Vol 454|28 August 2008

NEWS & VIEWS

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

Share and share alike

Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken

Recent experiments 1,2 have shown that

chimpanzees do not take advantage of costfree opportunities to deliver food to other
members of their group. Nor do they prevent
others from getting food when they could easily
do so. In most situations, our nearest primate
relatives seem to be focused exclusively on the
food that they themselves might get.
In the words of Fehr et al.3, in a paper on page
1079 of this issue, chimpanzees seem to have
no other-regarding preferences. But human
children do. In their study, Fehr et al. found
that children aged 7 to 8 will not only provide
food for others when it is of no cost to themselves, they will also seek an equal distribution,
even in situations where they could potentially
take a larger share for themselves (as well as in
situations in which they could potentially give
a larger share to the other). They care about
what the other is getting, and they want it to be
the same as for themselves. Importantly, this
is especially true when the other is from their
own group (that is, is one of their classmates),
rather than from a different group.
Fehr and colleagues carried out their experiments with 229 Swiss boys and girls between
3 and 8 years of age. The children were given
a choice between two food-allocation options,
each of which involved providing some sweets
for themselves and/or some for another child
(not present, but represented by a photograph).
For example, in one condition they could
choose between two for me, none for you and
one each.
The authors finding that early-school-age
children value equality of resource distribution confirms previous studies4. What is new
is the experimental design. The current studys
design follows that of research in experimental economics with adults, such that the childs
choice of resource distribution is anonymous
(the recipient is not in the room) and it will
happen only once. This is meant to rule out the
possibility that, as they divvy up the rewards, the
children are mainly concerned either with future
reciprocity from the recipient or with their own
reputation for cooperation. With these self-centred concerns ruled out, we can be more confident that the children are truly acting with the
others welfare in mind, as well as their own.

BURKE/TRIOLO PRODUCTIONS/FOODPIX

The happy tendency to share resources equitably at least with members of ones own social group is
a central and unique feature of human social life. It emerges, it seems, in middle childhood.

Sweet exchange: early-school-age children value equality of resource distribution.

Such other-regarding preferences are the

foundation on which humans unique forms
of altruism, cooperation and social norms
of fairness are built. Without a tendency
to monitor and care about what others are
experiencing and getting and comparing
it with what one is experiencing and getting
oneself it is difficult to imagine that human
morality and culture could exist. And the tendency to prefer equal outcomes for everyone
in the group is characteristic of individuals in the kinds of huntergatherer societies
in which humans spent the vast majority of

their evolutionary history, suggesting that this

preference did indeed play an important part
in the evolution of human cooperation5.
The main criticism of this type of research
with adults is that subjects do not really believe
the assurances of anonymity or that human
psychology is such that we cannot help but
operate as if we are being watched even when
we know we are not6. In Fehr and colleagues
study, the children were told that everything
was anonymous and that this was a one-time
event (the beneficiary children were only
pictured). However, the worry here is that the
1057

NEWS & VIEWS

children could easily have been concerned with

what the adult experimenters who stayed in
the room as the children decided thought of
them as cooperators.
A notable result was a change to otherregarding behaviour with age: younger children (34 years old) were mostly self-centred,
whereas the older children (78 years old)
were concerned with equality within their
group, that is. Interestingly, this developmental
pattern is different from that of another form
of altruism, namely instrumental helping.
Human infants as young as 1418 months
readily help others do such things as fetch or
stack objects, or open cabinets7. For this kind
of helping there is direct evidence that infants
are not influenced by external rewards, and
indeed our nearest primate relatives sometimes
help others achieve their goals as well7,8. So, in
the case of instrumental helping, the developmental trajectory is of early altruism and otherregarding preferences, and then, presumably,
growing concern with reciprocity and reputation as children learn to be selective altruists so
as to avoid being exploited by others.
One difference between these studies on
instrumental helping and Fehr and colleagues
research is that, in the former case, children
were faced with a real individual, not pictures,
and this might influence their altruism. That
is, in more natural settings, where resources
are being distributed among individuals who
are physically present, young children might
very well start out being altruistic as well. But
it is also possible that altruism is not a general
trait, and that there are actually two different
evolutionary scenarios involved here: one for
helping behaviourally and one for sharing
resources. Young infants may thus be helpful
behaviourally because it involves only energetic
and opportunity costs. But being generous with
food is another story, which might be governed
especially strongly by such things as expectations of reciprocity, adult encouragement and
social norms.
Fehr et al. 3 thus contribute to a growing collection of direct investigations of the
tendency of human beings to care about and
act on behalf of others. Their paper shows that,
in the case of sharing resources equitably, the
tendency emerges in middle childhood. It is
also significant that this tendency, even in
childhood, is directed mostly at others within
the group, for much evidence now suggests
that human cooperation is at root parochial9.
In the end, research of this kind should help
us to determine the degree to which human
social life, morality and culture derive from
a unique other-regarding psychology that
emerges early in life.

Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken are in the

Department of Developmental and Comparative
Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103
Leipzig, Germany.
e-mails: tomasello@eva.mpg.de;
warneken@eva.mpg.de
1058

NATURE|Vol 454|28 August 2008

1. Silk, J. B. et al. Nature 437, 13571359 (2005).

2. Jensen, K., Hare, B., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. Proc. R. Soc.
Lond. B 273, 10131021 (2006).
3. Fehr, E., Bernhard, H. & Rockenbach, B. Nature 454,
10791083 (2008).
4. Hook, J. G. & Cook, T. D. Psychol. Bull. 86, 429445 (1979).
5. Boehm, C. Hierarchy in the Forest (Harvard Univ. Press,
1999).

6. Haley, K. J. & Fessler, D. M. T. Evol. Hum. Behav. 26,

245256 (2005).
7. Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. Science 311, 13011303
(2006).
8. Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A., Hanus, D. & Tomasello, M.
PLoS Biol. 5, e184 (2007).
9. Bernhard, H., Fischbacher, U. & Fehr, E. Nature 442,
912915 (2006).

EARTH SCIENCE

A sheet-metal geodynamo
Ulrich R. Christensen
A decade of modelling Earths core on computers has led to the belief
that we understand what produces Earths magnetic field. More realistic
simulations are now shaking that complacency.
Earths magnetic field is often depicted as
though a gigantic bar magnet resides inside
our planet. In fact, the magnetic field is
created by strong electrical currents generated by a dynamo process resulting from the
flow of molten iron in Earths outer core. An
important feature of this motion is thought to
be spiralling flows in the form of long columns
running parallel to Earths axis. Despite
numerous simplifying assumptions, previous computer simulations of Earths core have
reproduced both this kind of flow and the
properties of the magnetic field remarkably
well. On page 1106 of this issue, Kageyama
et al.1 present a simulation that should more
closely model the conditions in Earths core.
Instead of columns, the model shows thin
sheets, which undermines our present thoughts
on exactly how the geodynamo works.
In a simple dynamo, as might power the lights
on a bicycle, the motion of a wire through a magnetic field generates electrical current in that
wire. In more sophisticated, technical dynamos
found in cars or power stations, the magnetic
field is generated by the dynamos own current
rather than being externally applied. These
dynamos work because the current is guided
by wires arranged in coils. But Earths core is
an unstructured sphere of iron, which is liquid
in its outer part. A simple rotational motion
of the core would be insufficient to produce a
magnetic field. Rather, the liquid metal must
follow complex paths reminiscent of the coils in
a technical dynamo.
The flow of material in the outer, liquid, core
is produced by convection, driven mainly by
a flux of heat and buoyant elements (such as
silicon and sulphur) that emanate from the
inner, solid, core. The flow is strongly influenced by forces due to Earths rotation such
as the Coriolis force, which causes low-pressure
weather systems to rotate anticlockwise in the
Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise in the
Southern Hemisphere. As long as convection
is weak, the flow takes the form of columns,
aligned northsouth, through which fluid
particles move with a corkscrew-like trajectory

(Fig. 1). Theoretical work has shown that this

situation could generate a magnetic field with
a dipolar (bar-magnet-like) structure2. Previous computer simulations of the geodynamo
that solved the equations of fluid flow and
magnetic induction in a rotating sphere support the existence of such columns and their
role in the generation of magnetic fields3,4.
They show magnetic field lines emerging at
the top of Earths core mainly in so-called flux
lobes, which appear in pairs aligned on the
same meridian line at around 60 latitude in
the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The
locations of the lobes are thought to be places
where individual convection columns touch
the outer boundary of the core5.
All computer models of the geodynamo suffer
from being unable to run with true core conditions, because this would require much more
powerful computers than are currently available.
For example, the viscosity of the liquid core must
be made unrealistically large to suppress smallscale eddies in the flow that cannot be resolved
on present computers. A useful measure of viscosity here is the Ekman number, which is the
ratio of viscous friction to the Coriolis force. The
Ekman number in the core is tiny, around 1015,
but until now geodynamo simulations have only
been able to operate down to Ekman numbers
of 106, with larger values being used in most
cases. Kageyama et al.1 used 4,096 processors
at the Earth simulator in Japan to run a vigorously convecting dynamo model with an Ekman
number approaching 107.
This may seem a small step, given the
discrepancy remaining eight orders of
magnitude but such efforts are important
to discover whether simulations with high
Ekman numbers produce qualitatively similar
results to those with more realistic conditions, or
whether lowering the Ekman number results in
marked alterations. It was expected that, at lower
Ekman numbers, the vortex columns would
become narrower and more numerous. Instead,
Kageyama et al.1 find that the flows become flattened into thin sheets radiating out from Earths
axis, reminiscent of the gills of a mushroom