By: patricia cartwright
In my blog, I will argue that altruism does exist. Altruism can be motivated by empathy-induced concern, collectivism, principalism, and genetic influences. Furthermore, I argue that altruism and empathy do possess an evolutionary benefit and that helping others does not always have to be motivated by self rewards. Altruism DefinedWith egoism, the ultimate motive is to increase one’s own welfare. Although egoism can motivate helping behavior, it does not, however, produce altruism. Helping behavior are varying actions intended to benefit individuals other than oneself. In contrast to egoism, altruism is the ultimate motive to increase another person’s welfare rather than one’s own. I, like, Dr. Daniel Batson believe that when one’s own welfare increases as an unintended consequence, their behavior can still be considered altruistic. For instance, empathy-induced altruism, feeling for another person and having the need to reduce the distress of another person can motivate helping. However, whether empathy, alone, is enough to motivate helping behavior is another question I seek to answer below.
Motivating Helping Behavior
People find motivation for helping behavior due to varying social motives. These motives can include collectivism, the idea that the group’s welfare comes before one’s own and one feels a need to maintain one’s belonging to a group (Fiske, 2014). Secondly, one can be motivated to help based on principalism, one’s need to uphold what they consider to be right and wrong, mixed in with a desire to control the outcome of situations (Fiske, 2014). Additionally, one can be motivated to help because of the belief that people are responsible for others and deserve to be helped. However, in most cases, prerequisites for helping must occur such as individuals noticing an event, deeming the event an emergency, feeling personally responsible for action, considering what help is needed, and then implementing action. Another important factor is the perception of a victim’s assigned responsibility. If the victim is perceived as responsible for their distress, people will be less likely to help. Lastly, research has also shown that other important situational factors such as affiliative motives can encourage helping behaviors.
Affiliative Motives vs. Empathic Motives
Research has found that humans help others when opportunities to affiliate with desirable partners are present (Phillips, Ferguson, & Rijsdijk, 2010). Situational factors such as a victim’s attractiveness, similarity to the potential helper, and the victim’s clear and severe need can help predict one’s likelihood of engaging in helping behavior (Fiske, 2014). Thus, it seems that affiliative and self-serving motives rather than purely empathic motives, often times, drive our helping behaviors. Similarly, research by Hauser, Preston, & Stansfield (2014) demonstrated that people prefer to help a happy over a sad victim when helping involves direct social interaction. Their results suggest social affiliation motives are impactful because they offer the opportunity to develop cooperative relationships that benefit survival and success in group life. Nevertheless, I believe that helping behavior can still be purely driven by altruism. In the section below, I will describe why some situations result in individuals placing others before themselves.
Others Before the Self
While some social psychologists believe that all acts of altruism are motivated by ulterior motives that are self-oriented, others argue that people do act selflessly to increase the welfare of others due to an inherent quality of feeling concern for others’ needs and goodness. Collectivism, another motivator of helping behavior, concerns the motivation to increase the welfare of one’s group as a whole and is differentiated from individual-level empathy (Fiske, 2014). Consistent with the idea that people act on collectivistic core social motives that results in helping others, people are also more likely to help when they can identify similarities between themselves and the victim, particularly when their group identity is relevant. In other words, when a victim is perceived as an ingroup member, people are more likely to help. Research by Mathur et al. (2010), actually suggests that greater inclusion of one’s group members in one’s self concept can lead to extraordinary empathy and altruistic behavior for members of one's own group. Importantly, their research also demonstrates that one’s self-concept is not activated when outgroup members are helped suggesting that, perhaps, altruism is real and evolutionarily adaptive.
The Evolution of Altruism
Humans are social animals that have lived in groups for thousands of years, resulting in a tendency for people to depend on one another. To increase our survival odds, we have learned to feel empathy and cooperate with each other. Altruism and empathy are evolutionarily adaptive because they can increase one’s odds of survival because they help people compete for resources, even when there are associated costs. Altruists believe people deserve help and expect people to be responsible for one another and thus responsible for helping maintain human survival. According to Phillips et al. (2010), it is also possible that more altruistic individuals seek out environments that offer opportunities to express their altruism. Altruistic actions depict interpersonal warmth which is a desirable trait, especially in women. Thus, having an opportunity to express altruism may, in turn, help attract mates that leads to more frequent sexual reproduction, offspring that have inherited gene coding for altruism, a stronger mate preference, and a cooperative society.
Conclusion
Although I believe altruism, in its purest sense, does exist, I also believe that empathic altruism cannot always motivate helping. When others have a tendency toward empathy they typically have a tendency to trust others, suggesting that in the absence of trust, perhaps empathy will not motivate helping behavior. The research reviewed here demonstrates that helping behavior motivated by self-rewards widely prevails but that true altruism may still exist, although rare. I agree that altruistic actions are often driven by self-rewards, but it also perfectly possible for people to commit altruistic acts and unintentionally receive rewards. Lastly, as Mathur et al. (2010) have found, one’s self concept is not involved in helping outgroup members which suggests true altruism is a phenomenon if people are not always thinking of themselves.
- Fiske, S. T. (2014). Chapter 9. In Social beings: Core motives in social psychology. (pp. 335-380). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- Hauser, D. J., Preston, S. D., & Stansfield (2014). Altruism in the wild: When affiliative motives to help positive people overtake empathic motives to help the distressed. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1295-1305.
- Martin, A., & Olson, K. R. (2015). Beyond good and evil: What motivations underlie children’s prosocial behavior? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10, 159-175.
- Mathur, V. A., Harada, T., Lipke, T., & Chiao, J. Y. (2010). Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation. NeuroImage, 51, 1468-1475.
- Phillips, T., Ferguson, E., & Rijsdijk, F. (2010). A link between altruism and sexual selection: Genetic influence on altruistic behaviour and mate preference towards it. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 809-819.