SELFLESSNESS

Selflessness



Selflessness

Answer

Selflessness is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “devotion to the welfare of others, regard for others, as a principle of action; opposed to egoism or selfishness." Selflessness in this case of discussion deals with evolutionary theory and where the two come together. Evolutionary theory can be defined as follows with regard to biology, "is the change in the heritable traits of a population over successive generations, as determined by shifts in the frequencies of genes."

The basic principle of evolutionary theory is that as animals, humans, insects etc, we have all evolved throughout hundreds of years based on our favorable traits. Natural selection says that our favorable traits are passed on to future generations to enable them a better chance to survive. Selflessness can be debated whether or not it exists among evolutionary theory. Certainly there are arguments for and against. I would like to argue in favor of Selflessness based on some of the information provided and some of my own intuitions.

The first explanation of human Selflessness is the empathy Selflessness hypothesis carried out by Batson. He suggested that empathy involves feeling an emotional response that is consistent with another person's emotional state, and acting upon this feeling selflessly. He believe that witnessing someone in need will create empathetic concern for them therefore motivating the helper to attempt to alleviate the distress of the other person.

Batson hypothesis suggests that some people are more empathetic than others and this is the reason why some people display Selflessness and others 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 found that despite this belief, those who had earlier tested high in empathy, were more likely to take the place of 'Elaine' in empathy. Who was a confederate receiving electric shocks in another room and screaming from the pain she was receiving. Batson carried out further research which showed that manipulating approval/disproval for helping made no difference to the level of helping, amongst the high empathetic participants. But it made a big difference to the low empathy participants. This then shows that this research supports Batson's hypothesis that people do not help to make themselves feel better but to make other people feel better.

The criticisms for this theory has also 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 Selflessness is not without its ...