Do We Help Others Because Of Empathy Or Anxiety?

When we help a family member, friend, or stranger on the street, we feel selfless and kind. Providing help to the person who needs it makes us believe that we are better people with high values ​​and high morals. Likewise, when we refuse to help another, we feel selfish; and in the same way we condemn those who refuse to give their support to others. But are we really helping others just because it’s a selfless act, or is there something else behind it?

Have you ever stopped to think about the hidden motivations that make you ready to help others? Are you sure that feelings of understanding and empathy will lead you to help others? What if the desire to promote another person’s well-being was not the original reason for your solidarity? Scientific research has delved into these approaches and reached quite interesting conclusions.

Do we help others because of empathy or anxiety?

Man-made prosocial behavior has been the subject of scientific research and experimentation for decades. Why do we help others? Is this tendency to be innate or is it cultural learning? Many scholars have researched these and many other related issues, and the topic has sparked much debate.

It has been shown that at the brain level, seeing another suffering activates the same neural networks involved in the treatment of pain in the person observing the situation. That is, to some extent we are able to experience the pain of others as our own.

But what do we really feel in situations like this? The hypothesis that seems to have the most empirical support is as follows, stating that in front of the person in need of help, we can react in two different ways:

• On the one hand, we can respond to another’s distress with feelings of anxiety, disgust, worry, or horror.
• On the other hand, we can experience compassion and understanding, allowing us to feel genuinely moved.

The kind of feelings this situation evokes in us depends on several different factors. First, we can talk about the particular context of suffering in which one is, but also the personal attitude in which the other sees this individual. Given this fact, two people may experience different reactions; and the same person may react differently to two different situations where another person is in need of help.

What is our motivation to help others?

Whether the situation is causing us anxiety or compassion, we are likely to help those in need. However, the reasons why we do this are very different in each case.

When we experience an alarming situation, disgust, or concern, our course of action is selfish; in other words, we help the other to alleviate the discomfort we ourselves feel when we see another person in need. On the contrary, if we feel empathy in a situation, we are acting with truly selfless motives designed to alleviate the pain of the other and not us.

This fact has been found in several studies with university students. In these studies, it has been found that the motivation introduced to help another depended on the emotions experienced. In other words, those whose brains activate the feeling of anxiety act as their motivation to reduce anxiety, and in turn, those whose brains activated compassion act in a situation to reduce another’s distress.

We cannot choose what kind of consideration arises in us, so we cannot claim that one of these groups would have acted more and the other less on a less moral level. In addition, one study in the field has provided us with a rather interesting fact: when helping one was associated with high personal sacrifices, those individuals who tended to feel genuine empathy for the other actually showed selfish patterns of action. Thus, it would appear that personal sacrifice nullifies the original selfless impulse to help another.

Are we beings of solidarity?

These observations only add to this eternal ambiguity as to the extent to which we humans are truly solidarity, selfless, and generous. We already knew that in many cases, helping another person gives us a sense of satisfaction; but now we also know that we can also help another to avoid our own feeling of discomfort.

So we want to ask, do we help others because worrying about the other really moves us? In any case, regardless of this latent motivation, prosocial behavior has its own advantages. It helps those who receive help, and it seems to help those who provide help as well. For the same reason, it is important to continue to promote them in order to ensure a more satisfactory social coexistence.