ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on people's motives for helping each other. The fundamental issue is whether promoting the welfare of others is ever our ultimate goal our final selfless aimor whether it is always and only an instrumental goal means to an end that satisfies some selfish desire on our part. Experimentation in the social psychological laboratory would appear to offer hope of untangling the causal knot. Advocates of this particular rival hypothesis point out that people typically berate themselves whenever they violate private standards of conduct. They argue that people's reluctance to violate such standards stems from their natural desire to avoid such painful feelings of self-censure. As the dictator Stalin once commented, with ironic insight into the nature of empathy: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million a statistic.
