PSYC 101 Chapter 10: Warneken (10) reading
Document Summary
Warneken, altruisic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Altruisic behavior has a cogniive component (being able to help) and a moivaional component (willingness to help: is extremely rare evoluionarily, even for humans unil recently. Compare infants to chimpanzees in order to see where along ancestral lineage altruism developed. Infant experiment: presented 24 18month old infants with 10 diferent situaions (random 5 test and 5 control for each person) in which an adult was having trouble achieving a goal: situaions varied in diiculty and type of problem. Using a wrong (correctable) means: for each task there was a corresponding control task in which same situaion was present but without indicaion that adult was having diiculty overcoming issue. Helping occurred almost immediately, before the adult looked to child or verbalized the problem. Chimp experiments have focused on empathy and anecdotal evidence: tests should not involve food because chimpanzees oten compete for food.
