Altruism can be defined as helping behaviour that is not seeking to benefit oneself either tangibly or intangibly. Batson (1981) put forward the idea that people are capable of altruistic acts which benefit another person. He suggested the empathy-altruism hypothesis, which states that if a person feels sympathy, compassion and tenderness towards a victim they decide to help in order to reduce the victim’s distress. Batson (1981) conducted a study to test his hypothesis.
He set up 4 different conditions. In all the conditions participants believed they were watching another student, called Elaine, receive electric shocks. They were asked if they would take Elaine’s place and receive the shocks. The conditions are summarised as follows with the results. This experiment supports Batson’s (1981) empathy-altruism hypothesis. The empathy condition (where participants believe they are similar) showed significantly higher percentages that took Elaine’s place.
Both empathic conditions showed similar percentages of helping which shows that the chance to escape made no difference; therefore we can say that helping was due to empathy. However, it is difficult to separate egoist and empathic factors when investigating altruism. Also it has been suggested that empathic helping only emerges in social situations. Also it is hard to generalise as participants in this experiment were all female and students. A strength of the empathy altruism hypothesis is that developmental evidence suggests that children do become more altruistic as empathy develops.
It also has empirical support e. g. Eisenberg and Miller (1987). Critics of this theory, however, counter these findings with the argument that the subjects were more motivated to avoid social disapproval or feelings of guilt. A weakness of this hypothesis is that the research is ethnocentric as participants are mainly from North America. There may be differences in helping behaviour across cultures. This hypothesis has been criticised by many researchers.
Smith et al (1989) proposed the empathic joy hypothesis which states that we help because empathy leads to shared feelings of joy. Also Cialdini (1987) suggested the negative state relief model, based on results from his replication of Batson’s ‘Elaine’ experiment (1981) but gave an unexpected reward to participants for taking Elaine’s place. He found that helping decreased and his reason for this was that, the offer of money improved participant’s mood and because their mood improved they didn’t feel the need to help (egoist motives). This opposed Batson’s hypothesis.