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Not all practical implications of the empathy‐altruism hypothesis are positive. Along with the benefits described, empathy‐induced altruism has some serious liabilities.

It can cause harm. Altruistic motivation is potentially dangerous. As evolutionary biologists have long pointed out (e.g., Dawkins, 1976), altruism may lead us to incur costs in time and money, even loss of life. When 28‐year old Lenny Skutnik was asked why he dove into the ice‐strewn Potomac River to rescue a drowning plane‐crash victim, he said, “I just did what I had to do.” When first responders at the World Trade Center on 9/11 pushed forward to help trapped civilians despite flames, toxic gasses, and other obvious dangers, many died. I can’t say to what extent these heroic acts were motivated by empathy‐induced altruism, but I can say that whatever motivated them put the actors squarely in harm’s way.

Not only can empathy‐induced altruism be harmful to the altruistically motivated person, it can also hurt the target. Balzac, one of our most astute observers of the human condition, graphically portrayed this irony in his classic novel, Pere Goriot (Balzac 1834/1962). Goriot’s selfless love spoiled his daughters, drove them from him, and ultimately destroyed both them and him. Balzac’s message: Altruism may be part of human nature but, like aggression, our altruism must be held carefully in check, lest it prove destructive. Graham Hancock made a similar point in his scathing indictment of international aid programs in Lords of Poverty (1989).

Even when helping is clearly appropriate, empathy‐induced altruism can at times make matters worse. This is especially true when effective help requires a delicate touch. Think of surgeons. It is no accident, argued neurophysiologist Paul MacLean (1967), that surgeons are prohibited from operating on close kin. When operating on one’s sister rather than a stranger, deep feelings of concern and a desperate desire to relieve her suffering may cause a normally steady hand to shake.

Testimony to an especially tragic circumstance in which a warm heart made it more difficult to do what was needed comes from survivors of the death camps in Nazi Europe. In the camps, members of the underground worked to save lives but couldn’t save everyone. At times, they had to decide who would live and who would not. Survivors reported that empathic concern felt for those who had to die made it difficult if not impossible to do what would save more lives. In the words of Terrence Des Pres:

Compassion was seldom possible, self‐pity never. Emotion not only blurred judgment and undermined decisiveness, it jeopardized the life of everyone in the underground … Hard choices had to be made and not everyone was equal to the task, no one less than the kind of person whose goodness was most evident, most admired, but least available for action. (Des Pres, 1976, p. 131)

It can lead to paternalism. As said earlier, the most plausible account of the evolutionary roots of empathy‐induced altruistic motivation seems to be cognitive generalization of human parental nurturance. If true, this account reveals a potentially serious liability. It suggests that a person for whom empathic concern is felt is metaphorically seen as childlike – as dependent, vulnerable, and needing care – at least with regard to the need in question. Consistent with this possibility, research has found that we feel greater empathic concern for more baby‐faced and more vulnerable adults (Dijker, 2001; Lishner, Batson, & Huss, 2011; Lishner, Oceja, Stocks, & Zaspel, 2008).

Sometimes, to be perceived as dependent, vulnerable, and needing care poses no problem. Most of us happily defer to the expertise of physicians, police, and plumbers when we need their help. At other times, the consequences can be tragic. Teachers and tutors can, out of genuine concern, fail to enable students to develop the ability and confidence to solve problems themselves, thereby fostering unnecessary dependence, low self‐esteem, and a reduced sense of efficacy (Nadler, Fisher, & DePaulo, 1983). Physical therapists, physicians, nurses, friends, and family members can do the same for patients with physical or mental disabilities. So can social workers trying to care for the poor and disadvantaged. To see the person in need as dependent and vulnerable may lead to a response that perpetuates if not exacerbates the problem. It may produce paternalism.

Effective parenting requires sensitivity about when to intervene and when to stand back, as well as sensitivity about how to structure the child’s environment to foster coping, confidence, and independence. Effective help requires much the same (J. D. Fisher, Nadler, & DePaulo, 1983). Recall the adage about teaching the hungry to fish rather than giving them fish.

