Altruism And Empathy

Introduction
Empathy is, by definition, the experience of understanding another’s condition from their perspective. This phenomenon is responsible for the ability to relate to another’s emotional condition, recognize distress and other emotions related to negative experiences, and encourage prosocial, or helpful, behaviours when in groups. Prosocial behaviours have been noted in many species, particularly of mammals and insects (Zahn-Waxler, Hollenbeck, Radke-Yarrow, 1984). However, scientists have noted that altruistic behaviours, or promoting someone else’s welfare at a risk to the self, is much less common interspecies (Zahn-Waxler et al, 1984). This paper will attempt to explain the factors that make empathy almost entirely unique to humans,
The most well-known of these is that empathy serves to elicit a personal sort of understanding between individuals that promotes prosocial behaviours. It has been theorized that empathy is also necessary for social interactions due to the fact that empathy and altruism can provide information about important details to do with those people interact this. Empathy accomplishes this by allowing people to notice subtleties in presentation(Zahn-Waxler et al, 1984).Empathy is thought to be fundamental, Zahn-Waxler notes, to eliciting altruistic and prosocial behaviour and inhibiting aggression. By increasing the possibility of insight into another’s life and personal experiences, the chances of applying positive emotions to others increases. This highlights the fact that empathy could be extremely important in maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships, since it helps to regulate aggression that prevents many dangerous situations. On another note, early Homo sapien sapiens have been thought to have lived as hunter-gatherers (Hill, 2002) in small tribes. These small groups relied on cooperation to function effectively enough to ensure survival(Richardson and Boyd, 2005). These tribes were often made up of families (Foley, 1992). This dynamic may well have required emotional connections, understanding and helping behaviours to keep tribe relations stable. Since early humans’ main focuses were on gathering food and water, staying sheltered and procreating, it can be inferred that active cooperation was the chosen “survival strategy” for early humans.