Does empathy lead to anything more than superficial helping? Comment on Batson et al. (1997).

Steven L. Neuberg, Robert B. Cialdini, Stephanie L. Brown, Carol L. Luce, Brad J. Sagarin, Brian P. Lewis·1997·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Abstract

To properly test the hypothesis that empathy-associated helping is altruistic, one needs to (a) consider plausible nonaltruistic alternatives for the observed empathy–helping effects, (b) validly and reliably measure these nonaltruistic alternatives, and (c) examine whether the empathy–helping relat

Cites (2)

  1. Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness.
    Aron, Arthur, Aron, Elaine N., Smollan, Danny · 1992 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
  2. Motivational and emotional controls of cognition
    Simon, Herbert A. · 1967 · Psychological Review

Show all 2 references

Cited by (8)

  1. Emotion, regulation, and moral development
    Eisenberg, Nancy · 2000 · Annual Review of Psychology
  2. Is gratitude a moral affect?
    McCullough, Michael E., Kilpatrick, Shelley D., Emmons, Robert A., Larson, David B. · 2001 · Psychological Bulletin
  3. Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets
    Heyman, James, Ariely, Dan · 2004 · Psychological Science
  4. A theoretical basis for the major dimensions of personality
    Ashton, Michael C., Lee, Kibeom · 2001 · European Journal of Personality
  5. The origins of altruism in offspring care.
    Preston, Stephanie D. · 2013 · Psychological Bulletin

See all 171

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does empathy lead to anything more than superficial helping? Comment on Batson et al. (1997). https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0022-3514.73.3.510
The paper
Neuberg, S. L., Cialdini, R. B., Brown, S. L., Luce, C. L., Sagarin, B. J., & Lewis, B. P. (1997). Does empathy lead to anything more than superficial helping? Comment on Batson et al. (1997). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.73.3.510

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.