From: NYTimes
By HANNAH SELIGSON
Published: December 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/global/24chinawork.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
For American Workers in China, a Culture Clash
As more Americans go to mainland China to take jobs, more Chinese and Americans are working side by side. These cross-cultural partnerships, while beneficial in many ways, are also highlighting tensions that expose differences in work experience, pay levels and communication.
In the last few years, a growing number of Americans in their 20s and 30s have been heading to China for employment, lured by its faster-growing economy and lower jobless rate. Their Chinese co-workers are often around the same age.
“The tight collaboration of the two countries in business and science makes the Chinese-American pairing one of the most common in the workplace in China,” said Vas Taras, a management professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a specialist in cross-cultural work group management.
But the two groups were raised differently.
The Americans have had more exposure to free-market principles. “Young Americans were brought up in a commercial environment,” said Neng Zhao, 28, a senior associate at Blue Oak Capital, a private equity firm based in Beijing. “We weren’t. So the workplace is a unique learning process for my generation.”
People in Ms. Zhao’s generation were born around or shortly after Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the West, so China has evolved from a government-regulated economy to a more free-market system in their lifetime. Therefore, they can face a steeper learning curve.
Sean Leow, 28, founder of Neocha, a social networking site based in Shanghai, says young Chinese employees often enter jobs with less hands-on preparation. They may also have less understanding of client services, he said.
In addition, he said, “I know a lot of my Chinese colleagues did not do internships in college,” in contrast to United States students.
Managers hiring workers in China appear to be paying a premium for Western experience. Foreigners tend to earn 10 to 15 percent more than their Chinese counterparts in similar positions, said Michael Norman, senior vice president at Sibson Consulting, an American firm.
That imbalance does not go unnoticed by Chinese workers. “There is definitely the perception that Americans get paid more for the same work,” said Ting Wang, 25, an associate at WildChina, a travel company based in Beijing.
The difference is a function of supply and demand, Mr. Norman said. “If you need the foreigner for their specialized knowledge of the West, companies are willing to pay a little more.”
On the other hand, Chinese workers have a deeper understanding of the influences, like Confucianism and Communism, that play a part in their country’s culture and economy.
It is imperative for Americans working in China to adjust, said Mr. Norman, who works on management and work force issues for multinational companies operating in Asia.
“In the West, there is such a premium on getting things done quickly, but when you come to work in China, you need to work on listening and being more patient and understanding of local ways of doing business,” he said.
Ming Alterman, 25, a senior account executive at Razorfish, a Shanghai-based digital media firm, is the only American among 40 employees. He says Americans need to understand the importance of building so-called guanxi (pronounced GWAN-she). The word means relationships, but has implications beyond the obligatory happy hour, occasional lunches with the boss or networking.
“In China, it’s really expected that you become friends with your boss and you go out and socialize in a way that doesn’t happen in the U.S.,” Mr. Alterman said.
The Chinese now rising in the work force were raised and educated in a system that tended to prize obedience and rote learning. Their American counterparts may have had more leeway to question authority and speak their minds. This can affect workplace communication.
When Corinne Dillon, 25, was working at a multinational company in Beijing, she noticed that her Chinese colleagues were sometimes hesitant about expressing their opinions, which she thought was rooted in views about hierarchy.
“Because foreigners are often in higher positions in companies, or even when they are not, there is sometimes an implicit respect given to them that makes Chinese people not want to directly disagree with them for fear of being perceived as impolite,” said Ms. Dillon, who is now director of sales and marketing at That’s Mandarin, a language school based in Beijing.
The difference cuts both ways. Ms. Zhao, of Blue Oak Capital, recalled her first experience working for an American at an American-run agency in Beijing. What her American boss perceived as directness left her feeling humiliated, she said. “I remember I was so embarrassed when my American boss told me he didn’t like something I was doing, right in front of me,” she said. “The Chinese way would have been much more indirect.”
Communication styles, Professor Taras said, can create workplace challenges. “Americans often perceive the Chinese as indecisive, less confident and not tough enough, whereas the Chinese may see Americans as rude or inconsiderate.”
This, he said, “can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings, but also affect promotion and task assignment choice, and ultimately performance.”
What is similar, though, is that both the Americans and the Chinese perceive a glass ceiling. “Most expats don’t speak good enough Chinese, so their promotion prospects are limited, and on a social and cultural level, young Chinese feel there are barriers that are hard to get past,” said Ziyu Wen, 28, who works with Americans in her job as a communications manager in Beijing.
