Experiments with one and a half year old children and young chimpanzees have shown that both are ready to disinterestedly help a person in a difficult situation, if only they can understand what the difficulty is and how to overcome it. Selfless altruism in chimpanzees was first recorded in rigorous experimentation. Previous attempts of this kind have ended in failure due to the fact that during the experiment, in order to demonstrate altruism, chimpanzees had to share food with someone. This time, the experimenters did not demand such terrible sacrifices from them.
Many animals (for example, social insects) selflessly help close relatives; sometimes unrelated individuals are cared for, but such assistance is usually supported by an immediate benefit to the person helping. In both cases, altruistic behavior contributes to the survival and spread of "their" genes in the next generations, and therefore is supported by selection.
Selfless assistance to unrelated individuals is extremely rare. Many scientists believe that this property is inherent only in humans, and in animals it is completely absent. Employees of the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology named after Max Planck (Leipzig, Germany) in a series of experiments showed that not only small children who still cannot speak, but also young chimpanzees willingly help a person in a difficult situation, and they do it completely disinterestedly.
The experiments involved 24 children at the age of 18 months and three young chimpanzees (three and four years old). Children and monkeys watched how an adult was trying in vain to cope with some task, and could help him if they had such a desire (but no one specifically pushed them to this). They received no reward for their help.
Four types of problems used in the experiment
| Task category | Example situation |
| "Don't get it" | A person accidentally drops a pencil, tries to pick it up and cannot - does not reach (experiment) or purposely throws it and looks indifferently (control) |
| "Physical obstacle" | A person wants to put a stack of magazines in the cabinet, but "does not know" to open the doors and "crashes" into them (experiment), or tries to put magazines on top of the cabinet, while crashing into the doors (control) |
| "Wrong result" | The person puts the book on top of the stack, but it falls (experiment), or puts it next to the stack (control) |
| "Wrong way" | A person drops a spoon into a small hole and tries to reach it through it, “not noticing” a large hole in the side wall of the box (experiment), or deliberately throws a spoon into the hole and does not try to get it (control). |
One and a half year old children willingly helped a stranger to cope with the difficulty that had arisen in all four experimental situations (and did not show activity in control experiments, where the general situation was similar, but no help was required).
Chimpanzees behaved in exactly the same way, but only in one of four situations, namely in the first, where the experimenter's "goal", which he could not achieve, and the way to achieve it were most obvious. Apparently, in the other three situations, chimpanzees, unlike children, simply could not understand what the problem was - they could not “calculate” the experimenter's goals, the meaning of his actions, and the result he wants to achieve.
Previous experiments of this kind have failed to record disinterested altruistic behavior in chimpanzees, because in these experiments, in order to demonstrate altruism, the monkey had to share food with the experimenter (or other chimpanzee). In nature, chimpanzees actively compete with each other for food and do not like to share. However, as it turned out, they are willing to come to the aid of an outsider when it comes to "instrumental" tasks not related to food. By the way, before giving the experimenter an object dropped by him, chimpanzees studied it much longer than children and gave it away only after making sure that it was completely inedible.
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Thus, disinterested mutual assistance is not a purely human property, and the beginnings of such behavior, apparently, were already in the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees who lived about 6 million years ago. The further development of these abilities during the evolution of our ancestors undoubtedly played a huge role in the formation of the human mind and sociality.
Alexander Markov