Altruism

The cultural animal is altruistic because the cultural animal’s particular kind of agent self is a looking-glass self that begins to be created early in development, typically around 30 months, by internalizing the responses of the set of significant others important to the developing person at that time. At first, the other-directed emotions of shame and guilt are felt when a significant observer reacts in sharply negative fashion to an observed behavior. An important next step comes when the developing human learns to accurately imagine how a significant other who may or may not be actually present would react to an action that was just performed or is being contemplated. Each layer of development added makes the developing animal more cultural and the “selfish” actions of this looking-glass self-agent more other-directed.

Finally, a generalized other emerges as the constant audience and judge of the actions of a self so fundamentally other-directed that almost every action, even those never witnessed by any actual other, are for the other and selfish at the same time for a self that is for the other if not all the way down at least very, very deeply down. In the fully mature cultural animal that the typical adult usually becomes, all actions are either for or in spite of this generalized other or some literal other present or imagined as the audience of the action. Actions in spite of make us feel guilt or shame. I do not feel comfortable saying that only our in spite of actions are selfish. I also do not feel comfortable saying that our for actions are finally selfish because they are performed to make us feel better. Given the way we cultural animals develop as such, it would be utterly amazing if we did not routinely do things with the ultimate goal of benefiting other persons and feel really good about ourselves when we do.

“The empathy-altruism hypothesis claims that pro-social motivation associated with feeling empathy for a person in need is directed toward the ultimate goal of benefiting that person, not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” (Batson et al., 1988, p. 52). This is the clearest statement I have found of the Batson position. It essentially argues that altruistic behaviors are based on feelings of empathy for others that lead us to perform actions that contribute to the well-being of these others. The phrase “not toward some subtle form of self-benefit” is where the argument with Cialdini starts. Cialdini and those of his camp want to say that if any form of subtle self-benefit can account for altruistic behavior then these behaviors are not truly altruistic. Their research agenda is an attempt to explain all forms of seemingly altruistic behavior in terms of such subtle forms of self-benefit. Batson’s counter-agenda is an attempt to design experiments that control for these “subtle forms of self-benefit” without eliminating altruistic responses. If Cialdini were on fire and I put him out with a foam fire extinguisher, he would claim after the fact that I only did it because it lowered my level of distress when he stopped running around and screaming and instead lay quietly on the floor repeating “Oh God, oh God” over and over. When Batson heard of this, he would immediately begin trying to design an experiment that would determine if I would have used the fire extinguisher on Cialdini in circumstances such that this reduction in my own level of distress would not have resulted. All the references cited in our textbook are examples of this agenda or this counter-agenda. The long spiel I opened with was meant as an explanation of why I see the whole dispute as being somewhat silly.

A 1991 study used a sample of 252 college students with a heavily female skew (198/252) in three experiments testing the hypothesis that helping behavior was motivated by the joy that those helping could expect to experience vicariously when the individual’s situation improved (Batson et al., 1991). These were factorial studies controlling for level of empathy (low/high) and chance of experiencing vicarious joy (20%/50%/80%). The patterns that emerged were not at all consistent with what would have been predicted if helping were motivated by the chance of experiencing vicarious joy. Vicarious joy is therefore not a “subtle form of self-benefit” sufficient to explain the helping that actually took place. This does not prove that this altruistic behavior was motivated by simple empathy with no ultimate goal beyond benefiting the person helped but the results are not inconsistent with this claim. This is the typical move of the Batson camp agenda: take some “subtle form of self-benefit” put forward by the Cialdini camp as a motive for helping behavior, control for it as an independent variable, and show that the level of this independent variable makes no difference to the dependent variable whereas the level of empathy, measured as another dependent variable, does.

The idea of a 2x2 factorial design looking at (low/high empathy) and (ease/difficulty of escape) as the levels of the two independent variables was looked at in a 1981 study by Batson et al. Once again, we have empathy and a second independent variable cross-controlling for each other. The idea is that if watching someone else suffer gives us an egotistic motive to help, then how easily we can escape watching them suffer should also determine how willing to help we are. On the other hand, if our response is rooted in pure empathy, whether we can escape watching or must continue to watch should not have much impact on our willingness to help. The results showed that in high empathy subjects, how easy it was to escape did not predict helping whereas in the low empathy subjects, it did. The low empathy subjects helped more when escape was hard and not as much when escape was easy. Empathy motivated helping even when escape was easy. Egoistic motives did so only when escape was hard. The implication is that empathy always generates altruistic behavior whereas egoistic motives sometimes do but not as reliably as high levels of empathy. High empathy alone is enough to generate altruistic behaviors at both levels of the second egoistic independent variable (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981).

In another study, a total of 100 participants broken down into three age categories (6-8, 10-12, and 15-18) were used to try to resolve contradictory findings about altruism and negative mood (Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). Some studies had shown a positive correlation between negative mood and altruism and some had not. The study authors hypothesized that if negative mood does correlate with altruism, this would indicate that altruism has the egoistic motive of cheering the altruist up. They further surmised that the contradiction in the original studies were caused by not taking age, and therefore level of socialization, into account, which is why they broke their sample up into three age categories. The three groups were encouraged to think of either depressing or neutral events and then given the chance to be generous. The younger subjects were actually less generous after thinking depressing thoughts but this reversed with increasing age and level of socialization until the opposite pattern was seen for the oldest group. These results indicate that the self-rewarding impact of benevolence on mood is an artifact of socialization.

