Kids, Chimps, and Cooperative Behavior (A Rant)

Yesterday, I found myself in the unenviable position of asking my teenage son, affectionately nicknamed "The Grouch," to help me out.

This isn't something I do lightly. There's a reason we call him the Grouch.

Unfortunately, with my husband out of town and kids strewn everywhere, I really needed that second driver. Even more unfortunately, the kid I needed him to pick up was his nemesis, the next-younger, the Goth.

(The Goth is a good kid. He just dresses funny. It drives the Grouch crazy, especially since they go to the same school).

The Grouch ranted and raved for a few minutes, mostly about how it unfair it was to ask him to help out the Goth. It never occurred to him that the person he was helping out was ME (not that it matters, much).

It is at this point that I generally threaten to take away his car keys, but it doesn't really work. He KNOWS I'm not going to cut off my own nose, and I really need the extra driver.

He did pick up the Goth. AND he reminded me of this fact all evening.

This morning, I got this review article in my in-box. It's an overview of research into altruism in primate models written by Kenneth W. Krause for eSkeptic.

Some of you are wondering about this great segue, right? What the devil do these two stories have in common?

My point: if we can't find altruism in young HUMANS, what likelihood is there that we'll find it in PRIMATES?

To be fair, there are a bunch of great researchers out there designing really nifty behavioral experiments to test whether animals truly do have a built-in sense of altruism. If you aren't familiar with this kind of research, read the article. These people are DEVIOUS! They could probably even get your kid to pick up his brother from driver's ed.

(No animals were harmed in the making of this story. They did, however, get to eat a lot of grapes).

What they can't do, apparently, is find unequivocal evidence that primates have natural altruistic tendencies. Which doesn't surprise any mom with teenagers.

We would like to believe that altruism is ingrained, encoded in our very DNA, the stuff that makes us human. But any mom of a teenage boy knows that some genes are just suppressed during puberty, and don't show up again until sometime after the tenth year of marriage, when you have them properly trained.

In the most hilarious of the quoted studies, "Warneken and Tomasello tested both human children (24 18-month-old infants) and three young chimpanzees (34, 54, and 54 months old) for their willingness to help human caretakers (quite familiar to the chimps) with some task absent of any possible expectation of reward." Both the human infants and the older chimps helped out.

What's wrong with this study? Moms? Anyone?

Little ones are intensely curious. They follow you to the BATHROOM without expectation of any reward, just 'cause.

If they had done that study with teenagers, I'm guessing they would have had to add a Wii to their research budget. Grapes just aren't going to cut it.