Does Empathy Promote Helping by Activating Altruistic Motivation or Concern About Social Evaluation? A Direct Replication of Fultz et al. (1986)

Empathy motivates people to help needy others. Does it do so by activating genuine concern, or byactivating more self-interested goals that helping needy others might enable them to fulfill? Theempathy-altruism hypothesis claims that empathic concern reflects a non-instrumental desire toimprove the welfare of a person in need. To rule out the alternative hypothesis that empathymotivates prosocial behavior by first generating fear of appearing selfish, Fultz et al. (1986)manipulated empathy for a needy target using perspective-taking instructions; they alsomanipulated whether the subject’s opportunity to help was subject to social evaluation. However,Fultz et al.’s (1986) experiments were underpowered. Here, we conducted a large-N pre-registeredreplication of Experiment 2 in Fultz et al. (1986). We also administered self-report measures ofmoral identity and endorsement of the principle of care to test whether these traits reflect altruisticdesires or desires to avoid disapprobation. We found that volunteering did not differ between thehigh and low social evaluation conditions, and that volunteering was not significantly higher in thehigh-empathy condition. These results sit uneasily with Fultz et al. (1986)’s evidence in support ofthe empathy-altruism hypothesis. Consistent with the empathy-altruism hypothesis, however, wedid find that self-reported empathic concern predicted helping. We also found that the principle ofcare (but not moral identity internalization) reflects altruistic motivation, and that moral identitysymbolization reflects self-interested motivation, suggesting that at least some existing measuresof prosocial disposition are valid indicators of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for helping.