I wandered into the New Scientist website earlier, as you do, and came across an interesting piece on primate behaviour. In fact, I’ll post a link to it here.
The interesting bit is the third section “No Reward”, it seems that the chimps will help out without expectation of reward. From the article: “Such altruistic helping behaviour is common in humans, but had never been documented in other animals before.”
It seems to me that there are people who like to make out that followers of their given religion are the only source of good. I wonder what they’d make of this? I personally find it reassuring tht altruism seems to be built in to animals to some degree, that it’s not just a thing contrived by humans.
Little Dragon says:
Thanks for the link to this article, I plan to have a look at this myself. I’ve been interested in altruism and empathy for some time and, in fact, did my masters dissertation on just this topic.
The more background research I carried out, the more I became convinced that altruism does exist but also that a lot of the research in this area needs re-examining.
One of the major players in the arena of altruism research is a bloke called Daniel Batson, who’s carried out a lot of research, but his research subjects have almost invariably students, who participated in the research as partial course credit. And this was research about altruism?!! Also the situations created were very artificial.
The observed behaviour in these chimps gives a more natural demonstration that altruism exists and gives me a lot of hope.
14 March 2006, 11:30 pmBecca says:
hi rich, interesting article. Its hardley suprising realy anoyone who spends much time watching wildlife knows this. but to have a study on it and all makes it very interesting. Maybe there is hope we start seeing animals as something other than a commodity.
14 March 2006, 11:59 pmbeccaxx
Berthttp://www.bmart.be says:
for some odd reason, I cannot read the article (404 error), but I don’t believe that there is something like altruism. There always a cost for both sides. A little thank you or a blink with the eyes, it’s all about those little things that make the journey worth wile.
Think of it like this: when you open a door for someone, you silently expect the other person to say thank you. If he/she doesn’t, you feel a bit ackward about this. It’s human. I believe this is the correct theory about human altruism, but I can be mistaken of course
PS: is it okay if I add this site to my blog?
15 March 2006, 2:11 amablokecalledbloke says:
I’ll hit Google for Daniel Batson, thanks for the tip off!
Becca, I firmly believe that animals have souls and reasoning powers, they just don’t get the chance to display them.
Bert, I think it was just the website having a bad day, it’s working now. Interesting point, what you’re saying is you create a disharmony by an act of altruism, then when the other person fails to acknowledge it (thus restoring harmony) you feel bad. I suppose I could say imbalance and balance instead?
And yes, feel free to link to my blog.
15 March 2006, 9:16 am