The Effects of Perspective Taking on Motivations for Helping: Still No Evidence for Altruism
- 1 November 2002
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 28 (11) , 1601-1610
- https://doi.org/10.1177/014616702237586
Abstract
To investigate the existence of true altruism, the authors assessed the link between empathic concern and helping by (a) employing an experimental perspective-taking paradigm used previously to demonstrate empathy-associated helping and (b) assessing the empathy-helping relationship while controlling for a range of relevant, well-measured nonaltruistic motivations. Consistent with previous research, the authors found a significant zero-order relationship between helping and empathic concern, the purported motivator of true altruism. This empathy-helping relationship disappeared, however, when nonaltruistic motivators (oneness and negative affect) were taken into account: Only the nonaltruistic factors of oneness (merged identity with the victim) and negative affect mediated helping, whereas empathic concern did not. Evidence for true altruism remains elusive.Keywords
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