The Development of Altruistic Behavior: Helping in Children and Chimpanzees

Psycholog

Review of "Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others"

Psycholog

Does it always feel good to get what you want? Young children differentiate between material and wicked desires

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3-year-olds attribute negative emotion to self-serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three-step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3-year-olds may be predisposed to view self-serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3- to 9-year-old children (n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three-year-old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic.Psycholog

From partner choice to equity – and beyond?

Baumard et al. provide an intriguing model where morality emerges from the dynamics of partner choice in mutualistic interactions. I discuss evidence from human and nonhuman primates that supports the overall approach, but highlights a gap in explaining the human specificity of moral cognition. I suggest that an essential characteristic of human fairness is to override concerns about merit in favor of promoting the welfare in others who are needy.Psycholog

Book Review: Trusting What You Are Told by Paul Harris

Psycholog

The sources of normativity: Young children‘s awareness of the normative structure of games

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children’s awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children’s normative responses to the puppet’s acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities

Correspondence : Chimpanzee helping is real, not a byproduct

In their recent study, Tennie et al.1 argue that positive instances of chimpanzees helping others can be a byproduct of testing methods1. The study includes a new task where chimpanzees can behave prosocially toward a conspecific either through an action (GO-condition) or by omission (NO-GO condition). The study further aims to test whether stimulus enhancement or carry-over effects from prior experiences explain previous results. We agree that a helping-by-omission task could in principle provide intriguing new evidence for chimpanzee helping. However, here we raise a number of crucial methodological issues that question the current interpretation of the study’s results. Furthermore, the study fails to consider the evidence from prior work addressing these concerns

Social-Cognitive Contributors to Young Children’s Empathic and Prosocial Behavior

This chapter discusses motivational factors and the contributors responsible for the empathic and prosocial behavior of young children. The reasons that people engage in prosocial behaviors, including self-benefit and society’s approval, are discussed. Empathy as an underlying prosocial behavior, along with its associated process sympathy, is studied to determine whether these are the factors responsible for young children’s prosocial behavior. The chapter discusses young children’s understanding of the situational cues and responding empathically to them. Instrumental helping acts of children aimed at helping other people in attaining their goals rather than looking for self-benefit are discussed, as is the role of culture and experience in influencing young children’s prosocial behavior.Psycholog

How comparative psychology can shed light on human evolution: Response to Beran et al.’s discussion of “Cognitive capacities for cooking in chimpanzees”

We recently reported a study (Warneken & Rosati Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282, 20150229, 2015) examining whether chimpanzees possess several cognitive capacities that are critical to engage in cooking. In a subsequent commentary, Beran, Hopper, de Waal, Sayers, and Brosnan Learning & Behavior (2015) asserted that our paper has several flaws. Their commentary (1) critiques some aspects of our methodology and argues that our work does not constitute evidence that chimpanzees can actually cook; (2) claims that these results are old news, as previous work had already demonstrated that chimpanzees possess most or all of these capacities; and, finally, (3) argues that comparative psychological studies of chimpanzees cannot adequately address questions about human evolution, anyway. However, their critique of the premise of our study simply reiterates several points we made in the original paper. To quote ourselves: “As chimpanzees neither control fire nor cook food in their natural behavior, these experiments therefore focus not on whether chimpanzees can actually cook food, but rather whether they can apply their cognitive skills to novel problems that emulate cooking” (Warneken & Rosati Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282, 20150229, 2015, p. 2). Furthermore, the methodological issues they raise are standard points about psychological research with animals—many of which were addressed synthetically across our 9 experiments, or else are orthogonal to our claims. Finally, we argue that comparative studies of extant apes (and other nonhuman species) are a powerful and indispensable method for understanding human cognitive evolution.Psycholog

Social Influences on Inequity Aversion in Children

Adults and children are willing to sacrifice personal gain to avoid both disadvantageous and advantageous inequity. These two forms of inequity aversion follow different developmental trajectories, with disadvantageous inequity aversion emerging around 4 years and advantageous inequity aversion emerging around 8 years. Although inequity aversion is assumed to be specific to situations where resources are distributed among individuals, the role of social context has not been tested in children. Here, we investigated the influence of two aspects of social context on inequity aversion in 4- to 9-year-old children: (1) the role of the experimenter distributing rewards and (2) the presence of a peer with whom rewards could be shared. Experiment 1 showed that children rejected inequity at the same rate, regardless of whether the experimenter had control over reward allocations. This indicates that children’s decisions are based upon reward allocations between themselves and a peer and are not attempts to elicit more favorable distributions from the experimenter. Experiment 2 compared rejections of unequal reward allocations in children interacting with or without a peer partner. When faced with a disadvantageous distribution, children frequently rejected a smaller reward when a larger reward was visible, even if no partner would obtain the larger reward. This suggests that nonsocial factors partly explain disadvantageous inequity rejections. However, rejections of disadvantageous distributions were higher when the larger amount would go to a peer, indicating that social context enhances disadvantageous inequity aversion. By contrast, children rejected advantageous distributions almost exclusively in the social context. Therefore, advantageous inequity aversion appears to be genuinely social, highlighting its potential relevance for the development of fairness concerns. By comparing social and nonsocial factors, this study provides a detailed picture of the expression of inequity aversion in human ontogeny and raises questions about the function and evolution of inequity aversion in humans