Rethinking natural altruism: Simple reciprocal interactions trigger children’s benevolence

Abstract

A very simple reciprocal activity elicited high degrees of altruism in 1-and 2-y-old children, whereas friendly but nonreciprocal activity yielded little subsequent altruism. In a second study, reciprocity with one adult led 1-and 2-y-olds to provide help to a new person. These results question the current dominant claim that social experiences cannot account for early occurring altruistic behavior. A third study, with preschool-age children, showed that subtle reciprocal cues remain potent elicitors of altruism, whereas a fourth study with preschoolers showed that even a brief reciprocal experience fostered children's expectation of altruism from others. Collectively, the studies suggest that simple reciprocal interactions are a potent trigger of altruism for young children, and that these interactions lead children to believe that their relationships are characterized by mutual care and commitment.reciprocity | altruism | social development | morality

Experience facilitates the emergence of sharing behavior among 7.5-month-old infants.

“…However, since the bucket game had a similar amount of communicative cues as the sharing game, and, since infants across both conditions reacted equally positively at V2, these are unlikely the sole reasons for improved sharing behavior. Instead, we speculate that infants might have construed a norm of reciprocal sharing from the reciprocal object-exchange experience, in line with previous research (Barragan & Dweck, 2014), and thus learned to share objects in response according to this norm.…”

“…Recent work suggests that reciprocal turn-taking object-exchanges elicit high degrees of altruism among 1- and 2-year-olds in laboratory helping tasks (Barragan & Dweck, 2014). Therefore, we hypothesized that regular practice of turn-taking object exchange could facilitate the onset of sharing.…”

“…Therefore, we hypothesized that regular practice of turn-taking object exchange could facilitate the onset of sharing. Such interactions likely support many elements crucial to the onset of sharing behavior, such as providing infants with experience understanding others’ requests (Brownell et al, 2009; Gross et al, 2015), socializing infants into understanding the emotional consequences of sharing objects with others (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nichols, & Drummond, 2013) and introducing infants to the norm of reciprocal sharing (Barragan & Dweck, 2014)…”

Explicit scaffolding increases simple helping in younger infants.

“…A further limitation of this and most other experiments investigating social influences on infant helping is the lack of a baseline condition (Cortes Barragan & Dweck, 2014; Warneken & Tomasello, 2008, 2013). Without such a baseline assessment, it remains possible that the differences between the younger experimental and control groups were due to pre-existing differences between the samples and not the experimental manipulation.…”

“…Rather, encouragement and praise may have conveyed that the adults value the infants' help and that handing the object back is the right way to help. In addition, given infants' general affiliativeness and desire for social interactions (Brownell, in press; Carpendale, Kettner, & Audet, 2015; Cortes Barragan & Dweck, 2014; Rheingold, 1982; Rheingold, Cook, & Kolowitz, 1987), salient positive signals like praise and encouragement may render helping interactions more enjoyable. Indeed, it is possible that the vocal tones and other non-verbal positive expressions can render helping interactions more enjoyable regardless of the linguistic content of the message (as long as the infant knows what to do) (Fernald, 1993).…”