This is gonna be kinda long; just a warning.
This is a matter over which I’ve given plenty of thought myself. I’m torn between the concept of altruism and egoism, though I’d like to shed some light on them from a psychological perspective before giving my own thoughts.
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Altruism is psychologically defined as an unselfish concern for others.
Egosim argues that actions that appear altruistic on the surface alleviate the sitress caused by witnessing another’s suffering and lead to material, social, or self-rewards.
Coke, Batson, and McDavis (1978) claimed to have provided evidence that altruism is triggered by empathy (feeling of sympathy/compassion for someone after imagining yourself in the same situation). They manipulated empathic feelings and found that participants who experienced the most empathy offered the most help.
Toi and Batson (1982) designed an experiment to compare altruistic behavior to egoistic behavior. The design was a 2x2 factorial design, and the experimenters manipulated levels of empathy (either high or low) and difficulty of another person’s escape from a particular situation (either easy or hard), making four groups with combinations of the above levels. Low-empathy participants helped less if escape was easy than if it were hard, which implied that they were motivated by the need to reduce their own distress (egoism). Participants in the high empathy group helped equally regardless of the difficulty of escape, implying altruism as their motivation.
Some psychologists suggest that empathy, the core of altruism to the above experiments, has evolutionary value as a means of communication: those with whom we can communicate best can help us the most. In a sense, empathy is almost a manipulative way of getting others to help you and, thus, does not involve altruism.
(The above was taken from Motivation: Theory, Research, and Applications by Petri & Govern, 5th Edition, p.300-301.)
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As for my own opinion on the subject:
It’s impossible for experiments to remove rewards from any circumstances because of self-rewards. We have a tendency to evaluate our own actions and determine whether or not they match up to our own morality (I think this is Cognitive Dissonance theory). I remember hearing a saying once that went something like “Each person lives life the way they think everyone should.”
I would be interested in seeing some research on altruism / egoism in animals, though this would be a great deal of speculation. In Zoology, they use a different definition of the term altruism, which is “Instinctive cooperative behavior that is detrimental to the individual but contributes to the survival of the species.” The ideal example of this is the bee, which loses its life fighting off predators in order to protect the hive.
There’s no reason that motivation can’t be comprised of several factors at once, including egoism and altruism simultaneously, but this is only because it’s likely impossible to prove one or the other doesn’t exist.
Completely altruistic actions may need to be voluntary, which may also require free will, which presents another debate in itself. If people don’t choose to be altruistic and are instead instinctively manipulated, as the evolutionary perspective seems to emphasize, actions don’t seem altruistic. As an example, a pregnant mother begins lactating at her own nutritional expense in order to care for her child. Is this altruistic?
Even if we accept that every action one performs has certain expectations of benefit, even if it’s just their own security in knowing who they are as a person, this may not necessarily be the strongest motivating influence. Even in the experiments that seemed to demonstrate altruism, the people “felt better” after successfully helping; this is a consequence, but one with personal sacrifice of help and another’s gain of success.
Any thoughts?
). Try to explain the idea of selfish love to a love struck person.