Not all needs evoke empathy‐induced altruism. Many of the pressing social problems we face today don’t involve personal needs of the sort likely to evoke empathic concern. Such concern is felt for individuals, but many of our pressing problems are global. Think of environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and population control. These problems aren’t encountered as personal needs; they’re broader and more abstract. It’s difficult if not impossible to feel empathy for an abstract concept like the environment, world population, or the planet – although personalizing metaphors like “Mother Earth” may move us in that direction.

Not only is it difficult to evoke empathy for these pressing global needs. Such needs can’t be adequately addressed with a personal helping response. They must be addressed in political arenas and through institutional and bureaucratic structures. The process is long and slow, not the kind of process for which emotion‐based motives, including empathy‐induced altruism, are apt to be very effective (Hardin, 1977). Like other emotions, empathic concern diminishes over time.

Empathy’s limited endurance may also undercut its ability to motivate the sustained helping efforts often required of community‐action volunteers (see Omoto & Snyder, 1995). Empathy‐induced altruism can be effective in initiating volunteer action, but other motives may need to take over if a volunteer is to continue for the long haul.

It can lead to empathy avoidance. What if you don’t want to be altruistically motivated? After all, altruistic motivation can cost you, leading you to spend time, money, and energy on behalf of another. Awareness of this cost may arouse an egoistic motive to avoid feeling empathic concern and the resulting altruistic motive. Shaw, Batson, and Todd (1994) provided evidence that this empathy‐avoidance motive is likely to arise when you are aware – before exposure to a person in need – that (a) you will be asked to help this person and (b) helping will be costly (also see Cameron & Payne, 2011). Empathy avoidance might be aroused, for example, when you see a homeless person on the street, or hear about the plight of refugees, or see news footage of the ravages of famine. It may lead you to cross the street, close your eyes, change channels.

Empathy avoidance may also be a factor in the experience of burnout among those who work in the helping professions (Maslach, 1982). But the conditions for empathy avoidance among helping professional don’t seem to be the ones specified by Shaw et al. (1994). Among professionals, empathy avoidance is more likely to result from the perceived impossibility of providing effective help than from the perceived cost of helping. Aware of the impossibility imposed by limited resources (e.g., insufficient time) or the intractability of the need (e.g., terminal illness), some physicians, chronic‐care nurses, therapists, counselors, and welfare case workers may avoid feeling empathy in order to avoid the frustration of thwarted altruistic motivation (López‐Pérez, Ambrona, Gregory, Stocks, & Oceja, 2013; Stotland, Mathews, Sherman, Hansson, & Richardson, 1978). These professional helpers may view their patients or clients as objects rather than people – and treat them accordingly. Other professionals may, over time, find that their ability to feel empathic concern is exhausted, leading to what has been called compassion fatigue (Figley, 2002). There are limits to how often one can draw from the emotional well. (For some possible antidotes, see Halpern, 2001.)

Empathy avoidance may also occur in response to the suffering of members of the opposition in intergroup conflicts. Whether your opponents are a rival sports team or a national, tribal, or ethnic outgroup, their suffering may be more apt to produce schadenfreude – malicious glee – than empathic concern (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011; Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson, & Singer, 2010).

Empathy avoidance may even have played an important, chilling role in the Holocaust. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, reported that he “stifled all softer emotions” in order to carry out his assignment: the systematic extermination of 2.9 million people (Hoess, 1959).

It can produce immoral action. Perhaps the most surprising implication of the empathy‐altruism hypothesis is that empathy‐induced altruism can lead to immoral action. This implication is surprising because many people equate altruism with morality. The empathy‐altruism hypothesis does not.

