 Another popular egoistic strategy for explaining the link between empathy and helping behavior is the aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis, which maintains that witnessing someone in need, and the empathy it evokes, is an unpleasant or aversive experience, and that helping is motivated by the desire to diminish that aversive  experience.[17]  If this is right, Batson maintains, people in a high empathy condition will sometimes have two quite different ways of reducing the aversive experience—they can help the person in need or they can simply leave. Which strategy a person adopts will depend, in part, on how difficult or costly it is to depart the scene. If escape is easy, people will be more likely to take that option, while if leaving is more difficult people will be more likely to help, since that is a less costly way of ending the aversive experience. If, on the other hand, the empathy-altruism hypothesis is correct and empathy leads to genuinely altruistic motivation, one would expect people in a high empathy condition to help whether escape is easy or hard, since only helping will satisfy an altruistic desire.