The span of the numbers in the experiment with Elaine were kind of amazing, and seem to me like they could easily be interpreted to lead to the conclusion that most people are quite amoral, which is a bit distressing. Specifically, the amazing part is the dramatic swing from 18% helping to 91% helping on the basis of discovering that "Elaine’s values and interests are very similar to the subject’s... while in the low-empathy condition, they are very different".

The effect of the similarity manipulation in the easy escape condition appears to be huge.

One way to reconcile my surprise is to imagine that the value differences the experimenters showed the subjects are really dramatic, like to the extent that "low empathy Elaine" is some kind of Baby-eating monster who is dissimiliar to most people and who many would feel moral righteous in helping to punish. That would explain the results in a way that would be moderately comforting, in the sense that the 18% helping rate might not simply show that only about 18% of the study population is what I would think of as "basically moral". If low empathy Elaine was a monster then some fraction of the 82% could reasonably have been the sort of people who also tend to enact personally costly punishment to maintain a moral order. If that was coming through in the study as a confound, that would be kind of comforting :-)

On the other hand, if "low empathy Elaine" just likes a different genre of music, has different dietary practices, and has the opposite tendencies from the subject on an introversion/extroversion scale then I find myself kind of horrified by the results of the low empathy condition... if low empathy Elaine is still a basically good person who is "just different" but not bad then it seems to indicate that something like 82% of the study population were assholes who wouldn't help someone in distress if the distressed person is even a small distance outside their monkeysphere.

Help distinguishing between these interpretations would be appreciated.