Children in Six Cultures Helped a Stuck Playmate, Each in the Local Way
Two children sit across a marble game. One of them takes a turn and runs into trouble: a box that will not open, or a container that tips its marbles onto the floor. The other child has already been taught how to fix both problems, and nothing in the game obliges her to say so.
What the watching child does next looks remarkably alike in communities that have almost nothing else in common. Henriette Zeidler of Sapienza University of Rome, Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues watched 336 children play that game in pairs. Their participants, aged four to nine, came from six societies across Latin America, Africa and Europe. In every one of those settings, they report in a paper published on Sept. 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, children reliably helped a partner who got stuck.
Most of what psychology knows about children helping comes from watching them help adults, usually a parent. Peers matter more in many parts of the world, and comparisons of children helping each other across cultures are rare; the researchers describe their own study as the first systematic one.
The Max Planck Society's account of the work describes a deliberately playful setup built to feel natural wherever it was run. Pairs of same-aged children took turns at the marble game. One hit the snag. The other had already been shown both solutions and could choose: explain what to do, do it hands-on, or both at once.
"What stood out immediately was how similar children's responses were, regardless of where they grew up," says Zeidler, the study's first author.
They were not helping indiscriminately. Children stepped in more often when the help was genuinely needed, for a peer wrestling with a stuck box rather than one gathering marbles anyone could pick up alone. That judgment sharpened with age: the youngest helped at similar rates whether or not it made a difference, while older children increasingly saved their help for the moments when it did.
The form of the help changed too. The paper reports that offers of information rose with age. Younger children mostly did the difficult part themselves, while older ones more often explained how it was done and left their partner to it.
The same account names two small differences that did emerge. German children were far more likely than any others to do both at once, solving the problem while talking their partner through it. Kikuyu children in Kenya were somewhat less inclined to offer practical help. Boys and girls did not differ in any way the team called meaningful, and no single population stood out as unlike the overall pattern.
"These patterns mirror the everyday interactions that children are familiar with," Zeidler says. "In many rural, subsistence-based communities, children learn largely by observing and helping out, with little verbal explanation involved. In Germany and similar places, however, parents tend to combine hands-on demonstrations with detailed verbal instructions, and children seem to apply the same approach when helping their peers."
The conclusion in the paper is carefully worded. The authors write that the pattern suggests helping among children is a universal human behavior, "subtly shaped by local norms and practices." The populations were picked for how unlike one another they are rather than drawn at random from the world's societies: Germans, the Wichí of Argentina, the Quechua of Bolivia, the ≠Akhoe Hai||om of Namibia, and the Samburu and Kikuyu of Kenya. Between them they span an industrialized society and small-scale foraging, farming and herding communities. Two of the six live in the same country, and no Asian community is in the sample.
What the marble game asks for is help that costs the helper almost nothing, and that is where this result stops. A team led by Bailey R. House reported on six other societies in the same journal in 2013. Kind acts that cost the child nothing rose steadily as children matured, with little variation between societies. Acts that did cost something diverged in middle childhood, as children converged on the adults around them. The new paper cites that work, and, read beside it, this result is about cheap kindness. It says nothing about sharing, fairness or anything a child has to give up.
It is a single experiment and not a repeat of anyone else's. The paper is open access, and the data behind it, one spreadsheet, is posted publicly.
"Helping is one of the clearest expressions of our species' capacity for cooperation," says Haun, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the study's senior authors. "Children don't just learn whether to help; they also learn how to help in ways that make sense within their own community."