THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYbecause in many cases the contributions are anonymous. This is a
phenomenon that researchers are only just beginning to investigate,
and they think part of the (disappointing) answer may have to do with
attention-seeking.
For example, Bernardo Huberman and colleagues at the Social
Computing Lab in California analysed the viewing history of over
9 million videos posted on YouTube by 579,471 contributors. A striking
feature of the data was that the more times a person’s videos were
watched, the more subsequent videos they tended to post, and vice versa.
Another pattern to come out of this analysis was that prolific contribu-
tors appeared to be more concerned by how their current performance
compared against their past performance, whereas newbies or infre-
quent contributors were more bothered by how their viewing statistics
compared with other people’s.
COOPERATION AND PUNISHMENT
Another aspect of helping behaviour that psychologists have investigated
is the handling of cheats. If a group of people club together to achieve a
shared objective, there’s a temptation for a sneaky cheat to sit back and reap
the rewards without contributing their fair share. Of course if everyone did
this, the group effort would fall apart. So how is cheating deterred?
How to make a toddler more altruistic
If you’re comfortable with the idea of covert manipulation and the
prospect of a more altruistic toddler sounds appealing, you could
try placing two companionable dolls side by side in various places
around the house. In 2009 Harriet Over and Malinda Carpenter at the
Max Planck Institute split sixty eighteen-month-old infants into four
groups. One of the groups viewed photos of household objects, all
of which also featured two dolls standing together side by side in the
background. The remaining groups looked at photos with household
objects in the foreground, with either a doll on its own in the
background; two dolls facing away from each other in the background;
or just a pile of toy bricks in the background. The key finding was that
afterwards, the infants who’d looked at the photos with the friendly
dolls in the background were three times as likely to help an experi-
menter pick up some dropped sticks. Over and Carpenter said the
effect had nothing to do with the children’s mood (they had tested
that), instead the mere sight of the two companionable dolls was
enough to prompt more helpful behaviour.