Despite the tension, the Chinese-American pairing holds many economic and political benefits for both countries.
“China needs workers who understand China and the West, so they can develop a business presence and influence in overseas markets,” Mr. Norman said.
“Likewise, America needs people who truly understand the Chinese, in order to compete and cooperate.” Having Americans working alongside the Chinese in China, he said, “is one of the best ways to cultivate and internalize this understanding for the future.”
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
(NYTimes) In Denmark, Ambitious Plan for Electric Cars
From: NYTimes
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/business/energy-environment/02electric.html?ref=todayspaper)
In Denmark, Ambitious Plan for Electric Cars
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Published: December 1, 2009
COPENHAGEN — Is saving $40,000 at the showroom enough to get drivers behind the wheel of an electric car? With a program in the works to add easy access to charging stations, Denmark is about to find out.
“In every industry, the incumbent always said it'll never change,” said Shai Agassi, the founder and chief executive of Better Place.
For all their potential, electric cars have always been the subject of more talk than action, and only a handful are on the road in Denmark. But now the biggest Danish power company is working with a Silicon Valley start-up in a $100 million effort to wire the country with charging poles as well as service stations that can change out batteries in minutes.
The government offers a minimum $40,000 tax break on each new electric car — and free parking in downtown Copenhagen.
But even in Denmark, one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, skepticism abounds. It is not clear that car buyers can be persuaded to make the switch.
“There is a psychological barrier for consumers when their car is dependent on a battery station,” warned Henrik Lund, a professor of energy planning at Aalborg University. “It’s risky.”
The Silicon Valley company, Better Place, is making a big push in Denmark and in Israel. That makes those two countries the world’s most important test cases for the idea that electric motors and batteries can supplant the petroleum-burning engines that have powered cars for more than a century.
The experiment has other implications beyond the borders of this Scandinavian nation of 5.5 million. That is because Denmark is trying to do more than simply move away from the internal combustion engine.
By revamping the power grid, Dong Energy, Better Place’s partner and the biggest utility in Denmark, wants to power the anticipated fleet of electric cars with wind energy, which already supplies nearly 20 percent of the country’s power.
With Better Place and the smart grid working together, cars would charge up as the winds blow at night, when power demand is lowest. Charging would soak up the utility’s extra power and sharply shrink the carbon footprint of electric vehicles.
“We’re the perfect match for a windmill-based utility,” said Shai Agassi, Better Place’s founder and chief executive. “If you have a bunch of batteries waiting to be charged, it’s like having a lot of buckets waiting for rain.”
The Danes will be promoting their electric car ambitions starting next week, when they hold an international meeting in Copenhagen intended to make progress on a new agreement to combat global warming.
“We want to be a test and laboratory country for electric cars, hybrid cars and other new technology,” said Lars Barfoed, the Danish minister of transport. “And as host of the climate change conference, that’s made us feel responsible and want to show the world we can do something.”
Mr. Agassi, a press-smart Israeli-American entrepreneur who was formerly a top executive at the software giant S.A.P., has cast his company’s efforts in moral terms, because of the large contribution that gasoline and diesel cars make to global warming. But so far, the results are falling short of the rhetoric.
In January 2009, Mr. Agassi promised that Denmark would have 100,000 charging spots in place and several thousand cars on the road by 2010. But with that deadline approaching, no Better Place cars are on the road and only 55 charging spots are ready.
According to Better Place, 2011 has always been the target for its mass debut, and that has not slipped. The company plans a road test of electric cars during the climate conference.
In addition to the charge points, Better Place’s vision calls for a network of stations where a robotic device could replace a battery in less time than it takes to fill a tank of gas.
These switching stations are needed because batteries have a limited range of about 100 miles, and recharging takes up to five hours, so changing batteries en route would make long journeys more convenient.
Consumers would buy the cars but get batteries from Better Place and pay a fee for the miles they drive, relying on the charging stations for local driving and the switching stations for longer trips.
But even local supporters of Better Place worry that the switching stations, which could cost as much as $1 million each to build, are impractical, largely because the stations may need to stock a wide range of batteries to accommodate cars from different manufacturers.
“I’m skeptical about the infrastructure,” said Klaus Bondam, Copenhagen’s mayor for technical and environmental administration. “It won’t work unless it’s standard on every electric vehicle produced.”
