helpful are 'online' surprisingly early in life, as Graham Music
explains in an extract from his new book.
We are all born with tendencies to be selfish, aggressive and competitive -and human nature has been shown in nearly every known culture to have a capacity for deception, ruthlessness, violence, cold-blooded warfare and worse. However, as well as such unsavoury character traits, humans have an inbuilt propensity to be generous, helpful and moral.
In one of a range of ingeniously simple but very rigorous experiments by Michael Tomasello and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig (Warneken and Tomasello, 2008) an adult is walking across a room and pretends to drop an object. Fifteen-month-old toddlers consistently come over and pick up the object and pass it to the adult.
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