Alexa Ispas
University of Edinburgh
eMail: alexa.ispas@ed.ac.uk
Try to remember the last time you helped someone. It may have been a relative, a friend, or a stranger on the street. Helping may have been easy, or may have involved considerable effort. The question is: why did you help? Was it to benefit the other person, or to benefit yourself? ‘Of course I helped to benefit the other person’, most people would say. If this is what you think, you believe in altruism – a term coined by Comte (1851), referring to the motivation to help others without personal gain. But now, think again: could it be that you helped simply to avoid the consequences of refusing to help? Maybe your real motive was to avoid feelings of guilt, or being seen by others in a bad light. Indeed, the view that all human behaviour is selfishly motivated has dominated disciplines such as politics, economics and biology since the times of Hobbes, Machiavelli and Darwin (Monroe, 1996). Following the same trend, all major psychological theories from Freud’s psychodynamic theory onwards have interpreted helping others as ultimately motivated by some form of self-benefit (Batson, 1987). The phrase “scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed” (Gheslin, 1974, p.247) seems to describe the consensus.
Not everyone agrees, though. Over the past few decades, a number of researchers have started to question the old assumption that our capacity to care is limited to ourselves, and to argue for the need to investigate altruistic motivation. Should altruism really exist, understanding its underlying mechanisms is essential if we want to promote a more caring social attitude across the world.
According to Batson, ‘without such knowledge, our efforts to encourage more care and concern will be shots in the dark, quite likely a waste of time, or worse’ (1995, p.335).
Altruism by numbers
But how can we know someone’s true motives for helping, and distinguish between an altruistic act and a clever attempt to gain praise? The solution suggested by Batson (1995) is to investigate altruism in the laboratory. This would allow us to tease apart altruistic from selfish motives by using statistical measures and highly controlled experimental studies. However, there are some problems with this proposal. Statistical measures can only give us an indication of group averages. Therefore, any individual instances of altruistic motivation remain inaccessible with such measures.
Moreover, experimental methods cannot fully simulate the complex interactions that lead to altruistic behaviour outside the laboratory. Indeed, Batson’s only justification for not complementing his laboratory-based findings with other kinds of data is that experimental methods ‘have become the trade-mark of social psychology in the last 50 years’ (Batson, 1995, p. 356). The limitations of experimental methods were apparent from the very beginning, as Batson had to reduce the intricate concept of altruism to a single testable prediction: namely, that altruistic helping is motivated by empathy (Batson et al, 1981). To test this idea, Batson’s studies typically placed participants in situations where avoiding to help a victim was either easy or difficult.
Initially, Batson appeared to have struck gold with his prediction: the studies consistently showed that participants who did not feel empathy only helped when escape from the situation was difficult. In contrast, participants feeling empathy helped regardless of how easy or difficult it was to avoid doing so. These findings, Batson argued, suggest that altruistic helping does exist and is motivated by empathy (Batson et al, 1997). But is this the only possible interpretation? Another group of researchers, led by Cialdini, suggested an alternative explanation: participants experiencing empathy are also the ones who are more likely to feel distressed when witnessing the plight of the victim (Cialdini et al, 1987). Therefore, participants might be motivated to help by the need to reduce this negative feeling (egoistic explanation), rather than by their concern for the victim (altruistic explanation). Batson and his colleagues responded to this challenge by demonstrating that the help offered by participants feeling empathy is not due to the egoistic desire to reduce negative emotions such as guilt (Batson et al, 1988), shame (Batson et al, 1988) or sadness (Batson et al, 1989). Through more than twenty-five studies, they succeeded in defending the existence of altruistic motivation against almost every new alternative explanation proposed by their critics (Cialdini et al, 1997).
Even though Batson may have won a few battles, he has lost a war. Ruling out the influence of one egoistic motive (e.g. the need to escape guilt) does not rule out egoism due to other factors in that specific situation (e.g. the need to feel good about oneself). As experiments can only test a limited number of egoistic alternatives at a time, Batson will never be able to compare altruism and egoism as whole constructs (Cialdini, 1991; Maner et al, 2002). More importantly, the endless debate about whether findings can provide conclusive evidence for the existence of altruistic helping has killed off any fundamental investigation of the mechanisms underlying such behaviour.
The human face of altruism
If experimental methods have so many drawbacks for this area of research, how else can we investigate altruistic motivation? The alternative proposed by Monroe in her award-winning book The Heart of Altruism (1996) is to combine a range of different methods of enquiry that focus on individuals rather than on group averages. In order to overcome the difficulties faced by Batson in teasing apart altruistic from egoistic motivation, she interviews people who most of us would agree provide unusual exemplars of altruism: rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
Through the way rescuers make sense of their lives during the interviews, the reader learns about the kind of things that are important to them and the kind of people they are. Unlike the statistical measures presented by Batson, the interview extracts selected by Monroe provide direct dramatic and emotional contact with altruism and convince readers of its existence. Monroe can then move on to the main task of investigating its underlying aspects. She does this by interviewing people from three other groups placed along the egoism-altruism spectrum: entrepreneurs, philanthropists and heroes. As might be expected, the first group is situated towards the egoistic end of the spectrum, with the other two groups closer to the rescuers, towards the altruistic end. This conceptualisation of altruism and egoism as opposites on the same spectrum, rather than as distinct categories, allows Monroe to detect subtle differences in the array of behaviours labelled altruistic.
In contrast to Batson, Monroe chooses the methods she draws on according to her research questions, rather than the other way around. For example, in order to understand how participants differ in the way they organise, process and interpret information, she uses unstructured interviews, in which she simply asks participants to tell their life story. Having gained an insight into the way participants make sense of their experiences in their own words, Monroe then asks them to answer a structured questionnaire designed to test specific hypotheses on altruism. Due to her strategic use of methodology, Monroe’s work is full of insights about the nature of altruism, and has important practical implications. For example, the closer they are to the altruistic end of the spectrum, the more participants interpret events from what Monroe calls the ‘altruistic perspective’: a way of seeing themselves as one with all humankind. In the words of Irene, a Polish rescuer, ‘we all belong to one human family’ (as cited by Monroe, 1996, p. 197). On the basis of her study, Monroe concludes that it is this perception of shared humanity that we need to promote if we want to encourage more people to help others, especially those living in vastly different circumstances to themselves. Instead of only helping fellow workers, fellow nationals or fellow Christians, we need to learn to help fellow human beings.
The dangers of methodolatry
‘When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind’ (as cited in Thompson, 1910/1976, p.64). Although these words were taken from a speech addressed at the Institution of Civil Engineers by Lord Kelvin in 1883, they seem to capture the dominant view in psychology today. Indeed, in a recent psychology paper, the author cites them uncritically in the opening sentence (Wright, 2003). In this context, research on altruism illustrates the dangers psychology faces by endorsing a narrow view of what constitutes acceptable ‘knowledge’. Nevertheless, it is still with great difficulty that studies using qualitative methods such as discourse and conversation analysis make their way into mainstream psychology journals (Reicher, 2000). However, as the example of research into altruism illustrates, it is precisely on using diverse methods that the health of our discipline depends. Without adapting our methods to suit the research area we are investigating, we run the risk of only producing ‘neat’ experimental findings that do not reflect the ‘messiness’ of the outside world. The object of our enquiry, not doctrinaire attachment to a particular method, should determine the methodology we use.
References
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Batson, C. D. (1987). Prosocial motivation: is it ever truly altruistic? Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 20,65-122.
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