How - Dov Seidman [35]
HELP
You are shopping in a supermarket, pushing your cart, minding your own business, thinking about what brand of soup to buy, when you pass a fairly short person taking a can down from the top shelf opposite you. In so doing, he accidentally knocks a few cans of minestrone off the shelf. He grabs for the falling cans, instinctively trying to steady the other cans on the shelf while catching the falling ones. Without thinking, you reach over and help him steady the cans on the shelf, and when they are secure, reach down and pick up the fallen ones, while he stammers his thanks. Without any conscious thought, you help.
Humans routinely help one another, even if there is no payoff for the helper. We help strangers as well as those we know. This behavior—called altruistic helping—is one of the things that separate us from most other animals. Altruistic helping requires a rather complex set of cognitions: You must see another person’s action, understand his intent, understand what is needed to achieve that intention, evaluate his ability to achieve it, evaluate his willingness to accept assistance, and make the decision to intervene despite the fact you receive no immediate or physical reward for so doing. For a long time psychiatrists believed that altruistic helping was a socially induced phenomenon, something learned over time from parental modeling and the observation of human society. This belief sprang from the fact that, at first blush, all this would seem to require higher brain function—reasoning, syntax, empathy, and decision-making skills—abilities that take years of childhood development to achieve.
Recently, however, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology did a revolutionary study that demonstrated that children as young as 18 months of age—prelinguistic or just linguistic and not generally possessed of these complex cognitive abilities—readily helped an unknown adult achieve a series of goals in a variety of situations and, amazingly, were able to make complex judgments about whether help was needed.4 Children helped a stranger reach out-of-reach objects, though not if he had purposefully discarded them. They aided him in stacking books if it appeared he had not yet met his goal. When he struggled to open a cabinet with his hands full, the children opened the door for him, though not if he made an effort to unload his burden on the cabinet top and was therefore able to open it himself. Finally, they retrieved objects from a box for him, though not if they felt he threw them there on purpose. Children with barely developed verbal skills were able to tell the difference between an individual needing help and one who had made a decision that made help unnecessary. From their study, Warneken and Tomasello concluded that “even very young children have a natural tendency to help other persons solve their problems, even when the other is a stranger and they receive no benefit at all.” This contradicts the widely held misconception that humans, absent the mitigation of social necessities, tend to act in their own self-interest. It turns out that greed, in the sense of doing only for yourself, others be damned, is not only not good, it is not natural.
YOU CAN JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER
On September 26, 1960, 70 million people watched the presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. This was the first of four so-called Great Debates, and the first ever televised.5 For the first time, the nation as whole was able to watch both candidates interact. Millions more listened on the radio. Nixon—who had been hospitalized most of August with knee surgery—showed up at the studios thin and pale in an ill-fitting shirt, and refused to wear makeup to enhance his complexion and disguise his not-inconsiderable