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CHAPTER 35. EMPATHY AND ALTRUISM 493 assumption that all human behavior is ulti- mately directed toward self-benefit—has long dominated not only psychology but also other social and behavioral sciences (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 uni- versal egoism must be replaced by a more com- plex 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 forces us to face the question of why empathic feel- ings exist. What evolutionary function do they serve? Admittedly speculative, the most plau- sible answer relates empathic feelings to parenting among higher mammals, in which offspring live for some time in a very vulner- able state (de Waal, 1996; Hoffman, 1981; Mc- Dougall, 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 mo- tivation—may promote one’s reproductive po- tential not by increasing the number of offspring but by increasing the chance of their survival. Of course, empathic feelings extend well be- yond one’s own children. People can feel em- pathy for a wide range of targets (including nonhumans), as long as there is no preexisting antipathy (Batson, 1991; Krebs, 1975; Shelton & Rogers, 1981). From an evolutionary per- spective, 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 chil- dren 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 in- stinct.” As with all of McDougall’s theorized in- stincts, the parental instinct involved cognitive, affective, and conative (motivational) compo- nents: Cues of distress from one’s offspring, in- cluding cognitively adopted offspring (e.g., a pet), evoke what McDougall called “the tender emotion” (our “empathy”), which in turn pro- duces altruistic motivation. Although few psy- chologists 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) em- pathic (sympathetic, compassionate, tender) emotional response, and (c) goal-directed altru- istic motivation seems at least as much a blue- print 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 effec- tively, these case workers—or nurses caring for terminal patients, or even pedestrians con- fronted 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). More positively, the empathy-altruism rela- tionship suggests the use of empathy-based so- cialization practices to enhance prosocial behav- ior, practices that are very different from the currently dominant practices involving inhibi- tion of egoistic impulses through shaping, mod- eling, and internalized guilt (see Batson, 1991, for some suggestions). Further, therapeutic pro- grams built around facilitating altruistic im- pulses by encouraging perspective taking and empathic feelings might enable individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal rela- tions, especially those that are long term. There 494 PART VI. INTERPERSONAL APPROACHES 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 out- groups. Empathy inductions have been used to improve racial attitudes, as well as attitudes to- ward people with AIDS, the homeless, and even convicted murderers (Batson, Polycarpou, et al., 1997; Dovidio, Gaertner, & Johnson, 1999). Empathy-induced altruism also has been found to increase cooperation in a competitive situa- tion (a Prisoner’s Dilemma)—even when one knows that the person for whom one feels em- pathy has acted competitively (Batson & Ah- mad, 2001; Batson & Moran, 1999). Conclusions Why do people help others, even 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 really are? These classic philosophical questions have re- surfaced in the behavioral and social sciences in the past several decades. Psychological research has focused on the claim that empathic emotion evokes altruistic motivation—motivation with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s wel- fare. To understand this research, it is important to distinguish empathic emotion—an emotional state congruent with the perceived welfare of another person—from a number of other em- pathy concepts. We identified seven other em- pathy concepts: knowing another person’s in- ternal state; assuming the physical posture of an observed other; coming to feel as another per- son feels; projecting oneself into another’s sit- uation; imagining how another is feeling; imag- ining how one would think and feel in another’s place; and being upset by another person’s suf- fering. The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that empathic emotion evokes altruistic motivation. Results of the over 25 experiments designed to test this hypothesis against various egoistic al- ternatives have proven remarkably supportive, leading to the tentative conclusion that feeling empathy for a person in need does indeed evoke altruistic motivation to help that person. Sources of altruistic motivation other than em- pathy also have been proposed, but as yet there is no compelling research evidence to support these proposals. Thinking beyond the egoism-altruism debate, two additional forms of prosocial motivation seem especially worthy of consideration: collec- tivism and principlism. Collectivism—motiva- tion with the ultimate goal of benefiting some group or collective as a whole—has been claimed to result from group identity. Princi- plism—motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding some moral principle—has long been advocated by religious teachers and moral phi- losophers. 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 al- truism may serve as a useful model for future research assessing the independent status of col- lectivism and principlism. We know more now than we did 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 so- ciety. Providing answers to these questions is, we believe, an important agenda item for posi- tive psychology. References Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Aron, A., & Aron, E. N. (1986). Love and the ex- pansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Batson, C. D. (1987). 