Helping Hands

Nurturing Altruism in Toddlers

By Kelly Burgess

Teamwork and learning. If you think about it, that's what helps our world go around. We work together to accomplish goals, and we take on different tasks to be sure it all gets done. Combine that with our innate impulses toward empathy and compassion and you have the human factors that make charitable organizations such as Habitat for Humanity a success and have prompted thousands of volunteers to help rebuild New Orleans. Are those people all builders, plumbers or gardeners? No, they're from every walk of life. What they have in common is the capacity not only to love, but to learn. And your toddler has that capacity, too.

There's no doubt that humans are born with an innate ability for empathy and compassion. Study after study has shown that even very young infants respond to the moods of those around them, often reaching out in sympathy or to comfort. What Dr. Felix Warneken wanted to find out was if a toddler would help someone else achieve their goals.

In the study,Dr. Warneken, a psychology researcher at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, would "accidentally" drop a clothespin while hanging out clothes. Each of the 24 toddlers in the study quickly acted to retrieve the clothespin and hand it back toDr. Warneken. He did not communicate with the toddlers in any manner during the study; he didn't indicate what he wanted them to do or praise or thank them for handing over the clothespin. Furthermore, when he deliberately dropped the clothespin, throwing it to the floor rather than dropping it, the toddlers did not retrieve it.

"A lot of people have interpreted this study to show that we are born altruistic, but that's not what it's about," saysDr. Warneken. "The importance of our study is the idea of learning. We are claiming that there is some biological predisposition that allows us to quickly acquire the necessary skills for helping others. What's unique about this is that we studied children who were able to acquire the necessary information to help without very specific instructions at a preverbal age."

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