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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:44PM (#515660)

    I'm a staunch.