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In trying to explain the good and bad of our species, we psychologists (like newspaper edi- tors) have also paid much more attention to our malevolence than our morality. In classical psy- choanalytic theory, for example, aggression and acquisitiveness are viewed as fundamental to our natures, whereas our moral motives emerge only after an arduous process of socialization (primarily through the supposed resolution of the Oedipus complex, at about age 7, according to Freud, 1921/1960). Similarly, in prominent behavioral theories, concern for others is based on learned, or secondary, reinforcers that are derived from more egocentric primary reinforc- ers (e.g., Hull, 1952; Skinner, 1971). Such motivational theories explain behavior in terms of some benefit or reinforcement to the individual doing the behaving. But morality is about getting reinforced by some benefit to an- other. Therefore, a theory of moral motivation has to account for the sources of this capacity to be reinforced by beneficial outcomes to oth- ers—an unusual challenge. Correspondingly, a theory of moral education has to figure out how to strengthen this capacity so that individuals become truly concerned about the well-being of others, rather than be- having well merely to acquire external rewards such as money or praise, or to avoid punishers such as a spanking or ostracism. This, too, is challenging because traditional motivational re- search has been focused much more on how already-established reinforcers (like food, money, and praise) strengthen behavior than on how to go about strengthening reinforcers (Schulman, 1990, 1996). Unfortunately, even the “moral develop- ment” theories of Piaget (1965) and Kohlberg (1969) offer little insight into moral motivation. These theorists paid little attention to the sources of and individual differences in our moral motives. Instead, they looked for univer- sals (or “stages”) in children’s conceptions of justice and propriety as they age (conceptions which, by the way, rarely have been found to 500 PART VI. INTERPERSONAL APPROACHES correlate with measures of moral action such as helping or honesty; see Schulman and Mekler, 1994, pp. 16–17). My goal in this chapter is to show that our moral motives are as primary, powerful, and emotionally intense as our aggressive and ac- quisitive ones; that concern for others emerges spontaneously in very young children (uncon- nected to any developmental stages and long be- fore the Oedipus complex is supposedly re- solved); and that morality is so crucial to our survival as a species that it has evolved in three separate forms, producing significant individual differences in “moral styles.” Murder and mayhem may grab the headlines, but if kindness, or at least civility, were not more common, then the human race would likely have gone the way of the dinosaurs. In- deed, various studies show that children per- form far more helpful and cooperative interac- tions than hostile ones (Hay & Rheingold, 1984; Walters, Pearce, & Dahms, 1957), although the hostile ones tend to get noticed more. A Theory of Moral Motivation Mark Twain (1967), contemplating the sources of morality, reckoned that “there are several good protections against temptations but the surest is cowardice” (p. 4). Obviously, fear of punishment does keep some people from yield- ing to temptations and doing harm—at least some of the time. But we do not ordinarily think of fear of punishment as a moral motive. On the contrary, the moral person resists temp- tation and treats others well out of “internal” motives, doing so even when he or she can get away with doing otherwise. So what is the source of our moral motives? Actually, one can distinguish at least three in- dependent sources—empathy, principles, and moral affiliations—suggesting that nature has been engaging in what engineers call “redun- dant” design. Engineers build in redundancy so that vital mechanisms have backup systems in case they fail. Nature often uses the same strat- egy, which is presumably why many of our vi- tal organs and senses come in pairs, such as our kidneys, ovaries, eyes, and ears. If moral motivation does derive from three independent sources (indicating redundant de- sign), it suggests that consciences, like kidneys, are critical to our survival. We, like all social animals, flourish as our group flourishes, and our group flourishes best when there is har- mony and helpfulness among members. But harmony and helpfulness are not automatic for us. No, we are eminently capable of harming each other and are frequently roused to do so. Nor, like some social animals, do we have in- stinctive mechanisms to help us resolve conflicts (e.g., we do not automatically terminate an at- tack against an opponent who signals submis- sion by baring his neck). Instead, what we hu- mans do have, or are capable of having, are powerful consciences that move us to care about others and aspire toward high moral ideals. What Does “Moral” Mean? Philosophers, theologians, talk show hosts, and countless others have argued endlessly about the meaning of moral. Some of the confusion arises from the fact that in common discourse the word has more than one meaning. As used in this chapter, moral refers only to acts in- tended to produce kind and/or fair outcomes. This is a core meaning of the term in all major ethical and religious traditions and probably is its most common usage. Thus, according to this definition, when we call an act moral, it is not because of some phys- ical aspect of the behavior or even because some good was achieved; rather, it is because we have inferred