Altruism refers to a motive for helping behavior that is primarily intended to relieve another person’s distress, with little or no regard for the helper’s self-interest. Altruistic help is voluntary, deliberate, and motivated by concern for another person’s welfare. When help is given for altruistic reasons, the helper does not expect repayment, reciprocity, gratitude, recognition, or any other benefits.
Background and History of Altruism
Questions about the nature and importance of altruism have a long history in moral philosophy. For example, the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, who ministered to a traveler’s wounds at personal cost while expecting nothing in return, has become synonymous with the idea of selfless giving. Among social psychologists, interest in altruism grew in response to early studies of helping behavior. Those studies tended to focus on the act of helping itself, that is, whether or not one person gave help to another person. As researchers sought to identify the motives responsible for acts of helping, it became apparent that two major classes of motives could underlie helping: egoistic and altruistic. Egoistic motives are concerned chiefly with benefits the helper anticipates receiving. These might be material (repayment, the obligation for future favors in return), social (appreciation from the recipient, public recognition), or even personal (the gratifying feeling of pride for one’s actions). Altruistic motives, on the other hand, focus directly on the recipient’s need for assistance and involve sympathy and compassion for the recipient.
A key debate has contrasted altruistic motivation with one particular type of egoistic motive, sometimes called distress reduction. Witnessing another person’s distress can be profoundly upsetting, and if the helpful act is motivated first and foremost by the desire to relieve one’s own upset feelings, the act would be seen as more egoistic than altruistic. The difference is that whereas altruistic helping focuses on the recipient’s need (“You were suffering and I wanted to help”), egoistic helping focuses on the helper’s feelings (“I was so upset to see your situation”).
The distinction between egoistic and altruistic motives for helping behavior has sometimes been controversial. One reason is that altruistic explanations do not lend themselves to the kinds of reward-cost theories that dominated the psychological analysis of motivation during the mid-20th century. These theories argued in essence that behavior occurs only when it maximizes the actor’s rewards while minimizing his or her costs, a framework that does not facilitate altruistic interpretations of helping. Nevertheless, it is clear that acts of helping often involve great personal cost with little or no reward; one need only consider the behavior of individuals who rescued Jews from Nazi persecution or Tutsis from the Rwandan massacre to realize that helping often does take place for altruistic reasons.
Social psychologist Daniel Batson was instrumental in introducing methods for studying helping that is altruistically motivated. One such method involves using experimental variations to differentially emphasize either the need of the recipient or the opportunity to fulfill more egoistic motives. Increases in helping from one condition to the other can then be attributed to whichever motive has been strengthened. Another method involves sophisticated techniques that help identify what people were thinking about as they considered helping. In both cases, research has shown unequivocally that altruistic motives often play an important role in helping behavior. This sort of helping is sometimes called true altruism or genuine altruism, tacit acknowledgment that some forms of helping behavior are more egoistic in nature. Although from the perspective of the needy recipient, it may not matter whether a given act is motivated by egoistic or altruistic concerns, from a scientific standpoint, the difference is substantial.
Factors That Contribute to Altruistic Helping
The factors that contribute to altruistic helping may be grouped into two broad categories: those that describe the individual who helps and those that are more contextual in nature. Concerning the former, research has shown that people who are more likely to provide altruistically motivated help tend to have strong humanitarian values and feel a relatively great sense of responsibility for the welfare of others. They also tend to be more empathic and caring about others than are more egoistically oriented helpers. In one interesting line of research, Mario Mikulincer, Phillip Shaver, and their colleagues have shown that people with a secure attachment style—that is, people who feel secure and trusting in their relationships with their closest care-givers (parents, romantic partners, and others)—tend to have more altruistic motives in a variety of helping contexts, including volunteerism (e.g., charity work). Insecure attachment styles, on the other hand, either discourage helping or foster more egoistic motives for helping.
Among the contextual factors that influence altruism, characteristics of the relationship between helper and recipient are very important. Empathy is strongly related to altruistic helping, in two ways: Empathy involves taking the perspective of the other, and empathy fosters compassionate caring. Both are more likely in close, personal relationships, and because people typically care about the welfare of their close friends, both tend to increase the likelihood of altruistically motivated helping.
Identifying with the other person is another contextual factor thought to increase the likelihood of altruism. This sense of connection with the other appears to be particularly important for explaining altruistic helping to kin and in group contexts. The former refers to the well-documented fact that the probability of an altruistic act is greater to the extent that the recipient shares the helper’s genes; for example, people are more likely to help their children than their nieces and nephews but are more likely to help the latter than their distant relatives or strangers. As for the latter, altruistic helping is more common with members of one’s ingroups (the social groups to which one feels that he or she belongs) than with outsiders to those groups. Many examples of personal sacrifice during wartime can be understood as ingroup altruism.
Other studies have shown that when the potential helper’s sense of empathy is aroused, altruistically based helping tends to increase. This can be done, for example, by asking research participants to imagine how the other person feels in this situation, as opposed to staying objective and detached. This kind of research is particularly useful for researchers seeking ways to increase altruistic helping in the modern world. It suggests that awareness of the needs of others, combined with some desire to assist them, may be effective.
- Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.