Altruistic personality in the context of the empathy-altruism hypothesis

In this study the influence of the altruistic personality in general and social. responsibility in particular on prosocial behaviour were investigated in the context of the empathy-altruism hypothesis. In an experiment 56 female participants had an opportunity to help a person in distress. In this setting, ease of escape without helping was manipulated. In addition, on the basis of their self-reports of situation-specific emotions, participants were divided into an empathic-concern and a personal-distress group. The results of the 2 (ease of escape) x 2 (predominant emotional response) design were in agreement with the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Further results indicated that in the easy-escape condition an altruistic motivation prevailed, whereas in the difficult-escape condition an egoistic motivation was more dominant. Besides the full scale, two subscales of social responsibility were formed: Moral Fulfilment of the Justified Expectations of Others and Adherence to Social Prescriptions. The full social responsibility scale was significantly related to helpfulness only in the difficult-escape condition. Further analyses including the subscales showed that the component Moral Fulfilment of the Justified Expectations of Others correlated positively with helping in the easy-escape condition. Results were interpreted as showing that specific profiles of personality variables are associated with helpfulness in the easy-escape and difficult-escape conditions. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.