different studies backed him up.
But Cialdini, one of the greatest social thinkers of our time, wasn’t done yet. He acknowledged
that empathy can drive helping. Feelings of concern and compassion certainly motivate us to act for
the benefit of others at a personal cost. But he wasn’t convinced that this reflects pure altruism. He
argued that when we empathize with a victim in need, we become so emotionally attached that we
experience a sense of oneness with the victim. We merge the victim into our sense of self. We see
more of ourselves in the victim. And this is why we help: we’re really helping ourselves. Quoting
Adam Smith again, “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves
enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the
same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something.”
Cialdini and colleagues conducted numerous experiments supporting this idea. Empathy leads to a
sense of oneness, or self-other overlap, and this leads to greater helping. Batson’s team came back
with another rebuttal: that is altruism. If we empathize with other people to the point of merging our
own identities with theirs, we care about them as much as we care about ourselves. Because we no
longer place our interests above theirs, helping them is purely altruistic.
Stalemate.
Both camps agree that empathy leads to helping. Both camps agree that a sense of oneness is a key
reason why. But they fundamentally differ about whether oneness is selfish or altruistic. I believe
there’s a middle ground here, and it’s one that Deron Beal discovered early on. When he started
Freecycle, he wanted to keep used goods out of landfills by giving them away to people who wanted
them. But he also had some personal interests at stake. In his recycling program, he had a warehouse
full of stuff he couldn’t use or recycle, and his boss wanted the warehouse emptied. In addition, Beal
was hoping to get rid of an old mattress that he owned. None of his friends needed it, and it was too
big to throw away. To dump it, he would need to borrow a truck and drive the mattress to a landfill,
where he would be charged for disposal. Beal realized it would be easier and cheaper if he could
just give it away to someone on Freecycle.
This is why many takers and matchers started giving on Freecycle. It’s an efficient way to get rid
of things they don’t want and probably can’t sell on Craigslist. But soon, Beal knows from personal
experience, people who initially give things away for selfish reasons begin to care about the people
they’re helping. When the recipient arranged to pick up his mattress, Beal was thrilled. “I thought I
was getting away with giving a mattress away, that I was the one benefiting,” he says. “But when the
person showed up at my door and thanked me, I felt good. It was only partially a selfish act: I was
helping someone else in a way that made me happy. I felt so darn good about it that I started giving
away other items.”
After a decade of research, I’ve come to the conclusion that Beal’s experience is the norm rather
than the exception. Oneness is otherish. Most of the time that we give, it’s based on a cocktail of
mixed motives to benefit others and ourselves. Takers and matchers may be most likely to give when
they feel they can advance others’ interests and their own at the same time. As the primatologist Frans
de Waal writes in The Age of Empathy, “The selfish/unselfish divide may be a red herring. Why try to
extract the self from the other, or the other from the self, if the merging of the two is the secret behind
our cooperative nature?”
Consider Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written for free by upwards of three million
volunteers, with more than a hundred thousand of them contributing regularly. When asked why they
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(Michael S)
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