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
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Reflecting on acts of kindness toward the self: Emotions, generosity, and the role of social norms.
TL;DR: The authors found that normative kindnesses were associated with more positive emotion and less negative emotion than non-normative kindnesses, an effect mediated by the greater positivity of the normative stories.
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Cerebral lateralization of pro- and anti-social tendencies.
TL;DR: Mounting evidence suggest that the right-hemisphere (RH) has a relative advantage in mediating social intelligence - identifying social stimuli, understanding the intentions of other people, awareness of the dynamics in social relationships, and successful handling of social interactions.
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The Other Side of Perspective Taking: Transgression Ambiguity and Victims’ Revenge Against Their Offender
Tyler G. Okimoto,Michael Wenzel +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the effect of perspective taking on victim's desire to exact revenge in an experimentally induced injustice and found that when the violation was ambiguous, perspective taking resulted in favorable attribution biases and reduced revenge.
Journal ArticleDOI
Self and other: from pure ego to co-constituted we
TL;DR: In this article, the social dimensions of selfhood have been discussed and the question of whether a self can be a self on her own or only together with others has been explored.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy, social psychology, and global helping traits
TL;DR: The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion as mentioned in this paper, and a number of philosophers have argued that virtue ethics can accommodate the empirical results in question.
References
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