Just Babies (26 page)

  
33
  
Hungry rhesus monkeys avoid pulling a lever:
S. Wechkin, J. H. Masserman, and W. Terris Jr., “Shock to a Conspecific as an Aversive Stimulus,”
Psychonomic Science
1 (1964): 47–48; J. H. Masserman, S. Wechkin, and W. Terris, “ ‘Altruistic’ Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
121 (1964): 584–85.

  
34
  
Rats will press a bar to lower another rat:
G. E. Rice and P. Gainer, “ ‘Altruism’ in the Albino Rat,”
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
55 (1962): 123–25; G. E. J. Rice, “Aiding Behavior vs. Fear in the Albino Rat,”
Psychological Record
14 (1964): 165–70.

  
35
  
one-year-olds will pat and stroke others in distress:
For review, see Hoffman,
Empathy and Moral Development.

  
36
  
The psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and her colleagues found:
C. Zahn-Waxler, J. L. Robinson, and R. N. Emde, “The Development of Empathy in Twins,”
Developmental Psychology
28 (1992): 1038–47; C. Zahn-Waxler, M. Radke-Yarrow, E. Wagner, and M. Chapman, “Development of Concern for Others,”
Developmental Psychology
28 (1992): 126–36.

  
37
  
Girls are more likely to soothe than boys:
Zahn-Waxler, Robinson, and Emde, “Development of Empathy in Twins.”

  
38
  
research suggesting greater empathy and compassion, on average, in females:
N. Eisenberg and R. Lennon, “Sex Differences in Empathy and Related Capacities,”
Psychological Bulletin
94 (1983): 100–131.

  
39
  
you can see similar behavior in other primates:
Frans de Waal,
The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist
(New York: Basic Books, 2001).

  
40
  
In one study where rats had the chance to press a bar:
Rice, “Aiding Behavior vs. Fear,” 167. For discussion, see S. D. Preston and F. B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
25 (2002): 1–71.

  
41
  
Toddlers also sometimes respond egocentrically to others’ pain:
Hoffman,
Empathy and Moral Development.

  
42
  
anecdotes and studies showing spontaneous helping:
For review, see D. F. Hay, “The Roots and Branches of Human Altruism,”
British Journal of Psychology
100 (2009): 473–79.

  
43
  
“ ‘Daddy wants slippers’ ”:
C. W. Valentine,
The Psychology of Early Childhood
(London: Methuen, 1942), 321.

  
44
  
a psychologist wrote about an eighteen-month-old:
Joseph Church, ed.,
Three Babies: Biographies of Cognitive Development
(New York: Random House, 1966), 71–72.

  
45
  
And another psychologist … described turning her lab into a messy home:
H. L. Rheingold, “Little Children’s Participation in the Work of Adults, a Nascent Prosocial Behavior,”
Child Development
53 (1982): 114–25.

  
46
  
psychologists have found that toddlers help adults:
F. Warneken and M. Tomasello, “Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees,”
Science
311 (2006): 1301–3; F. Warneken and M. Tomasello, “Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age,”
Infancy
11 (2007): 271–94. For review, see Michael Tomasello,
Why We Cooperate
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

  
47
  
This behavior is impressive:
K. A. Dunfield, V. A. Kuhlmeier, L. O’Connell, and E. Kelley, “Examining the Diversity of Prosocial Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Infancy,”
Infancy
16 (2011): 227–47.

  
48
  
Or perhaps their helpful acts are performed … for the adults’ approval:
K. Wynn, “Constraints on Natural Altruism,”
British Journal of Psychology
100 (2009): 481–85.

  
49
  
Alia Martin and Kristina Olson conducted an experiment:
A. Martin and K. R. Olson, “When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-Year-Old Children,”
Developmental Psychology
, forthcoming.

  
50
  
three-year-olds were more likely to help someone who had previously helped someone else:
A. Vaish, M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello, “Young Children Selectively Avoid Helping People with Harmful Intentions,”
Child Development
81 (2010): 1661–69.

  
51
  
Kristen Dunfield and Valerie Kuhlmeier got similar results:
K. A. Dunfield and V. A. Kuhlmeier, “Intention-Mediated Selective Helping in Infancy,”
Psychological Science
21 (2010): 523–27.

  
52
  
Children begin to spontaneously share:
H. L. Rheingold, D. F. Hay, and M. J. West, “Sharing in the Second Year of Life,”
Child Development
47 (1976): 1148–58; D. F. Hay, “Cooperative Interactions and Sharing Between Very Young Children and Their Parents,”
Developmental Psychology
6 (1979): 647–58; D. F. Hay and P. Murray, “Giving and Requesting: Social Facilitation of Infants’ Offers to Adults,”
Infant Behavior and Development
5 (1982): 301–10; Rheingold, Hay, and West, “Sharing in the Second Year.”

  
53
  
Celia Brownell and her colleagues:
C. A. Brownell, M. Svetlova, and S. Nichols, “To Share or Not to Share: When Do Toddlers
Respond to Another’s Needs?,”
Infancy
14 (2009): 117–30, quote from 125.

  
54
  
Rodolfo Cortez Barragan and Carol Dweck find:
R. C. Barragan and C. Dweck, “Young Children’s ‘Helpfulness’: How Natural Is It?,” unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 2013.

