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To test which contextual cues lead to altruistic or egoistic motivation for helping, undergraduates (N = 339) indicated prosocial motives (empathy, oneness, and negative affect) and intentions to help in an imagined scenario which varied contextual cues: need severity, relationship closeness, vulnerability, and antipathy. Severity, closeness, and antipathy significantly predicted helping motives and intent, whereas vulnerability did not. Empathy and oneness both predicted helping intent. Findings suggest that contextual cues influence whether helping is due to egoistic oneness or altruistic empathy motives, but both motives predict intentions to help; however, the presence of an empathy-helping link supports the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
There are competing hypotheses about how perspective taking can influence motivations to help. According to Batson's (1991) empathyaltruism hypothesis, perspective taking causes empathy and altruistic helping, regardless of rewards and punishments. According to the feltoneness hypothesis (Cialdini et al., 1997), perspective-taking leads to a merging of identities, and the conceptual overlap between helper and target causes helping to be self-serving. This study further examines the presence and strength of altruistic motives in helping, and the contextual cues which affect them.
Research to test these competing hypotheses has produced mixed results. Initial tests of the felt-oneness hypothesis found that empathy no longer predicted intentions to help in an imagined scenario; self-other overlap accounted for the relationship between empathy and willingness to help, which supported the felt-oneness hypothesis (Cialdini et al., 1997). Other research varied group membership to vary oneness, and found that it did not mediate the relationship between empathy and helping in a scenario participants believed to be real (Batson, Sager, et al., 1997), which supported the empathy-altruism hypothesis.
These competing hypotheses were tested using similar manipulations by including the egoistic motives of oneness, sadness, and personal distress in a model which also included empathic concern (Maner et al., 2002). Only oneness and sadness predicted helping. Empathy correlated with both oneness and sadness, which the authors suggested may have influenced its relationship with helping in previous research. Thus, in a model which controlled for oneness, empathy no longer predicted helping behavior, which indicated that helping is due to egoistic feelings of oneness rather than altruistic feelings of empathy.
However, other contextual cues may explain the relationships between oneness, empathy, and helping. Helping motivations and...