Felix Warneken The Development of Altruistic behavior : helping in Children

one of the key human characteristics is our willingness to help others in need. As adults we do this routinely, often in the absence of immediate personal gain and occasionally even at great costs to ourselves. Proponents of a Hobbesian worldview argue that these helpful behaviors mainly depend upon the acquisition of social norms that override and control our pervasive selfish nature. It is often assumed that helping behaviors originate in cultural practices such as our parents having taught us moral norms or having rewarded us for being nice to others. Conversely, followers of Rousseau support the idea that we might have basic tendencies to care about others, which do not depend on social norms alone. Perhaps our altruistic inclinations go deeper and have a biological roots as well as social ones. Empirical studies with young children and chimpanzees present us with a unique opportunity to investigate these questions. Focusing solely on the mature state of altruistic behaviors in human adults cannot provide us with satisfactory answers about the origins of the cognitive and motivational processes underlying altruism. However, by combining research focusing on the development of children with comparative approaches testing different species we can gain deeper insight into origins of the psychology underlying human altruistic behavior. Studying young children allows us assess the psychological capacities with which humans are equipped early in life that prepare them to develop altruistic behaviors. By examining their development, we can elucidate the interplay between these biological predispositions and social learning. Studies of chimpanzees, one of our closest living evolutionary relatives, allow inferences concerning the evolutionary basis of these behaviors. By comparing humans with chimpanzees, we can determine which aspects of human altruism may have already been present in the last common ancestor of apes and humans versus those components of the human mind that are species-unique and emerged only in the human lineage. Thus, by integrating insights from these two lines of research, we can gain insight into the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of human altruistic behavior. One of the earliest manifestations of altruistic inclinations can be found in simple helping behaviors in which one person struggles to complete a task and the child can intervene. These behaviors are interesting with regard to the cognitive as well as the motivational underpinnings of children's social behaviors. Specifically, in order to help someone with an instrumental problem, the child has to have the social-cognitive …