Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori and Kengo Miyazono at Hokkaido University on their recent paper “ Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification ” (2021, Frontiers in Psychology ). Kiichi Inarimori Empathy causes helping behavior. When your best friend in the same college is in financial trouble and has been evicted from her apartment, for example, you might empathize with her (e.g., feel sorry for her) and decide to let her stay in your apartment for a while (e.g., Batson et al., 1981 ). Is empathy-induced helping behavior altruistic? Are you genuinely altruistic when your empathy causes you to let your friend stay in your apartment? According to “the empathy altruism hypothesis” (Batson 1991 , 2011 , 2018 ), empathy causes genuinely altruistic motivation for helping others. According to “the self-other merging hypothesis” ( Cialdini et al. 1997 ), in contrast, empathic helping is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. When the helping agent ...
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