The Biology of Altruism
Scientific evidence suggests that humans have a biological desire to help others, including strangers. Altruistic behavior towards strangers is uniquely human and observed at a very young age. Dr. Felix Warneken and Dr. Michael Tomasello of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that children as young as 18 months want to help strangers. When their 18-month-old subjects saw a stranger throw a pencil on the floor, none of them picked it up. However, when the same subjects saw someone"accidentally" drop a pencil, nearly all the children picked it up in the first ten seconds. Says Dr. Warneken, "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." Because altruistic behavior Brain appears in children so young, Dr. Warneken and other scientists hypothesize that the human brain is designed to be altruistic.