Often, altruism produces action judged moral – as when it leads us to help the needy or comfort the sick. But not always. Batson, Klein, Highberger, and Shaw (1995) found that empathy‐induced altruistic motivation can also lead people to give preferential treatment to a person for whom they feel empathy even though doing so violates their moral standards of fairness (also see Blader & Rothman, t2014). Egoism, altruism, and moral motivation are, it seems, three distinct forms of motivation, each of which can conflict with another (see Batson, 2011, 2018, for discussions of the distinctions).

More broadly, there is evidence that empathy‐induced altruism can lead to partiality in our decisions as a society about whom among the many in need will get our assistance. Several decades ago, Time magazine essayist Walter Isaacson (1992) commented on the photogenics of disaster. He raised the possibility that the decision to intervene in Somalia but not the Sudan occurred because those suffering in Somalia proved more photogenic – their faces evoked empathic concern and altruistic motivation in a way that those in the Sudan did not. Isaacson reflected: “Random bursts of compassion provoked by compelling pictures may be a suitable basis for Christmas charity drives, but are they the proper foundation for a foreign policy?” (Isaacson, 1992; similarly, see Bloom, 2016; Prinz, 2011).

It can undermine the common good. Not only does the empathy‐altruism hypothesis predict that empathy‐induced altruism can lead to immoral action but also that it can lead us to act against the common good in social dilemmas. A social dilemma arises when three conditions co‐occur: (a) Persons have a choice about how to allocate their scarce resources (time, money, energy, etc.). (b) Regardless what others do, to allocate the resources to the group is best for the group as a whole, but to allocate to a single individual (oneself or another group member) is best for that individual. (c) If all allocations are to separate individuals, each individual is worse off than if all allocations are to the group. In modern society, social dilemmas abound. They include recycling, carpooling, pollution reduction, voting, paying taxes, contributing to public TV – to name but a few.

Guided by the assumption of universal egoism that underlies game theory, it has been taken for granted that in a social dilemma the only individual to whom we will allocate scarce resources is ourselves. But the empathy‐altruism hypothesis predicts that if you feel empathic concern for another member of the group, you will be altruistically motivated to benefit that person. So, if you can allocate resources to them, then rather than the two motives traditionally assumed to conflict in a social dilemma – self‐interest and the common good – three motives are in play. And if, along with egoism (self‐interest), the altruistic motive is stronger than the desire to promote the common good, the latter will suffer.

How often does empathy‐induced altruistic motivation arise in real‐world social dilemmas? It’s hard to think of a case where it doesn’t. It arises every time we try to decide whether to spend our time or money to benefit ourselves, the community, or another individual about whom we especially care. I may decline to participate in a neighborhood clean‐up project on Saturday not because I want to play golf but because my son wants me to take him to a movie. Whalers may kill to extinction – and loggers clear‐cut – not out of personal greed but to provide for their families.

Consistent with this empathy‐altruism prediction, Batson, Batson, et al. (1995) found that research participants placed in a social dilemma allocated some of their resources to a person for whom they felt empathy, reducing the overall collective good. And Oceja et al. (2014) found that if there is reason to believe that one or more other individuals in the group have needs similar to the need that induced empathy, resources may be preferentially allocated to them as well.

Highlighting a situation in which empathy‐induced altruism poses an even greater threat to the common good than does self‐interested egoism, Batson et al. (1999) found that when allocation decisions were to be made public, empathy‐induced altruism reduced the common good whereas self‐interest did not. Why would this be? There are clear social norms and sanctions against pursuit of self‐interest at the expense of what’s best for all: “Selfish” and “greedy” are stinging epithets (Kerr, 1995). Norms and sanctions against showing concern for another person’s interests – even if doing so diminishes the common good – are far less clear. How do whalers and loggers stand up to the public outcry about over‐depletion of natural resources? It’s easy. They aren’t using these resources for themselves but to care for their families.

If altruism poses such a threat to the common good, why don’t we have societal sanctions against altruism like those against egoism? Perhaps it’s because society makes one or both of two assumptions: (a) altruism is always good and (b) altruism is weak (if it exists at all). We now have good reason to think that each of these assumptions is wrong.