Reinterpreting the Empathy-Altruism Relationship: When One Into One Equals Oneness
TLDR
It is suggested that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self.Abstract:
Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy-altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness--a measure of perceived self-other overlap--was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness.read more
Citations
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The physiology of moral sentiments
Paul J. Zak,Paul J. Zak +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the Empathy-Generosity-Punishment model that reveals the criticality of moral sentiments in producing prosocial behaviors, and they test the model's predictions causally in three neuroeconomics experiments that directly intervene in the human brain to turn up and down moral sentiments.
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Empathy neglect: reconciling the spotlight effect and the correspondence bias.
TL;DR: The authors show that actors typically neglect to consider the extent to which observers will moderate their correspondent inferences when they can easily adopt an actor's perspective or imagine being in his or her shoes, which may explain why actors can overestimate the strength of observers' dispositional inferences even when, as the literature on the correspondence bias attests, observers are notoriously prone to drawing those very inferences.
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Differences in Perspective and the Influence of Charitable Appeals: When Imagining Oneself as the Victim Is Not Beneficial
Iris W. Hung,Robert S. Wyer +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that when participants took the perspective of the beneficiary at the time they read an appeal for help, characteristics of the appeal that increased the ease with which they could imagine the situation from this perspective (e.g., a picture of the victim) had a positive effect on both their urge to help and the amount of money they donated.
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Kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and social discounting
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of relatedness and reciprocation on the rate of social discounting and the relationship between the subjective value of a reward to be shared and agreeableness and neuroticism was investigated.
Journal ArticleDOI
How People with Disabilities Communicatively Manage Assistance: Helping as Instrumental Social Support
TL;DR: The goal was to study instrumental support interactions from the perspective of support recipients; in this case, people who are disabled, focusing on how physical assistance is communicatively managed with strangers and newer acquaintances.
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