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posted by mrpg on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the maybe dept.

If you bail on an activity with a preschooler, you'd better have a good excuse.

That's because, according to research published this week in the journal Child Development, children as young as three and a half years old understand and value the obligations that accompany joint commitments. The researchers found that children who abandon a cooperative activity for an apparently selfish reason tend to prompt more resentment from their peers than those who quit the task for another reason.

These findings do not just build on a growing body of research suggesting that the very young possess moral capabilities that are more sophisticated than scientists previously thought. They also suggest that the notion of shared obligation is in some ways fundamental to Homo sapiens, the only known animal to create social institutions.

"The kinds of joint commitments we are seeing here in the three-year-olds can be scaled up into legal contracts, in which we mutually pledge to hold up our end of the bargain," says Margarita Svetlova, a visiting assistant professor at Duke University, who co-authored the study with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "If you really want, you could scale it up to the social contract in general."


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:16AM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:16AM (#515297)

    You have a rather biased view of history. The middle easterners have a terrible history of human rights and slavery themselves. The Berbers in Northern Africa, in particular, were infamous for invading southern Europe (largely Italy) and abducting people, especially women, to be kept as slaves. The history is Islam is rife with stories of conquest; why do you think the Moors controlled Spain for so long? It wasn't because the Spanish wanted to be Muslims. Islam was spread by violence across Asia all the way to Indonesia.

    The Jews aren't any better, it's just that much of their heyday was several thousand years ago. You can read about it in the Old Testament, where they run around slaughtering other tribes and taking their women as slaves, because supposedly God told them to.

    All three of the Abrahamic religions are violent and oppressive, and have condoned and practiced slavery at various points in history. Pointing out the flaws in one and acting like the others are without fault is intellectually dishonest.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:03AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:03AM (#515348)

    I'm still trying to figure out if idiot_king (6587) actually believes the nonsense he keeps posting.

    He acts severely racist against white people. He acts as if he basically hates America, Europe, western culture, English, and more. I guess there are 3 possibilities:

    a. just a troll
    b. an actual Muslim or somebody living in Africa or similar
    c. a self-flagellating true believer of insanity, probably a permanent student in California

    Whatever the case, his actions contribute toward ultimately getting us all killed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:08PM (#515465)

      He's also displayed the usual presumption of female hegemony as the natural order of the universe, that the female gender is not only authentic but also ascendant (this is not a simple gender swap of the heteronormative notion of male gender inherent authenticity) while the male gender is inauthentic, and that the only thing that could upset this natural order of the universe is a force of evil (personified as all assigned males, collectively and severally, with some forbearance for males who flog themselves in their closets every night as penance for being an inferior being) typical of feminists.

      (I presume "he" is the correct pronoun to use with this person because of his username. However, I would not be surprised were that incorrect.)

      I'd like to offer up a fourth option.

      d. a right-wing authoritarian follower

      I think that addresses both of our gripes, even if I would otherwise be tempted to flame you. :) Normally I see language like you've used, and it's a dog whistle. However, if he is a right-wing authoritarian follower, then your language would literally apply to him. He does indeed hate Western culture; he does indeed hate its ascent from barbarism over the past 500 years; he does indeed hate the English language because it is the language we happen to use (our modern lingua franca, haha).

      While I know I need to expand my knowledge beyond Altemeyer so I can at least cite somebody else if I want to keep harping on it, his patterns of cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization, clear lack of critical thinking, etc practically scream "RWA." Even if his positions are traditionally leftist, his approach is fundamentally that of the right-wing authoritarian follower.

      (Note: I used ascend-type words twice in this post. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how a culture may be legitimately ascendant compared to other cultures and how it makes no sense for an entire gender irrespective of culture to be ascendant.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @12:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @12:19AM (#515762)

      He acts severely racist against white people. He acts as if he basically hates America, Europe, western culture, English, and more. I guess there are 3 possibilities:

      a. just a troll

      Seriously? 90% of the world hates America, Europe, and especially the English, with good reason. How can anyone be so obtuse, unless they are American, or speak English, because they are American. Just another example of why we cannot have white supremecy! Because white people are so stupid, clueless, and dense!