While cognitive empathy could result in affectively altruistic behavior, it normally would not do so without the presence of affective empathy. For example, if I am told that my friend has been locked in a closet, I can put myself in his shoes to realize that he is probably suffering, but what will motivate me to help him will be my distress at knowing that he is distressed (especially if I hear his screams) and the knowledge that my distress will be relieved or that I will be happy once he is released. I could also be motivated by a sense of justice or a desire for social reward, but since these, along with cognitive empathy, are much more cognitively complex and likely more culturally contingent than affective empathy, affective empathy seems to be a much better candidate for an innate basis of affective altruism. While there are, to be sure, many learned or socially constructed factors that cause affective altruism, for the purposes of this thesis, I am concerned with innate factors and, in particular, the most likely fundamental innate factor - affective empathy. Introspectively, we can easily discern the relationship between affective empathy and affective altruism. When we see someone suffer - especially if it is someone we care about and who shows many affective signs such as visible wounds, blood, screaming, and a pained facial expression - we suffer also and are often inclined to help that person. In a meta-analysis, Underwood and Moore (1982) did not find a significant correlation between affective empathy and affectively altruistic behavior, but note that the correlation is stronger when empathy is induced by an actual or experienced rather than a hypothetical or imagined situation. Eisenberg and Miller (1987) conducted a more comprehensive meta-analysis and found a low to moderate correlation between affective empathy and affective altruism, though they postulate that the actual correlation is much higher but is underestimated in the meta-analysis due to weak or questionable indices of empathy (such as response to hypothetical or imagined situations) and affective altruism.

III. Is Affective Altruism Innate?

Now that affective altruism has been defined and the psychological mediator we are concerned with has been identified, we can proceed to ask whether and in what sense affective altruism and affective empathy are innate. Before answering the question though, we must establish that the question itself is valid. In other words, is the so-called nativist-empiricist debate a meaningful debate at all?