Empathy-altruism is a form of altruism based on moral emotions or feelings for others.
Social exchange theory represents a seemingly altruistic behavior which benefits the altruist and outweighs the cost the altruist bears. Thus such behavior is self-interested. In contrast, C. Daniel Batson holds that people help others in need out of genuine concern for the well-being of the other person. [1] The key ingredient to such helping is empathic concern. According to Batson's empathy-altruism hypothesis, if someone feels empathy towards another person, they will help them, regardless of what they can gain from it. [2] An alternative hypothesis is empathy-joy, which states a person helps because they find pleasure at seeing another person experience relief. [3] When a person does not feel empathy, the standards of social exchange theory apply.
Empathic concern [4] is considered as a central component of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, it refers to an other-directed emotional response: when an individual perceives another person in distress whose well-being is threatened, they experience emotions aligned with that person's welfare (such as sympathy, tenderness, or care). [5] [6] For example, an observer witnessing someone suffering may feel “I hope that person gets better,” rather than primarily seeking to alleviate their own discomfort. This emotion is considered the core motivator driving assistance aimed at the ultimate goal of another's well-being.
In contrast, Personal Distress is a self-directed negative reaction: when an individual witnesses another's pain or suffering, they first experience their own anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, or discomfort. [7] [8] In such cases, helping behavior often stems from alleviating one's own unease rather than purely for the other person. Thus, help motivated by personal distress tends to follow a self-serving logic. The key distinction lies in their origins: empathy serves as a “for others” motivator, while personal distress functions as an “for oneself” emotional driver to reduce discomfort. In other words, empathy generates altruistic help motivation, whereas personal distress is often linked to self-directed, escapist, or discomfort-alleviating motives.
In the Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis, it is precisely the other-directed emotion triggered by empathic concern rather than by one’s own personal distress that is considered the crucial mechanism for forming genuine altruistic motivation.
In the empathy–altruism hypothesis, altruistic motivation is defined as a psychological state whose ultimate goal is to enhance others' well-being, which means that the fundamental purpose of an individual's helping behavior is not self-benefit, but to improve another person's situation. In contrast, egoistic motivation posits that the ultimate goal of helping behavior lies in enhancing one's own state: individuals may engage in helping actions to obtain external rewards, avoid punishment, maintain self-image, or alleviate the internal discomfort arising from witnessing others' suffering. [9]
The key distinction between these two types of motivation lies in the fact that seemingly similar helping behaviors may conceal fundamentally different “ultimate goals.” Traditional social exchange theory, [10] the negative-state relief model, [11] and aversive-arousal reduction [12] theory all contend that seemingly altruistic actions can be interpreted as self-serving strategic responses, which aims at making “oneself better” rather than “others better.”
The empathy–altruism hypothesis challenges this traditional assumption. According to this theory, if individuals choose to help others when experiencing empathic concern, even in situations without rewards, lacking social approval, or involving high costs, such behavior is more likely rooted in genuine altruistic motivation rather than self-interested calculation. Therefore, the theory emphasizes that when empathic concern is activated, individuals may transcend self-interested cost-benefit considerations and engage in actions aimed at improving others' well-being.
There has been significant debate over whether other-helping behavior is motivated by self- or other-interest. The prime actors in this debate are Daniel Batson, arguing for empathy-altruism, and Robert Cialdini, arguing for self-interest.
Batson recognizes that people sometimes help for selfish reasons. He and his team were interested in finding ways to distinguish between motives. In one experiment, students were asked to listen to tapes from a radio program. One of the interviews was with a woman named Carol, who talked about her bad car accident in which both of her legs were broken, her struggles and how behind she was becoming in class. Students who were listening to this particular interview were given a letter asking the student to share lecture notes and meet with her. The experimenters changed the level of empathy by telling one group to try to focus on how she was feeling (high empathy level) and the other group not to be concerned with that (low empathy level). The experimenters also varied the cost of not helping: the high cost group was told that Carol would be in their psychology class after returning to school and the low cost group believed she would finish the class at home. The results confirmed the empathy-altruism hypothesis: those in the high empathy group were almost equally likely to help her in either circumstance, while the low empathy group helped out of self-interest (seeing her in class every day made them feel guilty if they did not help). [13]
Batson and colleagues set out to show that empathy motivates other-regarding helping behavior not out of self-interest but out of true interest in the well-being of others. [14] They addressed two hypotheses that counter the empathy-altruism hypothesis: