While economists and biologists scratch their heads over why people help others at their own expense, the subjects in a recent experiment scratched their heads for an altogether different reason – to groom their glossy coats. The subjects, young chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, showed for the first time that humans are not the only altruistic animals. Instead, in a series of experiments, the chimpanzees helped their caretaker without command, without reward, and at some cost to themselves – fitting the very definition of altruistic. Because chimpanzees are one of humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, the studies’ researchers, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, conclude that both people and chimpanzees’ helpfulness is a hardwired biological tendency.
In their article in the March 3, 2006, issue of Science, Warneken and Tomasello similarly report that 18-month-old humans routinely helped a stranger reach his goals in a parallel set of studies. Because children this young have very little training in the art of giving aid, their actions provide even more evidence that humans have a natural yen for altruism.
“There are people out there who think you have to work against nature to create helpful, caring individuals,” says Warneken, a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute. “But this doesn’t seem to be right. We have a biological predisposition to be helpful and caring.”
Scientists have long thought that humans are the only truly altruistic species, writes UCLA anthropologist Joan Silk in a commentary accompanying the research report. Indeed, humans’ helpfulness is the fly in the ointment of two major theories of human behavior. Evolutionary theory, which assumes that life is about disseminating one’s own genes, can’t account for why people assist others who are not genetically related to them. And economics, which assumes that the point of existence is to maximize profit and self-interest, can’t figure out why people give away vast sums of time, money, and effort with no hope of personal gain.
Warneken and Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute, complicate this picture by showing that it isn’t just humans who are reflexively helpful. In their experiments, chimpanzees saw their caretaker drop an object, such as a lid or a sponge. In half the trials – the experimental condition – the caretaker made it clear that she wanted the object by unsuccessfully reaching for it. For the other half of the trials – the control condition – she intentionally threw the object on the floor. The chimpanzees helped the caretaker by retrieving the object, but not all of the time. They were more likely to help in the experimental condition, when the caretaker showed that she wanted the object, than in the control condition. “It’s not like fetch with a dog,” says Warneken. “The chimpanzees were sensitive to the person’s goal.”
The researchers also explored how 18-month-old human infants would act under similar conditions. Like the chimpanzees, human infants helped the experimenter pick up accidentally dropped objects, but not intentionally thrown ones. And they did so without being asked, praised, or rewarded. Unlike their hairy counterparts, however, the human infants were able to aid the experimenter with more complex tasks, like pointing out a second way to get inside a box into which he has dropped a spoon. Human infants were also quicker to help.
Combining these findings, Warneken concludes that “the common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans already had rudimentary helping skills. And so not much moral instruction is necessary to develop them.”
So why haven’t we all become saintly Nobel Peace Prize nominees? Warneken speculates that part of growing up is learning not to be helpful all the time: “It’s not a good thing to be altruistic to everyone. You wouldn’t want to be altruistic to a cheater, or to benefit someone who doesn’t benefit the group. You become more selective and understand when it’s appropriate to perform this behavior.”
He also points out that our philanthropic urges are not our only tendency. We also have a strong selfish streak. “But at least under some circumstances,” he adds, “we are automatically altruistic.”
Read more stories by Alana Conner Snibbe.