Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 13, Issue 9, September 2009, Pages 397-402
Journal home page for Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Review
Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.06.008Get rights and content

Recent empirical research has shed new light on the perennial question of human altruism. A number of recent studies suggest that from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resources with others and to inform others of things helpfully. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, engage in some but not all of these behaviors: they help others instrumentally, but they are not so inclined to share resources altruistically and they do not inform others of things helpfully. The evolutionary roots of human altruism thus appear to be much more complex than previously supposed.

Section snippets

Helping

The behavior is as simple as it is surprising – and it is highly robust. Drop an object accidentally on the floor and try to reach for it, for example, from a desk, and infants as young as 14–18 months of age will toddle over, pick it up and return it to you 8, 9, 10. They do this in the total absence of encouragement or praise, and they do it in some more complex situations as well, for example, when someone cannot open a cabinet because his hands are full, or is having trouble stacking books.

Sharing

Helping others by expending a few ergs of energy fetching a dropped pen is one thing, but sharing valuable resources with them is another. In this case, children turn out to be more generous with resources than are chimpanzees, but the comparison is complex, spanning four different ways of sharing.

First, although chimpanzees in their natural habitats mostly compete over food, they do transfer food to others in some circumstances. The most common circumstance is when individuals share food

Informing

It comes so naturally to humans that we do not think of it as prosocial behavior at all, but the free exchange of information in communication, in which humans engage constantly, can be a kind of altruism too. Human communication is premised on the assumption that a communicative act provides useful or relevant information not for the speaker but for the listener, and it is thus a cooperative act [34]. Moreover, humans often inform others of things that they believe will help those others even

Social selectivity and norms

And so young children are naturally helpful, generous, and informative and from very early in ontogeny. Given various lines of evidence, it would not seem that this behavior is inculcated in them originally by culture. However, it is obvious that social experience and cultural transmission become increasingly more influential over ontogeny.

First, in terms of direct social experience with others, a year or two after they have started behaving altruistically, young children begin to become more

Conclusion

The take-home messages from this review are two. First, from an early age human infants and young children are naturally empathetic, helpful, generous, and informative. The mechanisms presumably responsible for the emergence of human altruism as an evolutionarily stable behavior – reciprocity, reputation and social norms – do not seem to kick in until after children have been practicing their natural altruism (with a good bit of selfishness in parallel, of course) for a few years. This natural

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Anja Gampe, Sandy Kennert and Sylvio Tüpke for taking the photographs.

Glossary

Ultimate causation
Why a behavior evolved in terms of fitness costs and benefits. Concerning altruism, evolutionary models seek to explain how a behavior that appears fitness-reducing can evolve by, for example, resulting in long-term fitness-benefits through reciprocation between individuals or the promotion of one's own genes in genetically related individuals (kin-selection).
Proximate causation
How a certain behavior operates in the organism in terms of, for example, the cognitive and

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