So far, only one automaker, Renault Nissan, has agreed to make cars that work with Mr. Agassi’s switching stations. Getting more automakers on board is a looming obstacle for Mr. Agassi. Toyota, the market leader in hybrid cars, “sees no clear business advantage for us with Better Place,” said Graham Smith, senior vice president for external affairs at Toyota Motors Europe.
Mr. Barfoed, the Danish transport minister, said that while the deal with Renault was a good start, “what about all the other cars? What about the competition?”
Mr. Agassi professes to be untroubled that carmakers are not rushing to sign up, and he rejects other criticisms of his plan, as well.
“In every industry, the incumbent always said it’ll never change,” he said. “The mainframe guys said people will never need PCs.”
Jens Moberg, a former Microsoft executive who is the chief executive of Better Place Denmark, acknowledges the challenges and concedes that, aside from a few demonstration sites, little infrastructure has been put in place so far.
“I believe the automakers will embrace electric vehicles on a large scale; it’s just a question of when,” Mr. Moberg said. Stocking different batteries “is a challenge, but we can handle it because we have a flexible design for the switching stations.”
“We will be ready for 2011 when Renault ships the car,” he added.
Perhaps the main reason to think electric cars might have a shot in Denmark is their remarkable tax advantage.
The country imposes a punitive tax of about 200 percent on new cars, so a vehicle that would cost $20,000 in the United States costs $60,000 here. For a quarter-century, electric cars have been exempt from that tax. But the models on the market were so limited in their capabilities that only 497 of them are registered in the entire country.
The combination of an advanced mass-market car from Renault Nissan and practical charging options from Better Place will be the first real test of whether a tax break that large is enough to force a shift. To stimulate the market, local and national governments in Demark are expected to buy many electric cars for their own use.
“The one factor that you can’t find on a spreadsheet is the willingness of the people in government to lead change,” Mr. Agassi said. “And in Denmark every single one of them is engaged and willing to do whatever it takes to get Denmark to be a leader in electric vehicles.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/business/energy-environment/02electric.html?ref=todayspaper)
In Denmark, Ambitious Plan for Electric Cars
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Published: December 1, 2009
COPENHAGEN — Is saving $40,000 at the showroom enough to get drivers behind the wheel of an electric car? With a program in the works to add easy access to charging stations, Denmark is about to find out.
“In every industry, the incumbent always said it'll never change,” said Shai Agassi, the founder and chief executive of Better Place.
For all their potential, electric cars have always been the subject of more talk than action, and only a handful are on the road in Denmark. But now the biggest Danish power company is working with a Silicon Valley start-up in a $100 million effort to wire the country with charging poles as well as service stations that can change out batteries in minutes.
The government offers a minimum $40,000 tax break on each new electric car — and free parking in downtown Copenhagen.
But even in Denmark, one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, skepticism abounds. It is not clear that car buyers can be persuaded to make the switch.
“There is a psychological barrier for consumers when their car is dependent on a battery station,” warned Henrik Lund, a professor of energy planning at Aalborg University. “It’s risky.”
The Silicon Valley company, Better Place, is making a big push in Denmark and in Israel. That makes those two countries the world’s most important test cases for the idea that electric motors and batteries can supplant the petroleum-burning engines that have powered cars for more than a century.
The experiment has other implications beyond the borders of this Scandinavian nation of 5.5 million. That is because Denmark is trying to do more than simply move away from the internal combustion engine.
By revamping the power grid, Dong Energy, Better Place’s partner and the biggest utility in Denmark, wants to power the anticipated fleet of electric cars with wind energy, which already supplies nearly 20 percent of the country’s power.
With Better Place and the smart grid working together, cars would charge up as the winds blow at night, when power demand is lowest. Charging would soak up the utility’s extra power and sharply shrink the carbon footprint of electric vehicles.
“We’re the perfect match for a windmill-based utility,” said Shai Agassi, Better Place’s founder and chief executive. “If you have a bunch of batteries waiting to be charged, it’s like having a lot of buckets waiting for rain.”
The Danes will be promoting their electric car ambitions starting next week, when they hold an international meeting in Copenhagen intended to make progress on a new agreement to combat global warming.
“We want to be a test and laboratory country for electric cars, hybrid cars and other new technology,” said Lars Barfoed, the Danish minister of transport. “And as host of the climate change conference, that’s made us feel responsible and want to show the world we can do something.”
Mr. Agassi, a press-smart Israeli-American entrepreneur who was formerly a top executive at the software giant S.A.P., has cast his company’s efforts in moral terms, because of the large contribution that gasoline and diesel cars make to global warming. But so far, the results are falling short of the rhetoric.
