to something outside itself, whether another person, a group, or a principle (James, 1910/1982 ).

Most of these proposals seem plausible, but not all can be true, at least not at the same time. Based on research to date, it appears that neither empathic feelings nor their effect on helping are a product of any of the various forms of self—other merging or overlap—we-ness, self-expansion, self-projection, or group-level self-definition (Batson, Sager et al., 1997 ; Cialdini et al., 1997 ). Recent neuroimaging research further supports this conclusion (e.g., Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005 ; Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007 ; Lawrence et al., 2006 ).

In apparent contradiction to this conclusion, Maner et al. ( 2002 ) claimed to provide evidence that once the effects of self—other overlap and negative affect are removed, there is no longer a positive relation between empathy and helping. In their research, however, they included only empathic emotions in their global measure of negative affect (feeling “sympathetic,” “compassionate,” and “softhearted,” as well as three sadness items that in response to the need situation they used likely tapped feeling sadness for the person in need—“sad,” “low-spirited,” and “heavy-hearted”). As a result, when controlling for negative affect, they actually removed the effect of empathic feelings. It is not very surprising (and also not very informative) to find that once the effect of empathy is removed, there is no longer a relation between empathy and helping. More and better research is needed if we are to understand the role various cognitive representations of the self-other relationship play in responses to others in need.

Theoretical Implications of the Empathy—Altruism Relationship

Returning to the empathy-altruism relationship, it is clear that this relationship has broad theoretical implications. Universal egoism—the assumption that all human behavior is ultimately directed toward self-benefit—has long dominated not only psychology but other social and behavioral sciences as well (Campbell, 1975 ; Mansbridge, 1990 ; Wallach & Wallach, 1983 ). If individuals feeling empathy act, at least in part, with an ultimate goal of increasing the welfare of another, then the assumption of universal egoism must be replaced by a more complex view of motivation that allows for altruism as well as egoism. Such a shift in our view of motivation requires, in turn, a revision of our underlying assumptions about human nature and human potential. It implies that we humans may be more social than we have thought: Other people can be more to us than sources of information, stimulation, and reward as we each seek our own welfare. We have the potential to care about their welfare as well.

The empathy-altruism relationship also forces us to face the question of why empathic feelings exist. What evolutionary function might they serve? Admittedly speculative, the most plausible answer relates empathic feelings to parenting among higher mammals, in which offspring live for some time in a very vulnerable state (Bell, 2001 ; de Waal, 1996 ; Hoffman, 1981 ; McDougall, 1908 ; Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990 ). Were parents not intensely interested in the welfare of their progeny, these species would quickly die out. Empathic feelings for offspring and the resulting altruistic motivation may promote one's reproductive potential not by increasing the number of offspring but by increasing the chance of their survival.

Of course, empathic feelings extend well beyond one's own children. People can feel empathy for a wide range of targets (including nonhumans), as long as there is no preexisting antipathy (Batson, 1991 ; Batson, Lishner, Cook, & Sawyer, 2005 ; Krebs, 1975 ; Shelton & Rogers, 1981 ). From an evolutionary perspective, this extension is usually attributed to cognitive generalization whereby one “adopts” others, making it possible to evoke the primitive and fundamental impulse to care for progeny when these adopted others are in need (Batson, 1987 ; Hoffman, 1981 ; MacLean, 1973 ). Such cognitive generalization may be facilitated by human cognitive capacity, including symbolic thought and the lack of evolutionary advantage for sharp discrimination of empathic feelings in early human small hunter-gatherer bands. In these bands, those in need were often one's children or close kin, and one's own welfare was tightly tied to the welfare even of those who were not close kin (Hoffman, 1981 ).

William McDougall ( 1908 ) long ago described these links in his depiction of the “parental instinct.” As with all McDougall's theorized instincts, the parental instinct involved cognitive, affective, and conative (motivational) components: Cues of distress from one's offspring, including cognitively adopted offspring (e.g., a pet), evoke what McDougall called “the tender emotion” (empathy), which in turn produces altruistic motivation. Although few psychologists would wish to return to McDougall's emphasis on instincts, his attempt to integrate (a) valuing based on cognitive generalization of the perception of offspring in distress; (b) empathic (sympathetic, compassionate, tender) emotional response; and (c) goal-directed altruistic motivation seems at least as much a blueprint for the future as a curio from the past.

