Laura L. Shaw’s research while affiliated with University of Kansas and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (7)


Immorality From Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Conflict
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

June 1995

·

1,493 Reads

·

505 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

C. Daniel Batson

·

Tricia R. Klein

·

Lori Highberger

·

Laura L. Shaw

Results of 2 experiments supported the proposal that empathy-induced altruism can lead one to act in a way that violates the moral principle of justice. In each experiment, participants were asked to make an allocation decision that affected the welfare of other individuals. Participants who were not induced to feel empathy tended to act in accord with a principle of justice; participants who were induced to feel empathy were significantly more likely to violate this principle, allocating resources preferentially to the person for whom empathy was felt. High-empathy participants who showed partiality agreed with other participants in perceiving partiality to be less fair and less moral (Experiment 1). Overall, results suggested that empathy-induced altruism and the desire to uphold a moral principle of justice are independent prosocial motives that sometimes cooperate but sometimes conflict. Implications of this independence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

View access options

Empathy and the Collective Good: Caring for One of the Others in a Social Dilemma

April 1995

·

543 Reads

·

283 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

C. Daniel Batson

·

Judy G. Batson

·

R. Matthew Todd

·

[...]

·

Carlo M. R. Aldeguer

We predicted that feeling empathy for another member of the collective in a social dilemma would create an altruistic desire to allocate resources to that person as an individual, reducing collective good. To test this prediction, 2 studies were run. In each, participants faced a dilemma in which they could choose to benefit themselves, the group, or other group members as individuals. In Study 1, empathy for another group member was manipulated; in Study 2, naturally occurring empathic response was determined by self-report. In both studies, participants who experienced high empathy allocated more resources to the target of empathy, reducing the overall collective good. These results suggest the importance of considering self-interest, collective interest, and other-interest (altruism) as three distinct motives, each of which may operate in social dilemmas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)


Information Function of Empathic Emotion: Learning That We Value the Other's Welfare

February 1995

·

379 Reads

·

332 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Empathic feelings arise when a person values another's welfare and perceives the other to be in need. As a result, level of empathic response can be used to infer how much one values the welfare of a person in need. Four experiments were conducted to test these ideas. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that a similarity manipulation led to increased valuing of a similar person's welfare and, in turn, to increased empathy when this person was in need. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that direct manipulations of empathy (perspective-taking instructions, or false physiological arousal feedback) led to increased empathy and, in turn, to increased valuing of the welfare of the person in need. Once induced, this valuing was a relatively stable disposition; it remained even after empathy had declined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)


Empathy Avoidance: Forestalling Feeling for Another in Order to Escape the Motivational Consequences

November 1994

·

558 Reads

·

174 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Often people fail to respond to those in need. Why? In addition to cognitive and perceptual processes such as oversight and diffusion of responsibility, a motivational process may lead people, at times, to actively avoid feeling empathy for those in need, lest they be motivated to help them. It is predicted that empathy avoidance will occur when, before exposure to a person in need, people are aware that (1) they will be asked to help this person and (2) helping will be costly. To test this prediction, Ss were given the choice of hearing 1 of 2 versions of an appeal by a homeless man for help: an empathy-inducing version or a nonempathy-inducing version. As predicted, those aware that they soon would be given a high-cost opportunity to help the man chose to hear the empathy-inducing version less often than did those either unaware of the upcoming opportunity or aware but led to believe that helping involved low cost. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)


Evidence for Altruism: Toward a Pluralism of Prosocial Motives

April 1991

·

439 Reads

·

1,166 Citations

Psychological Inquiry

Psychologists have long assumed that the motivation for all intentional action, including all action intended to benefit others, is egoistic. People benefit others because, ultimately, to do so benefits themselves. The empathy-altruism hypothesis challenges this assumption. It claims that empathic emotion evokes truly altruistic motivation, motivation with an ultimate goal of benefiting not the self but the person for whom empathy is felt. Logical and psychological distinctions between egoism and altruism are reviewed, providing a conceptual framework for empirical tests for the existence of altruism. Results of empirical tests to date are summarized; these results provide impressive support for the empathy-altruism hypothesis. We conclude that the popular and parsimonious explanation of prosocial motivation in terms of universal egoism must give way to a pluralistic explanation that includes altruism as well as egoism. Implications of such a pluralism are briefly noted, not only for our understanding of prosocial motivation but also for our understanding of human nature and of the emotion-motivation link.



