 Cialdini and his collaborators have suggested an even more elaborate non-altruistic interpretation of helping behavior in high empathy/easy escape conditions. According to their suggestions, conditions of high empathy are also conditions of increased “interpersonal unity, wherein the conception of self and other are not distinct but are merged to some degree” (Cialdini et al. 1997, 490). It is this increased feeling of oneness rather than empathy that is causally responsible for motivating helping behavior (See however Batson et al. 1997a, Neuberg et al. 1997, and Batson 1997 and 2011 for a plausible reply and May 2018, 144–153 for a probing discussion of the relation between empathic concern and oneness). One therefore has to be cautious in claiming that Batson has conclusively proven that the empathy/sympathy-altruism hypothesis is true, if that means one has logically excluded every egoistic alternative in accounting for helping behavior. But it has to be acknowledged that Batson has radically changed the argumentative dialectic of the egoism-altruism debate by forcing the egoistic account of human agency to come up with ever more elaborate alternative interpretations in order to account for helping behavior within its framework. Egoism was supposed to provide a rather unified and relatively simple account of the motivational structure of human agency. In challenging the predominance and simplicity of this framework in an empirically acute fashion, Batson has at least established altruism—claiming that besides egoistic motivations we are also motivated by genuinely altruistic reasons—as an empirically plausible hypothesis. He has shown it to be a hypothesis one is almost persuaded to believe that it is true, as he himself recently has characterized his own epistemic attitude (Batson 1997, 522.) More positively expressed, Batson’s research has at least demonstrated that empathy/sympathy is a causal factor in bringing about helping behavior. Regardless of the question of the exact nature of the underlying motivation for helping or prosocial behavior, psychologists generally assume that in adults and children a positive, even if weak, correlation between empathy—measured in a variety of ways—and prosocial behavior has been established; and this despite the fact that the above aspects of emotional responding to another person have not always been sufficiently distinguished.(For a survey see Eisenberg and Miller 1987; Eisenberg/Fabes 1998, Spinrad and Eisenberg 2014. For a general survey of the various factors contributing to prosocial behavior see Bierhoff 2002).