Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation?

Abstract

It has been suggested that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. This hypothesis was tested by having subjects watch another female undergraduate receive electric shocks and then giving them a chance to help her by taking the remaining shocks themselves. In each of two experiments, subjects' level of empathic emotion (low versus high) and their ease of escape from continuing to watch the victim suffer if they did not help (easy versus difficult) were manipulated in a 2 X 2 design. We reasoned that if empathy led to altruistic motivation, subjects feeling a high degree of empathy for the victim should be as ready to help when escape without helping was easy as when it was difficult. But if empathy led to egoistic motivation, subjects feeling empathy should be more ready to help when escape was difficult than when it was easy. Results of each experiment followed the former pattern when empathy was high and the latter pattern when empathy was low, supporting the hypothesis that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help.