Practical Implications of the Empathy—Altruism Relationship

The empathy-altruism relationship also has broad practical implications. Given the power of empathic feelings to evoke altruistic motivation, people may sometimes suppress or avoid these feelings. Loss of the capacity to feel empathy for clients may be a factor, possibly a central one, in the experience of burnout among case workers in the helping professions (Maslach, 1982 ). Aware of the extreme effort involved in helping or the impossibility of helping effectively, these case workers—or nurses caring for terminal patients, or even pedestrians confronted by the homeless—may try to avoid feeling empathy in order to avoid the resulting altruistic motivation (Shaw, Batson, & Todd, 1994 ; Stotland, Mathews, Sherman, Hansson, & Richardson, 1978 ).

Nor should we expect empathy-induced altruism to always produce prosocial effects. It may lead one to increase the welfare of those for whom empathy is felt at the expense of other potential prosocial goals. Research suggests that individuals are willing to act against the greater collective good or to violate their own moral principles of fairness and justice if doing so will benefit a person for whom empathy is felt (Batson et al., 1999 ; Batson, Batson et al., 1995 ; Batson, Klein et al., 1995 ).

More positively, research suggests that empathically aroused individuals may focus on the long-term welfare rather than just the short-term welfare of those in need, providing more sensitive care (Sibicky, Schroeder, & Dovidio, 1995 ). The empathy-altruism relationship also makes possible the use of empathy-based socialization practices to enhance prosocial behavior. Empathy-based socialization is very different from current practices directed toward inhibition of egoistic impulses through shaping, modeling, and internalized guilt (see Batson, 1991 , for some suggestions). Further, therapeutic programs built around facilitating altruistic impulses by encouraging perspective taking and empathic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, especially long-term relationships. There may be personal health benefits as well (Luks, 1988 ; Williams, 1989 ).

At a societal level, experiments have indicated that empathy-induced altruism can be used to improve attitudes toward stigmatized outgroups. Empathy inductions have been used to improve racial attitudes, as well as attitudes and action toward people with AIDS, the homeless, and even convicted murderers and drug dealers (Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002 ; Batson, Polycarpou et al., 1997 ; Dovidio, Gaertner, & Johnson, 1999 ). Empathy-induced altruism has also been found to increase cooperation in a competitive situation (a Prisoner's Dilemma)—even when one knows that the person for whom one feels empathy has acted competitively (Batson & Ahmad, 2001 ; Batson & Moran, 1999 ).

Why do people help others, often at considerable cost to themselves? What does this behavior tell us about the human capacity to care, about the degree of interconnectedness among us, about how social an animal we humans are? These classic philosophical questions have resurfaced in the behavioral and social sciences in the past several decades. Psychological research has focused on the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which claims that empathic emotion produces altruistic motivation—motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare.

Results of the over 30 experiments designed to test this hypothesis against various egoistic alternatives have proved remarkably supportive, leading to the tentative conclusion that feeling empathy for a person in need does indeed evoke altruistic motivation to see that need relieved. Sources of altruistic motivation other than empathy also have been proposed, but as yet, there is not compelling research evidence to support these proposals.

Thinking beyond the egoism—altruism debate, two additional forms of prosocial motivation deserve consideration: collectivism and principlism. Collectivism—motivation with the ultimate goal of benefiting some group or collective as a whole—has been claimed to result from group identity. Principlism—motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding some moral principle—has long been advocated by religious teachers and moral philosophers. Whether either is a separate form of motivation, independent of and irreducible to egoism, is not yet clear. Research done to test the independent status of empathy-induced altruism may serve as a useful model for future research assessing the independent status of collectivism and principlism.

We know more now than a few years ago about why people help. As a result, we know more about human motivation, and even about human nature. These are substantial gains. Still, many questions remain about the emotional and motivational resources that could be tapped to build a more caring, humane society. Providing answers to these questions is, we believe, an important agenda item for positive psychology.

Three Questions for the Future

If empathic concern produces altruistic motivation (as the empathy—altruism hypothesis claims), then what produces empathic concern?

Can we give a plausible account of the evolution of empathy-induced altruism? (Inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, and group selection all fail to do so.)

Can we develop practical procedures that use what we have learned about the psychological implications of the empathy—altruism hypothesis to create a more humane, caring society?

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