Thomas and Batson (1981) conducted a study to establish that normative pressure to help may actually undermine the self-reward that comes from being spontaneously altruistic. This was another 2x2 factorial design in which the independent variables were receiving help/no help and a second variable was based on being told either that most people helped or that few people helped. The dependent variable was how altruistic subjects felt as determined by a survey hidden in materials given out to disguise the actual purpose of the research. The subjects who felt most altruistic were those who helped without having received help and were told that very few people helped.  Normative pressure, especially normative pressure based on the principle of reciprocity and a strong social consensus about what one “ought” to do, is often put forward as an explanation of helping behavior that is egoistic and self-serving rather than being determined by a genuine empathically based concern for the other. Showing that responding to such normative pressures actually makes people feel less altruistic when they help is another way to attack the idea that altruism is finally self-serving in this way. Please forgive me if this fast sprint through only five research articles has given the impression that I do not take the subject seriously. It is more that the two well-established camps involved in the debate have defined the terms of the debate in a way that is not all the interesting from my perspective.

              I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I am something of a connoisseur of weirdness. I seek out unusual people online and, more often than not, on those rare occasions when I travel, I am going to meet someone in real-time I have gotten to know well online. Most of the people I communicate with online I will never meet in real-time. Many of them live in New Zealand for some reason. One person I got to know online knowing that I would never meet her in real-time was the only homeless woman in America, as far as I know, who managed in spite of being officially homeless to have a blog. She had a computer science degree from University of Maryland and had tapped into the power-lines while living in a sort of yurt in a forested area of Northern Virginia. Years before, she had worked for the Department of Justice and had helped win the big anti-trust suit against Micro-soft by hyper-linking all the documents together in one big file in a way that was innovative at the time. She was a high functioning autistic who after losing many jobs and suffering many frustrations moved out into the woods to avoid further trauma.

She had a real genius for online search and I paid her small amounts of money to do research for me. This was one way that she bought food and replaced her electronics gear as it wore out. I enjoyed reading her blog and remained a regular contributor and online friend even after she managed to cost me one of my own jobs and a couple of valuable professional connections just being who she was. To be fair, I also made several friends based on my gutsy willingness to be publicly associated with someone whose letters to the Washington Post often got lengthy replies and caused odd sub-conflicts to spin-off from important political issues. Many people knew about the crazy genius woman out in the woods even though no one knew exactly where her yurt was located.

At some point, she began to complain about her teeth. She had not seen a dentist for years and was never highly focused on dental hygiene. She would not let me pay for dental work. She also spent anything I paid her on food, including sweets, and computer gear all the time she was complaining about her teeth. Finally, she as changed but I’m not sure it has improved. Mine has improved.

I asked all my housemates how to answer this question and they all gave the same reply. Suzie says that I’m always the one who takes care of her when she is sick. David and Kathy mention that I’m always willing to do errands and everyone pointed out that I’m the one who takes out the garbage and cleans the cat’s liter boxes not because these tasks were assigned to me in any official way but because I started doing them and everyone now thinks of these as my tasks. I’ve ended up doing the things no one else wants to do. I believe altruism to be very real for all the reasons I presented in the first paragraphs of this essay. A cultural animal, with a self that is other-directed almost all the way down, is capable of being selfish on behalf of a self that can, on occasion, expand to include all life anywhere in the universe. It would make me happy to learn that we are not alone in this universe for all the same reasons that it makes me happy to have friends that I will never have the chance to hug in New Zealand. It makes me happy when the Democrats win elections or when one of my students from Pakistan gets admitted to the engineering program at Texas A&M partially because I put a lot of time and all the rhetorical skill I possess into writing a letter of recommendation. In less than 600 words, I skillfully undermined every negative stereotype about Muslims that might have gotten in his way so subtly that I’m sure the engineering committee never realized how carefully everything they were reading had been spun to my student’s advantage. The glory of a cultural animal is the way the very nature of this looking-glass-self, other-directed almost all the way down, makes it difficult to say what is altruistic and what is selfish. I want to argue that, the more cultural an animal becomes, the harder this distinction is to draw and, perhaps, the less meaning it has in actual practice.

References

Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Slingsby, J. K.,  Harrell, K. L., Peekna, H. M., & Todd, R. M. (1991). Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 413–426.

Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruism motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 290–302.

Batson, C. D., Dyck, J. L., Brandt, J. R., Batson, J. G., Powell, A. L., McMaster, M. R., & Griffitt, C. (1988). Five studies testing two new egoistic alternatives to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 52–77.

Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (1976). Altruism as hedonism: A social development perspective on the relationship of negative mood state and helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 907–914.

Thomas, G., & Batson, C. (1981). Effect of helping under normative pressure on self-perceived altruism. Social Psychology Quarterly, 44(2), 127-131.