The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,357

so we are really dealing with two hypotheses. One, based on the “sympathy” sense, is that our emotional repertoire includes a state in which another person’s well-being matters to us—we are pleased when the person is happy, and upset when he or she is not—and that this state motivates us to help them with no ulterior motive. If true, this idea—let’s call it the sympathy-altruism hypothesis—would refute a pair of old theories called psychological hedonism, according to which people only do things that give them pleasure, and psychological egoism, according to which people only do things that provide them with a benefit. Of course there are circular versions of these theories, in which the very fact that a person helps someone is taken as proof that it must feel good or benefit him, if only to scratch an altruistic itch. But any testable version of these cynical theories must identify some independent ulterior motive for the help extended, such as assuaging one’s own distress, avoiding public censure, or garnering public esteem.

The word altruism is ambiguous too. The “altruism” in the empathy-altruism hypothesis is altruism in the psychological sense of a motive to benefit another organism as an end in itself rather than as a means to some other end.48 This differs from altruism in the evolutionary biologist’s sense, which is defined in terms of behavior rather than motives: biological altruism consists of behavior that benefits another organism at a cost to oneself.49 (Biologists use the term to help distinguish the two ways in which one organism can benefit another. The other way is called mutualism, where an organism benefits another one while also benefiting itself, as with an insect pollinating a plant, a bird eating ticks off the back of a mammal, and roommates with similar tastes enjoying each other’s music.)

In practice, the biologist’s and psychologist’s sense of altruism often coincide, because if we have a motive to do something, we’re often willing to incur a cost to do it. And despite a common misunderstanding, evolutionary explanations for biological altruism (such as that organisms benefit their kin or exchange favors, both of which help their genes in the long run) are perfectly compatible with psychological altruism. If natural selection favored costly helping of relatives or of potential reciprocation partners because of the long-term benefits to the genes, it did so by endowing the brain with a direct motive to help those beneficiaries, with no thought of its own welfare. The fact that the altruist’s genes may benefit in the long run does not expose the altruist as a hypocrite or undermine her altruistic motives, because the genetic benefit never figures as an explicit goal in her brain.50

The first version of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, then, is that psychological altruism exists, and that it is motivated by the emotion we call sympathy. The second version is based on the “projection” and “perspective-taking” senses of empathy.51 According to this hypothesis, adopting someone’s viewpoint, whether by imagining oneself in his or her shoes or imagining what it is like to be that person, induces a state of sympathy for the person (which would then impel the perspective-taker to act altruistically toward the target if the sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true as well). One might call this the perspective-sympathy hypothesis. This is the hypothesis relevant to the question raised in chapters 4 and 5 of whether journalism, memoir, fiction, history, and other technologies of vicarious experience have expanded our collective sense of sympathy and helped drive the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, the New Peace, and the Rights Revolutions.

Though Batson doesn’t always distinguish the two versions of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, his two-decade-long research project has supported both of them.52

Let’s start with the sympathy-altruism hypothesis and compare it to the cynical alternative in which people help others only to reduce their own distress. Participants in one study watched an ersatz fellow participant, Elaine, get repeatedly shocked in a learning experiment.53 (The male participants were introduced to Charlie rather than Elaine.) Elaine becomes visibly upset as the session proceeds, and the participant is given an opportunity to take her place. In one condition, the participant has finished her obligation to the experimenter and is free to leave, so taking Elaine’s place would be genuinely altruistic. In another, the participant doesn’t take Elaine’s place and has to watch Elaine get shocked for another eight sessions. Batson reasoned that if the only reason people volunteer to take poor Elaine’s place is to reduce their own distress at the sight of