Reciprocity

The psychology professor Robert Cialdini keeps saying that reciprocity is the most powerful of all the forces that influence behaviour - give what you want to receive. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany just reported a study that makes this very point.

After observing 3-year-olds' behaviour in a between-subjects design, researchers concluded that children are much less likely to help a person who has been seen to harm someone else – in this case adult actors tearing up or breaking another adult's drawing or clay bird. But it was the judgment of intention that characterizes the linchpin. Indeed, the odds are low for a toddler to help one person even if that person tried to harm someone else but didn't succeed. And as if that's not enough, when the toddler observed a person accidentally cause harm to another, the youngster was more willing to help that person.

Hooray for the toddlers' ability to understand another's intent.

In fact, such ability has been demonstrated to be universally present even in preverbal infants. Few years back, Yale professor Paul Bloom conducted similar experiments and published their findings in Nature. At the age of six months and 10 months, babies were shown one figure (made of wood and with large eyes glued onto it) initially at rest at the bottom of a hill. The babies witnessed events in which the figure struggled to climb the hill, and on the third attempt was either aided up by a helper who pushed it from behind, or was pushed down by a hinderer. In the test phrase, the babies showed a robust preference for the helper over the hinderer. And then, the hindering figure was either punished or rewarded. In this case, the babies preferred a character who was punishing the hinderer over ones being nice to it.

The moral of these two studies is enormous, particularly to parents like me. I remember reading once that experience may be the sculptor of the baby's mind but it is we adults who provide the chisel.

I'd better behave myself.