ALTRUISM

Altruism

Altruism

The first interpretation of human altruism is the empathy altruism hypothesis conveyed out by Batson. He proposed that empathy involves feeling an emotional answer that is consistent with another person's emotional state, and acting upon this feeling selflessly. He accept as true that witnessing somebody in need will create empathetic anxiety for them thus motivating the helper to try to alleviate the anguish of the other person. Batson hypothesis proposes that some persons are more empathetic than other ones and this is the cause why some persons display altruism and other ones do not. Batson argues that the ability to take someone else's perspective depends on three different aspects: that the observer has had a similar experience, so have a deeper understanding of how the person in distress feels. The observer is attached to the victim for instance they are a family member or friend. Or the observer may be instructed by others who imagine what it must be like to be in the needy situation.

Research for this hypothesis has been carried out by Batson himself, who firstly gave a collection of people a placebo drug which he claimed fixed the participants moods. He discovered that despite this conviction, those who had earlier checked high in empathy, were more expected to take the location of 'Elaine' in empathy. Who was a confederate obtaining electric alarms in another room and shouting from the agony she was receiving. Batson conveyed out farther study which showed that manipulating approval/disproval for helping made no distinction to the grade of helping, amidst the high empathetic participants. But it made a large-scale distinction to the low empathy participants. This then shows that this study carries Batson's hypothesis that persons do not help to make themselves seem better but to make other persons seem better.

The condemnations for this theory has furthermore been carried out by Batson. In further experiments he found that when the costs of helping were high, even highly empathetic people refused to 'Elaine's' place. This then shows that empathy altruism is not without its bounds. Also another criticism of this study is that the participants may have just been showing demand characteristics and acting in the way they believe the researcher wants them to act in that particular situation. This may be because they were scared of the social disapproval of not helping someone In need.

This shows that if the empathy model is correct, then inducing empathy should increase pro-social behaviour. The next explanation of human altruism is the negative state relief hypothesis carried out by Cialdini. This study is different to the empathy altruism hypothesis as he argues that we help for selfish reasons. He argues that when we do something wrong such as not helping someone in need, we feel guilty. As guilt is a negative state, for instance an unpleasant feeling, we are motivated to reduce it in some way. Also as children we are taught that helping others is good and is ...