In January 2009, Mr. Agassi promised that Denmark would have 100,000 charging spots in place and several thousand cars on the road by 2010. But with that deadline approaching, no Better Place cars are on the road and only 55 charging spots are ready.
According to Better Place, 2011 has always been the target for its mass debut, and that has not slipped. The company plans a road test of electric cars during the climate conference.
In addition to the charge points, Better Place’s vision calls for a network of stations where a robotic device could replace a battery in less time than it takes to fill a tank of gas.
These switching stations are needed because batteries have a limited range of about 100 miles, and recharging takes up to five hours, so changing batteries en route would make long journeys more convenient.
Consumers would buy the cars but get batteries from Better Place and pay a fee for the miles they drive, relying on the charging stations for local driving and the switching stations for longer trips.
But even local supporters of Better Place worry that the switching stations, which could cost as much as $1 million each to build, are impractical, largely because the stations may need to stock a wide range of batteries to accommodate cars from different manufacturers.
“I’m skeptical about the infrastructure,” said Klaus Bondam, Copenhagen’s mayor for technical and environmental administration. “It won’t work unless it’s standard on every electric vehicle produced.”
So far, only one automaker, Renault Nissan, has agreed to make cars that work with Mr. Agassi’s switching stations. Getting more automakers on board is a looming obstacle for Mr. Agassi. Toyota, the market leader in hybrid cars, “sees no clear business advantage for us with Better Place,” said Graham Smith, senior vice president for external affairs at Toyota Motors Europe.
Mr. Barfoed, the Danish transport minister, said that while the deal with Renault was a good start, “what about all the other cars? What about the competition?”
Mr. Agassi professes to be untroubled that carmakers are not rushing to sign up, and he rejects other criticisms of his plan, as well.
“In every industry, the incumbent always said it’ll never change,” he said. “The mainframe guys said people will never need PCs.”
Jens Moberg, a former Microsoft executive who is the chief executive of Better Place Denmark, acknowledges the challenges and concedes that, aside from a few demonstration sites, little infrastructure has been put in place so far.
“I believe the automakers will embrace electric vehicles on a large scale; it’s just a question of when,” Mr. Moberg said. Stocking different batteries “is a challenge, but we can handle it because we have a flexible design for the switching stations.”
“We will be ready for 2011 when Renault ships the car,” he added.
Perhaps the main reason to think electric cars might have a shot in Denmark is their remarkable tax advantage.
The country imposes a punitive tax of about 200 percent on new cars, so a vehicle that would cost $20,000 in the United States costs $60,000 here. For a quarter-century, electric cars have been exempt from that tax. But the models on the market were so limited in their capabilities that only 497 of them are registered in the entire country.
The combination of an advanced mass-market car from Renault Nissan and practical charging options from Better Place will be the first real test of whether a tax break that large is enough to force a shift. To stimulate the market, local and national governments in Demark are expected to buy many electric cars for their own use.
“The one factor that you can’t find on a spreadsheet is the willingness of the people in government to lead change,” Mr. Agassi said. “And in Denmark every single one of them is engaged and willing to do whatever it takes to get Denmark to be a leader in electric vehicles.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
(NYTimes) We May Be Born With an Urge to Help
From: NYTIMES
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?ref=science)
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: November 30, 2009
What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.
But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.
The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.
When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.
“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”
But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.
Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.
For parents who may think their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home, which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he said.
As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”
Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.
Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.
Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little interest in what may be their companions’ minds.
If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.
“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.
The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not really share their catch.
An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.
Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”
This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.
“Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
A similar conclusion has been reached independently by Hillard S. Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers, so much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr. Kaplan has found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.
The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.
The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.
Much the same conclusion is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of Empathy.” Dr. de Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is often overrated as a human motivation.
“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths.
Indeed, it is in our biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed. “In fact,” Dr. de Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”
The basic sociability of human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive nothing.
“Humans clearly evolved the ability to detect inequities, control immediate desires, foresee the virtues of norm following and gain the personal, emotional rewards that come from seeing another punished,” write three Harvard biologists, Marc Hauser, Katherine McAuliffe and Peter R. Blake, in reviewing their experiments with tamarin monkeys and young children.
If people do bad things to others in their group, they can behave even worse to those outside it. Indeed the human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
Sociality, the binding together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”
The roots of human cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also follow rules requiring us to be nice to others.
“That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?ref=science)
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: November 30, 2009
What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.
But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.
The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.
When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.
