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Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants

Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering lar...

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Autores principales: Schmidt, Marco F. H., Sommerville, Jessica A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188955/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22003380
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023223
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author Schmidt, Marco F. H.
Sommerville, Jessica A.
author_facet Schmidt, Marco F. H.
Sommerville, Jessica A.
author_sort Schmidt, Marco F. H.
collection PubMed
description Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life.
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spelling pubmed-31889552011-10-14 Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants Schmidt, Marco F. H. Sommerville, Jessica A. PLoS One Research Article Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life. Public Library of Science 2011-10-07 /pmc/articles/PMC3188955/ /pubmed/22003380 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023223 Text en Schmidt, Sommerville. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Schmidt, Marco F. H.
Sommerville, Jessica A.
Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title_full Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title_fullStr Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title_full_unstemmed Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title_short Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants
title_sort fairness expectations and altruistic sharing in 15-month-old human infants
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188955/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22003380
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023223
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