Studies reveal the mechanisms behind tumor metastasis and how to stymie it. But primary tumors still get the lion’s share of researchers’ attention.
Image courtesy of Science Source/Phanie.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by Susan Gelman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, and approved July 1, 2013 (received for review December 13, 2012)
Abstract
Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bailey.house{at}gmail.com.
Author contributions: B.R.H., J.B.S., J.H., H.C.B., and S.L. designed research; B.R.H., J.B.S., H.C.B., B.A.S., and A.H.B. performed research; B.R.H. and R.M. analyzed data; and B.R.H., J.B.S., J.H., H.C.B., B.A.S., A.H.B., B.S.H., R.M., and S.L. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data described in this paper is available on the website of the Culture and the Mind project, at http://www.philosophy.dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/Data.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1221217110/-/DCSupplemental.
Ontogeny of prosociality across diverse societies
More Articles of This Classification
Biological Sciences
Anthropology
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Related Content
Cited by...
- Limited evidence for third-party affiliation during development in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii)
- Sackler Colloquium on Extension of Biology Through Culture: Cumulative cultural learning: Development and diversity
- Multinational investigation of cross-societal cooperation
- Third-party punishment increases cooperation in children through (misaligned) expectations and conditional cooperation
Similar Articles
You May Also be Interested in
Both social and engineering factors must be further explored and scrutinized across the globe—as should notions of justice related to flooding impacts and responses.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com/Ekaterina Pokrovsky.
Blair Hedges discusses the state of Haiti's remaining forests and the consequences to biodiversity.
A study uncovers genetic evidence of early colonization of Jamaica by primates and suggests that adaptation can shape species morphology in novel environments, even when species come from morphologically conservative families.
Image courtesy of Lorraine Meeker (American Museum of Natural History, New York).
Researchers report that some moth species use sound absorbing-scales to avoid detection by bats and suggest that the findings could aid the design of biologically inspired sound absorbers for an array of applications, including noise mitigation and building acoustics.
Image courtesy of Thomas R. Neil.
