This article was originally published in The Boston Globe, March 6, 2006.
By Sara Shipley Hiles
Globe Correspondent
Would you run into a burning building to save a stranger’s life? Would a chimpanzee do the same?
Acts of altruism — helping an unrelated creature with no apparent benefit to yourself — have long been an evolutionary puzzle because the behavior seemingly contradicts the notion of ”survival of the fittest.” Until now, humans were the only members of the animal kingdom with a proven record of behaving altruistically.
But a study published in the journal Science last week suggests that both human children and chimpanzees have altruistic tendencies. In the experiment, both toddlers and chimps helped a researcher who was having trouble completing a task — for example, picking up a clothespin that he had dropped on the floor and couldn’t reach. The researcher gave no praise or reward for the assistance.
The study’s lead author, Felix Warneken, said the study suggests that rudimentary helping behavior evolved before humans split from chimpanzees about six million years ago. In other words, maybe chimps aren’t so different from people when it comes to helping out.
”At least this shows us that some rudimentary form of helping was already present in our evolutionary ancestor,” said Warneken, a developmental psychologist from Germany who is on a fellowship at Harvard University. ”It clarifies something about the evolutionary trajectory. It tells us what we are already prepared for biologically, and what comes mainly from learning.”
Warneken’s study is part of a flood of new research that seeks to understand the origin of social behavior in animals. The growing field draws from psychology, evolutionary genetics, anthropology, economics, biology, paleontology, and other disciplines.
”It’s an exciting time. I think we’ve learned more about animal cognition in the last 10 years than in the previous 100 years,” said Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard evolutionary biologist who directs the university’s Cognitive Evolution Lab.
Hauser said that in the past few years, there has been an explosion of new evidence supporting the idea that some animals have a ”theory of mind” — that is, the animal has some concept of what another creature might be thinking. Having a theory of mind is the basis for such sophisticated behaviors as empathy.
Soon, Hauser predicts, research will show that although important distinctions will remain, animals are closer to the human condition than previously thought. ”There are lots of areas that people hailed as being uniquely human that are being hammered from all directions,” he said.
Language, memory, mathematical ability, self-recognition, reading facial expressions, and gauging false beliefs are all being probed deeply, he said.
Altruism and other forms of cooperation also are a hot topic. Humans are extremely cooperative, forming groups to accomplish difficult tasks. They’re also frequently altruistic, donating blood and helping little old ladies across the street.
When and why do animals cooperate? Animals frequently hunt in groups, but it’s unclear whether they work together deliberately or accidentally. Another study published in Science last week found that chimps understood when they needed help to reach a food tray, and they recruited a partner to do so. When given a choice of partners, the chimps chose collaborators who had previously succeeded in completing the task.
In that study, both chimps directly benefited from cooperating, because only by working together could they reach the food. But would chimps help purely out of the ”goodness of their hearts”?
Two previous studies found that chimpanzees didn’t give food to another chimp when they had the opportunity. Warneken, however, figured that food was precious, and he wanted to see whether chimps would help if food were not involved.
His study, conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, put children and chimps to the same tests. A researcher performed everyday tasks in front of the subject, such as hanging laundry on a line, stacking books in a pile, or putting magazines in a cabinet. In one part of the study, the researcher completed the task without any problem. In another part, the researcher pretended to have trouble — for example, dropping a marker on the floor and not being able to reach it to pick it up. In that case, the researcher gazed at the out-of-reach object, looked at the subject to elicit help, and, after a few seconds said, ”My marker!”
Warneken and his co-author, Michael Tomasello, a director of the institute, reported that the children in the study, aged 18 months, jumped to help very quickly and with very little prompting. The children also helped in a variety of tasks, from retrieving a spoon in a box to picking up a clothespin.
The chimps helped with only one kind of task — the out-of-reach object. They didn’t help with the more complex tasks, like the spoon-in-a-box test.
They also took longer than the children to retrieve the object in question. Both the kids and the chimps helped when they saw that the adult needed help and not in cases when it was apparent that the researcher had dropped the item on purpose.
Scientists have debated the origin of altruism since Darwin’s time.
One theory is that altruism evolved because it improves group survival. ”Some researchers say that when you live in a helpful society, you will have an advantage over a totally egoistic selfish group,” Warneken said.
Warneken acknowledged that his study found that chimps helped only in limited circumstances, and more research is needed to further understand those limitations.
Hauser questioned whether Warneken’s study really showed altruism, because the children and the chimps likely would have received an ”emotional reward” — a good feeling — for helping, he said. He also said the cost of helping was low because the subject didn’t have to overcome any risks or challenges.
Warneken acknowledged that the subjects might have gained an emotional reward but said he has no proof of that.
Additionally, if it’s true that humans and chimps get a good feeling from helping others, that could be further evidence that both humans and chimps are biologically programmed to identify with others’ needs, he said.
As far as the ”cost” of helping, Warneken said, such small acts of altruism — like picking a marker up from the floor — are still noteworthy because ”you could do something that is more important to yourself than helping someone else,” he said. ”You have to be motivated to act on behalf of the other, not your own goals.”
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