The Altruism Debate
For nearly forty years, two of the world’s most distinguished psychologists have locked horns over
whether the decision to give can be purely altruistic, or whether it’s always ultimately selfish. Rather
than debate philosophy, each has come to battle wielding a deadlier weapon: the psychological
experiment.
The defendant of pure altruism is C. Daniel Batson, who believes that we engage in truly selfless
giving when we feel empathy for another person in need. The greater the need, and the stronger our
attachment to the person experiencing it, the more we empathize. When we empathize with a person,
we focus our energy and attention on helping him or her—not because it will make us feel good but
because we genuinely care. Batson believes that although some people feel empathy more intensely
and frequently than others, virtually all humans have the capacity for empathy—even the most
disagreeable of takers. As Adam Smith put it centuries ago: “the emotion which we feel for the
misery of others... is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel
it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of
society, is not altogether without it.”
The devil’s advocate is Robert Cialdini, who argues that there’s no such thing as pure altruism.
He believes that human beings are frequently generous, giving, and caring. But he doesn’t think these
behaviors are entirely altruistic in origin. He believes that when others hurt, we hurt—and this
motivates us to help. Cialdini’s first challenge to Batson’s claims was that when empathy leads us to
help, it’s not because our ultimate goal is to benefit the other person. He proposed that when others
are in need, we feel distressed, sad, or guilty. To reduce our own negative feelings, we help. Cialdini
accumulated an impressive body of studies suggesting that when people feel distressed, guilty, or sad
toward another person in need, they help.
Batson’s rebuttal: it’s true that people sometimes help to reduce negative feelings, but this isn’t
the only reason. And negative feelings don’t always lead to helping. When we feel distressed, sad, or
guilty, our ultimate goal is to reduce these negative feelings. In some cases, helping is the strategy that
we choose. But in many cases, we can reduce our negative feelings in other ways, such as distracting
ourselves or escaping the situation altogether. Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether
empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person’s distress or our own distress. If
the goal is to reduce our own distress, we should choose whatever course of action makes us feel
better. If the goal is to reduce another person’s distress, we should help even when it’s costly and
other courses of action would make us feel good.
In one experiment, Batson and colleagues gave people a choice: watch a woman receive electric
shocks or leave the experiment to avoid the distress. Not surprisingly, 75 percent left. But when they
felt empathy for the woman, only 14 percent left; the other 86 percent stayed and offered to take the
shocks in her place. And of the people who stayed to help, the ones who empathized the most strongly
were willing to endure four times as many shocks as those who felt less empathy. Batson and
colleagues demonstrated this pattern in more than half a dozen experiments. Even when people can
reduce their negative feelings by escaping the situation, if they’re feeling empathy, they stay and help
anyway, at a personal cost of time and pain. On the basis of this evidence, Batson concluded that
reducing bad feelings is not the only reason people help, and a comprehensive analysis of eighty-five