Practice question · True or false
Batson tested whether helping is genuinely altruistic by making escape from the situation easy.
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- What would an egoistic helper do if leaving were free?
- Leaving relieves your own distress at no cost.
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True
Why
True. If helping merely relieves the helper's own distress, an easy exit relieves it more cheaply and the egoistic helper leaves. High-empathy participants helped anyway, which is the empathy-altruism hypothesis's key result, and the design is the reason it counts as evidence rather than assertion.
Practise Prosocial Behavior: Altruism and the Roots of Helping
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