Human infants can override possessive tendencies in favor of altruism

• In Event: Social and cultural influences on early prosociality

Abstract

Altruism and possessiveness are key aspects of human behavior, but the early balancing of these competing forces in adult human behavior is not well understood. What physical objects might infants most want to selfishly possess and thereby experience difficulty in giving up to others an altruistic manner? Infants seek out “attachment” or “transition” objects, which they commonly treat as their own favorite possessions. Such objects include a stuffed teddy bear, favorite toy, or bottle. Using a standard instrumental helping test paradigm we investigated whether infants would help a stranger obtain these and other, of the infants’ own highly desired objects.
In Experiment 1 (N = 48, 19-month-olds), we tested whether infants spontaneously give away their own bottle or favorite toy to a begging stranger. Infants in the Experimental Group saw the experimenter reach for infants’ personal possessions, which he had “accidently” dropped onto a tray on the floor (vs. a Control group in which the intentionally deposited the objects into the tray). Results showed that the mean percent of trials in which infants helped was greater in the Experimental Group (M = 22.92%, SD = 36.05) than in the Control Group (M = 0%), z = 2.86, p = 0.004, (permutation test) (Fig. 1A).
In Experiment 2 (N = 48, 19-month-olds), we tested three salient classes of objects in children’s lives: personal objects (favorite toy and bottle), desirable edible objects (piece of banana and grape), and common objects (wooden cube and marker). This allowed us to measure whether infants display more possessive behavior toward their personal objects than toward objects, and the flexibility and variability of instrumental helping, which may be expressed at different rates for different classes of objects. First, we scored possessive behaviors in terms of whether or not infants: (i) gestured as if wanting to acquire the object, (ii) exerted approach effort by raising onto toes to lean or lunge toward the object, (iii) directed both raised arms toward the object. We examined whether infants demonstrated these possessive behaviors and whether this varied as a function of object type. Analyses showed that each of the three kinds of possessive behaviors was significantly elevated in response to the personal objects (Fig. 2), all ps < 0.05. Even infants who exhibited overt possessive behavior toward their own personal objects nonetheless engaged in helping behavior with the same objects, p = 0.002.
Finally, we combined the present data with previous data from our laboratory, yielding a large sample of 19-month-olds (N = 192), and found that infants whose parents were from “interdependent” backgrounds had, on average, 22.96% significantly more helping across trials than infants of other ethnic-cultural backgrounds (controlling for other variables in the model), and infants with siblings had, on average, 8.97% significantly more helping across trials than infants without siblings. We propose that already by 19-months of age, socio-cultural factors have calibrated the balance between possessive impulses and infants’ ability to altruistically meet the needs of strangers.

Authors

• Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Andrew N Meltzoff, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author