Like this:

In one of my last posts I asked myself how selfish we are when we are born. And still now this question occupies me.So let’s have a look at the behavior of children. Now some of you might say that they only kick, beat and bite but I argue that they nevertheless have compassion. For example if the mother is sick, in a certain age the children bring her their beloved cuddly toys. And when I was babysitting at the playground one day, and a baby had screamed, other kids went to the baby, trying to figure out what was wrong. I wouldn’t say that they’d understand but it seemed like they cared for the baby.

Also, check out this video! It’s so cute how the baby tries to console his dad who pretends to cry:

I love it Did you recognize the bread the baby even throws away? You gotta watch it twice

At the Max-Planck-Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, the behavior of children has been analyzed. For example when 18-month old children have seen how an adult struggled with opening a cabinet door since he was carrying something, almost every time the children abandoned their toys in order to help. And as you can imagine they haven’t done it because they love to open cabinet doors. It wasn’t really surprising that the children kept on playing when seeing that the adult could do it on his/her own. Now you might argue the children only did it because they were expecting a reward, but that wasn’t the case. Quite the contrary: When the scientists started to reward the children, they could observe that those children have become less obliging than the children who never received a reward. Maybe that shows that we shouldn’t always get rewarded when helping others because then we also expect a reward? If we are not longing for a reward, we might then not do it. I think this is the problem: We should stop expecting something if we help others. We should do it and be fine with it, go on playing like the children

In addition, helping others should be something self-evident. You do not need to get a reward just because you held the door open. Funny enough that heavily loaded people I held open the door at university were really surprised when I helped them. I mean, is this really that astonishing? Okay, sometimes I had to walk back to the door in order to open it but this only takes some seconds for me whereas the people would need a lot more effort. Ah, and concerning the reward… when I’ve seen one lecturer (I didn’t know him) who was carrying something, I waited at the door till he could pass, he was also surprised and then said: “You aren’t even one of my students, I can’t give you a better grade! Why would you do that?”

Well, because it’s self-evident. And maybe because of empathy.

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