 While the literature on self-other merging provides little reason to believe that normal people take themselves to be numerically identical with another person, it does provide a different kind of challenge to the empathy-altruism hypothesis defended by Batson and his colleagues. That hypothesis, it will be recalled, is that empathy often causes an ultimate desire to help another person. But in the Cialdini et al. (1977) paper cited earlier, they report three studies indicating that empathy, though it does occur, is not playing any causal role in the process that leads to helping. Rather, they maintain, it is “merging”—which is used here as a label for whatever the IOS scale and the use-of-we test measure—that is actually leading participants to help. Though the Cialdini et al. paper is quite sophisticated, Batson et al. (1997) pointed out a number of methodological problems. When they conducted a pair of experiments that avoided these methodological problems, the role of empathy in producing helping behavior was clearly evident. However, most experiments exploring the link between empathy and helping behavior, including this one, use a relatively small number of participants. And the “replication crisis” that has emerged in recent years has led many to worry about the robustness of the effects reported in experiments like these (Chambers 2017). McAuliffe et al. (2018) have addressed these concerns. Their high powered, pre-registered study, run on the internet, analyzed data from 680 participants. Their findings were “unambiguously supportive” (2018: 504) of the link between empathy and helping behavior.