Young children-- as young as 3 years old-- decline to cooperate with people who have done something antisocial in their presence.
So says new research publish
Children playing, New York, 1912. Lewis Wickes Hines, Library of Congress.
In the study, children who saw adults deliberately tear another adult's picture or break a toy figure were unlikely to help that adult later. And apparently, they can understand the difference between deliberately harming another person and doing so accidently, as they were more likely to help someone who had only damaged the picture or figure inadvertently.
Previously, such capacities were thought to develop years later-- around age 5 or 6-- and this lowering of the age of moral reasoning is being touted by the Times as the most significant part of the new research:
“It had been thought for a long time that it was at a later age, only around age 5 or 6, that children become conscious of other people’s intentions,” said Amrisha Vaish, one of the study’s authors and a developmental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute. “To help those who help others is actually a very sophisticated ability.”
But I think there is something else of interest here. It is hinted at by the final quote from Amrisha Vaish in the Times:
It is a form of cooperation that is thought to have enabled the emergence and sustenance of human society as it is today.
This is a gesture toward the larger debate about altruism in human evolution. Starting in the 1960s, moral action, typified by altruism, began to be viewed as contradictory to evolutionary theory. Concepts of the "selfish gene" exercising influence in order to increase "inclusive fitness" were developed to try to provide a mechanism by which what appeared to be altruism was actually self-serving.
That perspective is part of what makes moral judgment a surprising capacity among very young children. In slightly older children, we could argue that they have been inculcated in an implicitly maladaptive type of behavior that goes against human nature. But three year olds have barely mastered language.
As Steve Davis explains in an excellent overview of debates about altruism at Science 2.0, there isn't really any reason why we should be surprised at morally sound behavior.
Davis ends with an anecdote about E.O. Wilson coming to accept inclusive fitness, with its perverse rationalizations of altruism as concealed selfishness, after initially rejecting it. He then writes:
He should have asked himself this question; what sort of person sees altruism as a problem?
The short answer is a sociopath.
And children, it would seem, are not sociopaths.
