Why we cooperate - 0 Colaboratori implicaţi - 3014 Vizite Drop
something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick
it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist
Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children
in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that
children are naturally-and uniquely-cooperative. Put through
similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability
to work together and share, but choose not to. As children grow,
their almost reflexive desire to help-without expectation of
reward-becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of
being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations,
and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and
collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly
human combination of innate and learned behavior. Tomasello,
codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, shares his theories on how human cooperation
evolved and suggests it is a defining charac