Providing help to a help-seeker depends on various factors such as the cost of helping, the presence of bystanders, empathy, distress, and characteristics of help-seekers. The present research explores the interplay of various factors when help is asked alone or accompanied, and how that influences helping behavior. We argue that help-providers will experience more empathy and distress for single help-seekers than multiple. Hence, we hypothesize that helping would be higher when the help-seekers ask for help alone than being accompanied. Four studies were conducted to test the hypothesis. The first two studies were vignette-based experiments, which examined the chances of helping a single and an accompanied help-seeker in two different help contexts. Study 3 examined the hypothesis in a real-life help context through a field experiment. The results of the three studies supported our hypothesis. Study 4 explored the reasons for such differential helping patterns. The result showed that the different levels of empathy and distress for alone and accompanied help-seekers led to differential helping in these two cases. These results are discussed using the empathy-altruism model, the negative state relief hypothesis, and the cost of helping/not-helping. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.