Do humans come with a built-in sense of obligation to one another?
A study finds that children as young as three and a half years old display an understanding of shared commitments, adding to a growing body of evidence that humans are a uniquely cooperative species.
Children engage in collaborative play at a preschool in Lexington, Mass. A new study finds that children as young as 3-1/2 understand and value the concept of joint commitments.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
If you bail on an activity with a preschooler, you鈥檇 better have a good excuse.
That鈥檚 because, according to research published this week in the journal Child Development, children as young as three and a half years old听. The researchers found that children who abandon a cooperative activity for an apparently selfish reason tend to prompt more resentment from their peers than those who quit the task for another reason.
These findings do not just build on a growing body of research suggesting that the very young possess moral capabilities that are more听sophisticated than scientists previously thought. They also suggest that the notion of shared obligation is in some ways fundamental to听Homo sapiens, the only known animal to create social institutions.
鈥淭he kinds of joint commitments we are seeing here in the three-year-olds can be scaled up into legal contracts, in which we mutually pledge to hold up our end of the bargain,鈥� says Margarita Svetlova,听a visiting assistant professor at Duke University, who co-authored the study with colleagues from听the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. 鈥淚f you really want, you could scale it up to the social contract in general.鈥�
Researchers at Max Planck ran an experiment in which 72 same-sex pairs of three-and-a-half-year-olds were asked to complete a task that required two people to pull a rope on an apparatus to retrieve a pair of marbles.
Members of each pair were randomly assigned the role of 鈥渟ubject鈥� and 鈥減artner.鈥� The researchers told the subjects that they would be working with the partner to obtain the marbles. But the partners were there to thwart the plan. Some were instructed to quit the task in exchange for an individual听reward,听so that they would appear selfish to the subject. Others were trained to use the apparatus in a way that didn鈥檛听work,听so that they would appear incompetent. And for other partners, the machine was rigged so that they would 鈥渂reak鈥� it.
The researchers found that the subjects reacted more strongly when the partner appeared to abandon the task for selfish reasons. When the partner appeared incompetent, the subject would tend to attempt to teach the partner how to pull the rope.
鈥淲e were amazed that three-year-olds only blamed their partner if she intentionally broke the rules of the cooperative game,鈥� says Professor Svetlova. 鈥淭hey were fine with it if she was ignorant of the rules, and in听fact in this case听they taught her the rules.鈥�
The subjects鈥� responses,听when they inferred their partners鈥� underlying intentions and respond appropriately, are听arguably 鈥渢he kind of reactions that could be expected of a competent moral agent,鈥� note the researchers in their paper.
鈥淭he fact that in this study they react differentially depending on why the partner failed in her role shows that they really understand what they are doing,鈥� Svetlova says.
Humans begin cooperating very early in life. Studies indicate that children as young as 14 months of age听听fetch objects that are out of reach, remove obstacles, and attempt to correct mistakes. Rewarding or verbally encouraging children doesn鈥檛 seem to increase helping behavior, and in some cases, rewarding kids听听to听help again. Many psychologists and biologists see these tendencies as a sign that evolution has endowed us with a predisposition to cooperate.
鈥淲e鈥檙e really not solitary individuals,鈥� says听Felix Warneken, a Harvard psychologist who studies altruism and cooperation in infants and young children but who did not participate in this study. 鈥淲e depend on each other maybe more than any other species, maybe with the exception of eusocial insects,鈥� like ants and most bees.听
Viewed this way, it makes sense that a species as adaptable as our own would evolve an instinctive drive to collaborate. 鈥淲e can basically survive in any part of the world because we鈥檙e able to learn from each other,鈥� says Professor听Warneken.听鈥淚t鈥檚 not preprogrammed in us how to find food or how to protect ourselves from听weather. This is all something we have to learn from each other.鈥�
鈥淲hen we run studies like this with chimpanzees,鈥� he adds, 鈥�.鈥� 听
The study鈥檚 authors also note that these findings may be of some practical use to parents and others who work with preschoolers.听
鈥淥ne of the lessons for parents is that in many cases you would be a lot better off just letting kids work things out for themselves, even if that doesn鈥檛 produce the outcome you yourself would choose for them,鈥� says Svetlova.
鈥淭hey need to learn the consequences of their actions for their relations with their friends and peers, who, as we show in this study, are perfectly capable of reacting in a morally appropriate way.鈥