Humans born with an urge to help

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. “Vicious and addicted to warfare”, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.
“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others.”

But Dr Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behaviour can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. He concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.

Inductive parenting

If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others.

An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.

Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”

This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.

“Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr Tomasello writes.

A similar conclusion has been reached independently by Hillard S Kaplan, University of New Mexico. Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers, so much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr Kaplan has found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.

The division of labour between men and women requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.

The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, said Dr Kaplan and colleagues. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.