Differentiating affect, mood, and emotion: Toward functionally based conceptual distinctions.

1,079 Reads

·

247 Citations

our goal in this chapter is to make yet another attempt at conceptual distinctions / our goal is to understand feelings in a motivational context, as a means whereby the organism maintains and obtains desired states / as a result, the definitions and distinctions that we shall offer are not based on the components of emotional experience . . . or on the emotion-instigating circumstances / they are based on an analysis of the role that feelings play in relation to goals and motives structural versus functional analysis: James versus McDougall / phenotypic versus genotypic analysis: psychometrics versus Lewin / toward functionally based conceptual distinctions in the affective domain [affect, mood, emotion, two functions of emotions in goal-directed action, links of affect, mood, and emotion to motivation] / employing the conceptual distinctions: toward a more differentiated view of the effect of the affect domain on social behavior [effects on helping, effect on hurting, operationalizing the affect-mood-emotion distinction] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Citations (7)


... Altruism refers to voluntarily completing an activity for others' sake without anticipating a reward (Rushton, 1980;Teng et al., 2015). The concept is grounded in a worldview wherein every person is obligated to aid others as a source of happiness and to facilitate societal functioning (Batson and Shaw, 1991;Wearing et al., 2019). Altruism also entails innate concerns about others' welfare, which compels people to act without expecting anything in return (e.g. ...

Reference:

Do prestige sensitivity and altruism moderate the effects of customers' emotions on WOM? An investigation of luxury retailers
Evidence for Altruism: Toward a Pluralism of Prosocial Motives
  • Citing Article
  • April 1991

Psychological Inquiry

... Research suggests that several psychological motivations affect religious giving. For example, anticipating empathic joy when helping others has been found to be a motivation for religious giving (Batson & Shaw, 1991). Similarly, giving has been associated with self-esteem in religious people (Schwartz, 1970). ...

Encouraging Words Concerning the Evidence for Altruism
  • Citing Article
  • April 1991

Psychological Inquiry

... Mood represents a pervasive and sustained affective state that significantly influences an individual's perception and behavior. It has been extensively studied in psychology [5], [16], [17]. Unlike emotions, which are typically intense and fleeting reactions to specific stimuli, moods are less intense but more enduring, often lasting several hours or even days [17]. ...

Differentiating affect, mood, and emotion: Toward functionally based conceptual distinctions.
  • Citing Article

... Considering empathy as a trait is a prerequisite to measure individual differences in dispositional empathy scores. However, there is research showing situational effects of salience (Batson, Klein, Highberger, & Shaw, 1995) or perceived similarity on empathy (Xu, Zuo, Wang, & Han, 2009). For example, Xu et al. (2009) investigated the different neural mechanisms of the relationship between empathy and the same racial group. ...

Immorality From Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Conflict

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... If higher helping effort is associated with increased stress levels, this could at least partially explain why people avoid effortful helping 21 . Shaw et al. 47 found that participants actively avoided feelings of empathy for a man experiencing homelessness, if they knew that helping him in the future would involve high financial costs compared to participants who were led to believe that helping involved low costs. People may anticipate the negative consequences of costly helping for their perceived stress levels and thus avoid it. ...

Empathy Avoidance: Forestalling Feeling for Another in Order to Escape the Motivational Consequences

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... Other psychological research emphasizes the process-dependent aspect of empathy -state empathyas well as trait empathy. State empathy emphasizes situational aspects, meaning the different elements of a situation that influence how much empathy a person deploys in a given moment (Batson et al. 1995). State empathy highlights the more relational aspects of empathy defining it as an active process of engagement rather than a static ability that exists or does not exist (Iversen 2019). ...

Information Function of Empathic Emotion: Learning That We Value the Other's Welfare

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... In addition, equality promotion is conceptually distinct from similar constructs, such as empathy-induced altruism and prosocial motivations, as they have different goals. Empathy-induced altruism is a helping motivation for whom empathy is felt, and equality promotion to maintain a moral principle (Batson et al. 1995). Meijeren, Lubbers, and Scheepers (2023b) also found support for utilizing the social justice function for the VFI, as individuals who volunteered for refugees often valued social justice, an important facet of this type of volunteering. ...

Empathy and the Collective Good: Caring for One of the Others in a Social Dilemma

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology