... hypothesis has been carried out by Batson himself, who firstly gave a collection of people a placebo drug which he claimed fixed the participants moods. He found that despite this belief, those who had earlier tested high in empathy, were more likely to take the place of 'Elaine' in empathy. Who was a confederate receiving electric shocks in another room and screaming from the pain she was receiving. Batson carried out further research which showed that manipulating approval/disproval for helping made no difference to the level of helping, amongst the high empathetic participants. But it made a big difference to the low empathy participants. This then shows that this research supports Batson's hypothesis that people do not help to make themselves feel better but to make other people feel better. The criticisms for this theory has also been carried out by Batson. In further experiments he found that when ...

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