Why does empathy promote prosocial behavior? Previous research suggests that empathically aroused individuals help those in need, even when physical escape from the need situation is easy, and this evidence has been used to support the claim that empathy evokes an altruistic motive. However, existing research has not addressed the possibility that empathically aroused participants help because ease of physical escape fails to provide adequate psychological escape from awareness of the victim's suffering and the aversive empathic arousal such awareness produces. The two experiments reported here examined this issue by directly manipulating empathic arousal and the perceived ease of psychological escape among potential helpers. In both experiments, higher rates of helping were observed among empathically aroused participants, even under conditions of easy psychological escape. The findings of both experiments suggest that empathy evokes an altruistic motive to reduce the victim's suffering rather than an egoistic aversive-arousal reduction motive. In addition, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that concern for psychological escape from the suffering of others may constitute an important independent prosocial motive in need of future study.

This work considers sociocultural foundations of self and agency in material affordances associated with affluence and poverty. We first review work that links independent self-construal and disjoint agency to material abundance. We then report an experiment among students at North American ( n = 52) and West African ( n = 60) universities, in which we manipulated abundance and scarcity concepts and assessed effects on a pronoun-selection measure of self-construal. Participants in the North American setting and abundance condition selected first-person pronouns (particularly, I and me) with greater frequency than did participants in the West African setting and scarcity condition. In contrast to modernity accounts, which propose that individualism promotes prosperity, results are consistent with the alternative account: that abundance can promote independent or disjoint varieties of self and agency. Discussion focuses on the distinction between cultural and structural varieties of sociocultural influence and contributions of international perspectives to psychological science.

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An ethnography found that when members of a historical reenactment group behave in ways that seem inconsistent with the group’s ideology, they engage in discourse to demonstrate to other members that their behavior is congruent with the group’s ideology and, in doing so, strengthen connections with other members who have different standards for behavior or different interpretations of the group’s ideology. The term bridging discourse is introduced to refer to this practice. Bridging discourse is useful for members of the historical reenactment group, as authenticity is an important but ambiguous part of the group’s ideology, and it is not always clear what behavior is authentic and what behavior is not. Members use bridging discourse to demonstrate to other members that a wide range of behavior can be considered authentic. Individuals engage in bridging discourse by redefining the group’s ideology, reinterpreting behavior, and making exceptions to the group’s normative standards. Such discourse ultimately allows the group to survive with a diverse membership.