Infants willing to lend a helping hand, researchers find

WILLINGNESS to offer a helping hand seems to be hard-wired into the human brain.

Scientists found that at just 18-months-old, human infants helped spontaneously in simple tasks such as reaching objects.

Psychologist Felix Warneken, who co-led the research in Germany, said: “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 behaviour.”

Mr Warneken and Professor Mike Tomasello also found that, to a lesser extent, helpfulness was inherent in chimpanzees.

In one experiment, Mr Warneken hung clothes on a line in front of an infant and then deliberately dropped a clothes peg out of reach.

While showing he wanted the peg back, he never expressly asked for help.

Virtually all the children taking part in this and similar experiments offered to help at least once.

In 84% of cases, help was given during the first 10 seconds, before Mr Warneken even made eye contact with the child.

“They only gave it to me if they inferred that I needed the peg to complete my goal, in this case, hanging up the clothes.”

A more complicated situation involved a box with a flap to retrieve objects placed inside. Mr Warneken pretended to accidentally drop a spoon inside the box, making out that he did not know about the flap.

Again, the children helped him retrieve the spoon if they saw he was struggling to reach it. No help was offered if he appeared to throw the spoon in the box deliberately.

The study is published in the journal Science.

Recent research looking at chimpanzees, the closest animal relative to humans, indicated they only appeared to want to help themselves.

But this was when the goal was retrieving food. The German researchers found chimps were willing to help for no reward in simple tasks, such as picking up clothes pegs.

However, the chimps did not respond the same way when more complex tasks were introduced, such as the box experiment.

Mr Warneken said: “Perhaps there was a tiny bit of altruism in our evolutionary ancestor and it’s grown much stronger in modern humans.”