Is altruism part of human nature?

Martin L. Hoffman·1981·Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
DOI 10.1037//0022-3514.40.1.121

Cites (9)

  1. The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
    Hamilton, W.D. · 1964 · Journal of Theoretical Biology
  2. The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
    Trivers, Robert L. · 1971 · The Quarterly Review of Biology
  3. Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility.
    Darley, John M., Latane, Bibb · 1968 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
  4. A theory of group selection.
    Wilson, D S · 1975 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  5. The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology
    Sahlins, Marshall · 1976
  6. Self-attribution of emotion: the effects of expressive behavior on the quality of emotional experience
    Laird, James D. · 1974 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
  7. The relationship between empathy and aggression in two age groups.
    Feshbach, Norma D., Feshbach, Seymour · 1969 · Developmental Psychology
  8. Helping a Distressed Person: Social, Personality, and Stimulus Determinants
    1974 · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
  9. Motion and emotion: the role of proprioception in the physiology and pathologyof the emotions
    Gellhorn, E. · 1964 · Psychological Review

Show all 9 references

Cited by (28)

  1. Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases
    Preston, Stephanie D., de Waal, Frans B. M. · 2002 · Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  2. The functional architecture of human empathy
    Decety, Jean, Jackson, Philip L. · 2004 · Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews
  3. The relation of empathy to prosocial and related behaviors
    Eisenberg, Nancy, Miller, Paul A. · 1987 · Psychological Bulletin
  4. Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy
    de Waal, Frans B.M. · 2008 · Annual Review of Psychology
  5. Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review
    Goetz, Jennifer L., Keltner, Dacher, Simon-Thomas, Emiliana · 2010 · Psychological Bulletin

See all 746

How to cite

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

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Is altruism part of human nature? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0022-3514.40.1.121
The paper
Hoffman, M. L. (1981). Is altruism part of human nature? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.40.1.121

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.