  
55
  
an intimate connection between judging others and judging ourselves:
R. F. Baumeister, A. M. Stillwell, and T. F. Heatherton, “Guilt: An Interpersonal Approach,”
Psychological Bulletin
115 (1994): 243–67. For discussion, see Pinker,
Better Angels.

  
56
  
Babies in the first year of life show distress when they harm others:
For review, see Hoffman,
Empathy and Moral Development.

  
57
  
a clever experiment on the elicitation of guilt in children:
Charlotte Buhler,
From Birth to Maturity: An Outline of the Psychological Development of the Child
(London: Kegan Paul, 1935), 66–67, cited in Peter Hobson,
The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking
(London: Macmillan, 2002).

  
58
  
the psychological pull of compassion:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 9.

3. FAIRNESS, STATUS, AND PUNISHMENT

    
1
  
William Damon, in a series of influential studies:
William Damon,
The Social World of the Child
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 81. The example that I give here is also cited in S. Nichols, “Emotions, Norms, and the Genealogy of Fairness,”
Politics, Philosophy and Economics
9 (2010): 275–96.

    
2
  
the same equality bias in younger children:
K. R. Olson and E. S. Spelke, “Foundations of Cooperation in Preschool Children,”
Cognition
108 (2008): 222–31.

    
3
  
The equality bias is strong:
A. Shaw and K. R. Olson, “Children Discard a Resource to Avoid Inequity,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
141 (2012): 382–95.

    
4
  
the sixteen-month-olds preferred the fair divider:
A. Geraci and L. Surian, “The Developmental Roots of Fairness: Infants’ Reactions to Equal and Unequal Distributions of Resources,”
Developmental Science
14 (2011): 1012–20.

    
5
  
the fifteen-month-olds looked longer at the unfair division:
M. F. H. Schmidt and J. A. Sommerville, “Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants,”
PLoS ONE
6, no. 10 (2011): e23223.

    
6
  
children can sometimes override their focus on equality:
S. Sloane, R. Baillargeon, and D. Premack, “Do Infants Have a Sense of Fairness?,”
Psychological Science
23 (2012): 196–204.

    
7
  
children are smart about what to do with the extra resources:
Shaw and Olson, “Children Discard a Resource”; K. R. Olson and E. S. Spelke, “Foundations of Cooperation in Preschool Children,”
Cognition
108 (2008): 222–31.

    
8
  
Some experiments that I’ve done:
K. McCrink, P. Bloom, and L. Santos, “Children’s and Adults’ Judgments of Equitable Resource Distributions,”
Developmental Science
13 (2010): 37–45.

    
9
  
And other studies find that … develops even through adolescence:
I. Almas, A. W. Cappelen, E. O. Sorensen, and B. Tungodden, “Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance,”
Science
328 (2010): 1176–78.

  
10
  
we are natural-born egalitarians:
Frans De Waal,
The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society
(New York: Random House, 2009), 200.

  
11
  
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells an unnerving story:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
(New York, Harper, 1974), 69–70.

  
12
  
the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue:
Christopher Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  
13
  
Hunter-gatherer societies are hyperviolent:
Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest.
For review, see Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(New York: Viking, 2011).

  
14
  
“ ‘insulting the meat’ ”:
N. Angier, “Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive,”
New York Times
, July 5, 2011.

  
15
  
“Among the Hadza … his efforts amused them”:
Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest
, 75.

  
16
  
And there are more serious penalties:
Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest
, 121, 82.

  
17
  
“a bizarre type of political hierarchy”:
Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest
, 3.

  
18
  
the Ultimatum Game:
W. Güth, R. Schmittberger, and B. Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
3 (1982): 367–88.

  
19
  
According to the behavioral economist Dan Ariely:
Dan Ariely,
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
(New York: Harper, 2010). See also J. R. Carter and M. D. Irons, “Are Economists Different, and If So, Why?,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
5 (1991): 171–77.

  
20
  
our minds were not adapted for one-shot anonymous interactions:
A. W. Delton, M. M. Krasnow, J. Tooby, and L. Cosmides, “The Evolution of Direct Reciprocity Under Uncertainty Can Explain Human Generosity in One-Shot Encounters,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108 (2011): 13335–40.

  
21
  
You can see this in the recipients’ faces:
H. A. Chapman, D. A. Kim, J. M. Susskind, and A. K. Anderson, “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust,”
Science
5918 (2009): 1222–26.

  
22
  
and in their brains:
A. G. Sanfey, J. K. Rilling, J. A. Aronson, L. E. Nystrom, and J. D. Cohen, “The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game,”
Science
300 (2003): 1755–58.

  
23
  
In one study, where recipients were allowed to send anonymous messages:
E. Xiao and D. Houser, “Emotion Expression in Human Punishment Behavior,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
102 (2005): 7398–7401. For discussion, see Nichols, “Emotions, Norms.”

  
24
  
What, precisely, is so annoying about being lowballed?:
Nichols, “Emotions, Norms,” 289.

  
25
  
the Dictator Game:
D. Kahneman, J. Knetsch, and R. H. Thaler, “Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics,”
Journal of Business
59 (1986): 285–300.