that some good intention lay behind the act, that the actor’s true goal was to produce a kind outcome to benefit one or more others, or a fair outcome to provide each relevant party with the benefit he or she deserves (typically based on considerations of equity or equality). In other words, we have inferred that the true reinforcer for the act was benefit to one or more others, and that the act was not undertaken out of coercion or obligation or to induce reciproc- ity. (When we refer to people as moral, and not just their acts, it is because we believe their ac- tions generally spring from such benevolent in- tentions.) But the intention to produce kind and fair outcomes is not the only meaning of moral. For example, sexual morality generally refers to re- fraining from sex except in approved ways un- der authorized circumstances, and its motive sources (such as religious and community traditions, sexual rivalries, taboos, and aver- sions) are very different from those motivating the inclination to treat others kindly and fairly. Indeed, many of us know “good” (that is, kind) people who do not adhere to traditional sexual CHAPTER 36. HOW WE BECOME MORAL 501 codes, as well as “bad” (that is, mean) people who do. Sexual behavior that might be censured in certain sexuality-based moralities (such as premarital or gay sex) might not even enter into considerations of character in a morality based on kindness and fairness. (In this regard, be- cause we as a society are less inclined than ear- lier generations to base judgments of character on sexual behavior, when religious leaders and mental health professionals call for a return to traditional sexual mores, they frequently justify their position more in terms of claims about physical and psychological health than virtue; e.g., Lickona, 1991, p. 357.) In another different conception of morality, moral status is contingent on obedience to au- thorities, such as to parents or religious or po- litical leaders. Here, too, the motivational sources are not the same as those that prompt kindness and fairness. Indeed, there are many instances when the morality of obedience and the morality of kindness and fairness pull in op- posite directions (which is why, in this day and age, few would accept “I was just following or- ders” as a tenable moral defense). The Three Moral Systems A comprehensive understanding of moral mo- tivation must take into account three separate and independent sources: (a) the arousal of em- pathy; (b) moral affiliations (or identifications with moral models); and (c) the commitment to principles or personal standards of right and wrong. In more experiential terms, one might say we become moral because we are: (a) moved by people’s feelings (especially their suffering); (b) moved by the goodness of moral models; and (c) moved by ideas of the “good,” such as noble principles and ideals. Empathy Empathy refers to that remarkable capacity we humans have to experience what other people are feeling, to imagine ourselves in another’s psychological place and feel his or her joys and sorrows as if they were our own. Like many psychological attributes, the capacity for empa- thy may be a normally distributed characteris- tic, and, as Martin Hoffman (1977) and others have demonstrated, children often begin to ex- hibit signs of empathy, spontaneously, by their 18th month. For example, children of this age will show concern and sadness when a parent or sibling appears sad and also offer help, say, by offering to share their “comforter” blanket (Young, Fox, & Zahn-Waxler, 1999). Empathy, thus, becomes a source of moral motivation by inducing altruistic acts to make someone else feel better. Empathic responses are akin to reflexes in the sense that they are unlearned reactions to the emotional states of others. And they can be ex- traordinarily intense. Anyone who has been un- able to ease the pain of someone he or she has felt for—a parent with a hurt or sick child, for instance—knows how intense the psychological discomfort of an empathic response can be. But children and adults do not feel empathy for everyone; someone perceived as an enemy or even a competitor is not likely to arouse em- pathy (see Cassell, this volume). The more sim- ilar we believe others are to us, the more likely we will be to empathize with them and treat them well (Eisenberg, 1983). A growing body of research by C. Daniel Bat- son (1990; see also Batson, Ahmad, Lishner, & Tsang, this volume), among others, has dem- onstrated a direct relationship between empathy and altruism: We tend to help and protect those with whom we empathize and are less likely to do them harm (Feshbach & Feshbach, 1969; Roberts & Strayer, 1996; Toi & Batson, 1982). Conversely, low empathy scores are associated with a higher propensity for antisocial behavior and delinquency (Cohen & Strayer, 1996). The recent research into William’s syndrome, a genetically based disorder, which (like Down’s syndrome) has physiognomic, physiological, and behavioral manifestations, may help un- cover the genetic roots of empathy. Among the characteristics of those born with this syndrome are unusually strong empathic responses to oth- ers (Bower, 2000). Moral Affiliations Moral affiliations, our second source of moral motivation, produce morality through identifi- cation with “good” others such as a parent, a mentor, a political or religious figure, or even a fictional character. It is common for children to love goodness in others, spontaneously and without instruction or prompting. This may be why so many children are enthralled by Mr. Rogers, Barney, and other caring characters. No one has to teach them this response or force them to watch these TV shows. Children do not [...]... 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