The Development of Contingent Reciprocity (original) (raw)

The Development of Contingent Reciprocity in Children

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2013

Cooperation between nonrelatives is common in humans. Reciprocal altruism is a plausible evolutionary mechanism for cooperation within unrelated pairs, as selection may favor individuals who selectively cooperate with those who have cooperated with them in the past. Reciprocity is often observed in humans, but there is only limited evidence of reciprocal altruism in other primate species, raising questions about the origins of human reciprocity. Here, we explore how reciprocity develops in a sample of American children ranging from 3 to 7.5 years of age, and also compare children's behavior to that of chimpanzees in prior studies to gain insight into the phylogeny of human reciprocity. Children show a marked tendency to respond contingently to both prosocial and selfish acts, patterns that have not been seen among chimpanzees in prior studies. Our results show that reciprocity increases markedly with age in this population of children, and by about 5.5 years of age children consistently match the previous behavior of their partners.

The emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2013

Contingent reciprocity is important in theories of the evolution of human cooperation, but it has been very little studied in ontogeny. We gave 2-and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children's helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2year-olds. These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children's prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children's prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity.

Chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) do not develop contingent reciprocity in an experimental task

Animal Cognition, 2009

Chimpanzees provide help to unrelated individuals in a broad range of situations. The pattern of helping within pairs suggests that contingent reciprocity may have been an important mechanism in the evolution of altruism in chimpanzees. However, correlational analyses of the cumulative pattern of interactions over time do not demonstrate that helping is contingent upon previous acts of altruism, as required by the theory of reciprocal altruism. Experimental studies provide a controlled approach to examine the importance of contingency in helping interactions. In this study, we evaluated whether chimpanzees would be more likely to provide food to a social partner from their home group if their partner had previously provided food for them. The chimpanzees manipulated a barpull apparatus in which actors could deliver rewards either to themselves and their partners or only to themselves. Our Wndings indicate that the chimpanzees' responses were not consistently inXuenced by the behavior of their partners in previous rounds. Only one of the 11 dyads that we tested demonstrated positive reciprocity. We conclude that contingent reciprocity does not spontaneously arise in experimental settings, despite the fact that patterns of behavior in the Weld indicate that individuals cooperate preferentially with reciprocating partners.

Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees

Trends in cognitive sciences, 2009

Recent empirical research has shed new light on the perennial question of human altruism. A number of recent studies suggest that from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resources with others and to inform others of things helpfully. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, engage in some but not all of these behaviors: they help others instrumentally, but they are not so inclined to share resources altruistically and they do not inform others of things helpfully. The evolutionary roots of human altruism thus appear to be much more complex than previously supposed.

Spontaneous altruism by chimpanzees and young children

PLoS Biology, 2007

People often act on behalf of others. They do so without immediate personal gain, at cost to themselves, and even toward unfamiliar individuals. Many researchers have claimed that such altruism emanates from a species-unique psychology not found in humans' closest living evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee. In favor of this view, the few experimental studies on altruism in chimpanzees have produced mostly negative results. In contrast, we report experimental evidence that chimpanzees perform basic forms of helping in the absence of rewards spontaneously and repeatedly toward humans and conspecifics. In two comparative studies, semi–free ranging chimpanzees helped an unfamiliar human to the same degree as did human infants, irrespective of being rewarded (experiment 1) or whether the helping was costly (experiment 2). In a third study, chimpanzees helped an unrelated conspecific gain access to food in a novel situation that required subjects to use a newly acquired skill on behalf of another individual. These results indicate that chimpanzees share crucial aspects of altruism with humans, suggesting that the roots of human altruism may go deeper than previous experimental evidence suggested.

Evolution of indirect reciprocity

Nature, 2005

Natural selection is conventionally assumed to favour the strong and selfish who maximize their own resources at the expense of others. But many biological systems, and especially human societies, are organized around altruistic, cooperative interactions. How can natural selection promote unselfish behaviour? Various mechanisms have been proposed, and a rich analysis of indirect reciprocity has recently emerged: I help you and somebody else helps me. The evolution of cooperation by indirect reciprocity leads to reputation building, morality judgement and complex social interactions with ever-increasing cognitive demands.

The developmental emergence of direct reciprocity and its influence on prosocial behavior

Humans are a remarkably cooperative species, and one behavior thought to play an important role is that of reciprocal altruism. By ensuring that the immediate costs associated with performing a prosocial action will be recouped in the long-run, reciprocal interactions support the emergence and maintenance of group-level cooperation. Existing developmental research suggests that a tendency toward selective prosocial behavior and an understanding of direct reciprocal interactions emerge in early childhood, but much less is known about the interplay between these two behaviors. In this paper, I review the existing literature supporting the notion that reciprocity mediates early prosocial tendencies and suggest that a greater understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying reciprocity is needed. Finally, I propose two social cognitive capacities related to prospection that I believe may help to shed light on the psychology of strategic reciprocal interactions and their role in prosocial behavior more broadly.

The ontogeny of human prosociality: behavioral experiments with children aged 3 to 8

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2012

Humans regularly engage in prosocial behavior that differs strikingly from that of even our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). In laboratory settings, chimpanzees are indifferent when given the opportunity to deliver valued rewards to conspecifics, while even very young human children have repeatedly been shown to behave prosocially. Although this broadly suggests that prosocial behavior in chimpanzees differs from that of young human children, the methods used in prior work with children have also differed from the methods used in studies of chimpanzees in potentially crucial ways. Here we test 92 pairs of 3-8-year-old children from urban American (Los Angeles, CA, USA) schools in a face-to-face task that closely parallels tasks used previously with chimpanzees. We found that children were more prosocial than chimpanzees have previously been in similar tasks, and our results suggest that this was driven more by a desire to provide benefits to others than a preference for egalitarian outcomes. We did not find consistent evidence that older children were more prosocial than younger children, implying that younger children behaved more prosocially in the current study than in previous studies in which participants were fully anonymous. These findings strongly suggest that humans are more prosocial than chimpanzees from an early age and that anonymity influences children's prosocial behavior, particularly at the youngest ages.

A proximate perspective on reciprocal altruism

Human Nature, 2002

The study of reciprocal altruism, or the exchange of goods and services between individuals, requires attention to both evolutionary explanations and proximate mechanisms. Evolutionary explanations have been debated at length, but far less is known about the proximate mechanisms of reciprocity. Our own research has focused on the immediate causes and contingencies underlying services such as food sharing, grooming, and cooperation in brown capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees. Employing both observational and experimental techniques, we have come to distinguish three types of reciprocity. Symmetry-based reciprocity is cognitively the least complex form, based on symmetries inherent in dyadic relationships (e.g., mutual association, kinship). Attitudinal reciprocity, which is more cognitively complex, is based on the mirroring of social attitudes between partners and is exhibited by both capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees. Finally, calculated reciprocity, the most cognitively advanced form, is based on mental scorekeeping and is found only in humans and possibly chimpanzees.