14 DAY TRIAL // University of Washington scientists have recently made a remarkable discovery as they were investigating the brain of infants. They found that, even at the age of 15 months, the young ones were perfectly capable of displaying altruism, as also sense inequality and when someone was being unfair.
Even at such a tender age, infants are able to sense when food, for example, is being distributed unequally among them. They also appear to be willing to share toys, although many would expect small children to be very selfish.
Details of the new investigation were published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE, which is edited by the Public Library of Science. Past studies have only evidenced altruism in children aged around 2.
By the time children reach the ages of 6 or 7, they start to become aware of concepts such as fairness, or at least this is what investigators used to believe. The new study pushes back all these ages by a wide margin, showing that the behaviors are present even in children one-and-a-half years old.
“Our findings show that these norms of fairness and altruism are more rapidly acquired than we thought,” explains UW associate professor of psychology Jessica Sommerville. She was also the leader of the new investigation.
“These results also show a connection between fairness and altruism in infants, such that babies who were more sensitive to the fair distribution of food were also more likely to share their preferred toy,” the research scientist explains.
She explains that she and her team began conducting this investigation after she began to suspect that these behaviors in fact appeared much earlier than other researchers were suggesting. In order to test this hypothesis, the team set up a set of experiments.
During the study, parents held their 15-month-old babies on their laps as they were watching two short video clips depicting people sharing something. The young ones were then asked to select one of two toys – their original selection was considered to be their favorite toy.
Then, as the kids played, a research would enter the room, and ask the infant nicely to play as well. The test subjects did not meet this research until he came into the room. About 33 percent of kids gave the expert their favorite toy.
An additional third of the kids shared their second-favorite toy, whereas the remaining third did not share any. UW experts say that it's very possible infants in the latter category were simply too scared and unmotivated to play with someone else.
“It’s likely that infants pick up on these norms in a nonverbal way, by observing how people treat each other,” Sommerville concludes, quoted by PsychCentral.