“It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”
But Dr. Tomasello finds the helping is not enhanced by rewards, suggesting that it is not influenced by training. It seems to occur across cultures that have different timetables for teaching social rules. And helping behavior can even be seen in infant chimpanzees under the right experimental conditions. For all these reasons, Dr. Tomasello concludes that helping is a natural inclination, not something imposed by parents or culture.
Infants will help with information, as well as in practical ways. From the age of 12 months they will point at objects that an adult pretends to have lost. Chimpanzees, by contrast, never point at things for each other, and when they point for people, it seems to be as a command to go fetch something rather than to share information.
For parents who may think their children somehow skipped the cooperative phase, Dr. Tomasello offers the reassuring advice that children are often more cooperative outside the home, which is why parents may be surprised to hear from a teacher or coach how nice their child is. “In families, the competitive element is in ascendancy,” he said.
As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.”
Children not only feel they should obey these rules themselves, but also that they should make others in the group do the same. Even 3-year-olds are willing to enforce social norms. If they are shown how to play a game, and a puppet then joins in with its own idea of the rules, the children will object, some of them vociferously.
Where do they get this idea of group rules, the sense of “we who do it this way”? Dr. Tomasello believes children develop what he calls “shared intentionality,” a notion of what others expect to happen and hence a sense of a group “we.” It is from this shared intentionality that children derive their sense of norms and of expecting others to obey them.
Shared intentionality, in Dr. Tomasello’s view, is close to the essence of what distinguishes people from chimpanzees. A group of human children will use all kinds of words and gestures to form goals and coordinate activities, but young chimps seem to have little interest in what may be their companions’ minds.
If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.
“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.
The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not really share their catch.
An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.
Advertising what one is looking at could be a risk. Dr. Tomasello argues that the behavior evolved “in cooperative social groups in which monitoring one another’s focus was to everyone’s benefit in completing joint tasks.”
This could have happened at some point early in human evolution, when in order to survive, people were forced to cooperate in hunting game or gathering fruit. The path to obligatory cooperation — one that other primates did not take — led to social rules and their enforcement, to human altruism and to language.
“Humans putting their heads together in shared cooperative activities are thus the originators of human culture,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
A similar conclusion has been reached independently by Hillard S. Kaplan, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico. Modern humans have lived for most of their existence as hunter gatherers, so much of human nature has presumably been shaped for survival in such conditions. From study of existing hunter gatherer peoples, Dr. Kaplan has found evidence of cooperation woven into many levels of human activity.
The division of labor between men and women — men gather 68 percent of the calories in foraging societies — requires cooperation between the sexes. Young people in these societies consume more than they produce until age 20, which in turn requires cooperation between the generations. This long period of dependency was needed to develop the special skills required for the hunter gatherer way of life.
The structure of early human societies, including their “high levels of cooperation between kin and nonkin,” was thus an adaptation to the “specialized foraging niche” of food resources that were too difficult for other primates to capture, Dr. Kaplan and colleagues wrote recently in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. We evolved to be nice to each other, in other words, because there was no alternative.
Much the same conclusion is reached by Frans de Waal in another book published in October, “The Age of Empathy.” Dr. de Waal, a primatologist, has long studied the cooperative side of primate behavior and believes that aggression, which he has also studied, is often overrated as a human motivation.
“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control.” The only people emotionally immune to another’s situation, he notes, are psychopaths.
Indeed, it is in our biological nature, not our political institutions, that we should put our trust, in his view. Our empathy is innate and cannot be changed or long suppressed. “In fact,” Dr. de Waal writes, “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”
The basic sociability of human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive nothing.
“Humans clearly evolved the ability to detect inequities, control immediate desires, foresee the virtues of norm following and gain the personal, emotional rewards that come from seeing another punished,” write three Harvard biologists, Marc Hauser, Katherine McAuliffe and Peter R. Blake, in reviewing their experiments with tamarin monkeys and young children.
If people do bad things to others in their group, they can behave even worse to those outside it. Indeed the human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” Dr. Tomasello writes.
Sociality, the binding together of members of a group, is the first requirement of defense, since without it people will not put the group’s interests ahead of their own or be willing to sacrifice their lives in battle. Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist who has traced aggression among early peoples, writes in his book “War Before Civilization” that, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”
The roots of human cooperation may lie in human aggression. We are selfish by nature, yet also follow rules requiring us to be nice to others.
“That’s why we have moral dilemmas,” Dr. Tomasello said, “because we are both selfish and altruistic at the same time.”
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