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 by activating more self-interested goals that helping needy others might enable them to fulfill? The empathy-altruism hypothesis claims that empathic concern reflects a non-instrumental desire to improve the welfare of a person in need. To rule out the alternative hypothesis that empathy motivates prosocial behavior by first generating fear of appearing selfish, Fultz et al. (1986) manipulated empathy for a needy target using perspective-taking instructions; they also manipulated 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-registered replication of Experiment 2 in Fultz et al. (1986). We also administered self-report measures of moral identity and endorsement of the principle of care to test whether these traits reflect altruistic desires or desires to avoid disapprobation. We found that volunteering did not differ between the high and low social evaluation conditions, and that volunteering was not significantly higher in the high-empathy condition. These results sit uneasily with Fultz et al. (1986)’s evidence in support of the empathy-altruism hypothesis. We also failed to find evidence that the principle of care or moral identity internalization reflect altruistic motivation. Consistent with the empathy-altruism hypothesis, however, we did find that self-reported empathic concern predicted helping.