Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s book –Altruism (NiL Éditions, 2013)
“ More recent research from the team of Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken has shown that very young children spontaneously offered to help an experimenter complete various tasks— bringing the experimenter an object that had fallen to the floor, for instance— and they did so without the prospect of any kind of reward. As Felix Warneken notes, “The results were astonishing because these children are so young— they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language, but they already show helping behavior.”
Few researchers till then had experimentally studied the phenome-non of mutual aid among very young children. In fact, theoreticians of child development were for a long time influenced by the hypothesis, formulated by Jean Piaget and his student Lawrence Kohlberg, that empathic behavior directed toward others did not manifest before school age, and that before that age the child was completely egocentric. Piaget studied the development of moral judgment in children, which is linked to their cognitive development. But by stressing exclusively the faculty of reasoning, he neglected the emotional aspect and came to the conclusion that young children were without empathy before the age of seven. Since then, countless experimental studies have shown that quite the opposite is true, and that empathy manifests very early on in children. The child begins by offering “instrumental” aid, for instance, by bringing to an adult an object he needs, which implies an understanding of the other’s desires. A little later, the child manifests an “empathic” aid, for instance, by consoling a sad person.
When an experimenter in the process of hanging up laundry drops a clothespin and has difficulty picking it up, almost all the eighteen-month-old children move to pick up the clothespin and hand it to him. They react on average within the five seconds following the dropping of the clothespin, which is approximately the same period of time an adult takes when placed in an equivalent situation. Similarly, the children come to open the door of a cupboard that an experimenter with his arms full of books is bumping against.
Even more impressive, the children specifically recognize a situation in which the adult really needs help: if the adult deliberately throws the clothespin to the ground instead of accidentally dropping it, the children don’t budge.
During these experiments, the experimenter never asks for help verbally, and most of the time, he doesn’t even look in the direction of the children to convey to them that he is in difficulty.
What’s more, when the researchers asked the mothers, present in the room, to encourage their children to help, that didn’t change anything. In fact, the children showed so much enthusiasm that, to observe differences in their willingness to help, they had to be distracted while the experimenter got back into a situation where he seemed to need help. Almost always, the children would immediately interrupt their play to help the experimenter. It is particularly interesting to note that if children obtain a reward from the experimenter, their propensity to help is not increased. Quite the contrary: it was observed that the children who were rewarded offer their help less often than those to whom nothing was given.
As Warneken and Tomasello note: “This rather surprising finding provides even further evidence for the hypothesis that children’s helping is driven by an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic motivation.”If the child is rewarded for having done a good action, he strongly risks thinking he has acted for the reward, and not for the person who benefits from his action. He acquires an “extrinsic” motivation—he no longer acts with the aim of helping someone but in order to gain an advantage. When people stop calling on his potential for kindness, the child is inclined to behave in a less altruistic way. ”
Picture: Villagers near Kapilasvitu, Nepal, where the humanitarian organization Karuna-Shechen is implementing various projects addressing extreme poverty, sanitation (toilets), reproductive health, and other initiatives. March 2024
From birth, children are naturally altruistic and cooperative, but the critical window for development is between the ages of 0 and 5. To preserve this precious potential, the Karuna-Shechen Association puts the vision of its founder, Matthieu Ricard, into practice on the ground. In India and Nepal, it supports teachers and parents so that every child can grow and thrive with confidence. Discover our campaign.