C4| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Babies Can Be
More Altruistic
Than Adults
MIND&MATTER
SUSAN PINKER
TOMASZ WALENTA
TODDLERS AREinno-
cent and sweet, but are
they good? Pint-sized
autocrats who wake up
at dawn, expect food and
drink on demand, say no to everything,
and who can kick, scream and bite if
they don’t get their way are called Ter-
rible Twos for a reason.
A new study tells a different story.
Published recently in the journal Na-
ture’s Scientific Reports, it shows that
toddlers will offer up food they really
want to a needy stranger. Most adults
don’t show that kind of altruism.
The researchers, led by University of
Washington post-doctoral scholar Rod-
olfo Cortes Barragan, made that discov-
ery by testing 96 toddlers. In the first
experiment, the child met an adult who
was sitting behind a desk. (The desk
was gated and the toddler stayed on
the other side with a parent nearby, so
they wouldn’t feel threatened.) The
adult selected a piece of freshly cut
strawberry, banana, blueberry or grape,
which then suddenly slipped out of his
hand and landed on a tray on the
child’s side of the desk.
In the “begging experimenter” group,
the adult acted dismayed, grasping the
air impotently to get at the fruit. “He
reaches for the yummy fruit, expresses
the desire for it, but can’t get to it,” ex-
plained Andrew Meltzoff, one of the au-
thors of the paper and the co-director
of the University of Washington’s Insti-
tute for Learning & Brain Sciences. In
contrast, the control-group adult non-
chalantly tossed the fruit onto the tray.
There was a clear difference in the
toddlers’ reactions. In the begging ex-
perimenter group, almost 60% of them
retrieved the fruit and promptly of-
fered it to the experimenter. In the con-
trol group only 4% did the same.
The second experiment raised the
stakes by asking parents to bring theirchildren to the lab when they were
hungry. In this case, though more of
the toddlers in the “begging experi-
menter” group gave in to their urges
and ate the fruit, about 38% of them
still handed it over to the stranger.
“They would pick up the banana, look
at the banana and hover over it. Some
hungry children would even bring it to
their mouths,” said Prof. Meltzoff.
“Though there’s a biological push to act
selfishly, there’s a social motivation to
give it to the begging stranger,” he
said. That social motivation evaporated
when the hungry toddlers in the con-
trol group saw the experimenter inten-
tionally toss the fruit away: 0% of those
babies gave it back.
The knack for reading others’ needs
and being motivated to help fulfill
them is a distinctly human trait.
“Chimpanzees don’t give up food to a
stranger,” said Dr. Cortes Barragan.
Mother chimps won’t even offer prized
bits of fruit to their own toddlers, ac-
cording to a 2004 study. They eat the
best morsels themselves and leave the
stems and seeds for the babies. (For
their part, toddler chimps just grab a
dropped chunk of fruit and run with it.)
There are evolutionary reasons why
human babies behave altruistically. By
sharing food with strangers, they help
to cement bonds with non-family mem-
bers that hold the group together. But
altruistic instincts can also be en-
hanced by experience, said Prof. Melt-
zoff. In this study, for instance, the
fruit-sharers were slightly more likely
to have siblings, and Asian and Latino
babies shared more often than those
from other backgrounds. “The value of
interdependence is picked up by prelin-
guistic babies,” he said.
Prof. Meltzoff has now spent de-
cades studying how infants grasp oth-
ers’ intentions. But discovering that
hungry babies will give up treats to a
stranger still astonishes him. “These
are young human beings, not even
speaking in sentences. Yet they care
about others and act altruistically to-
ward them. We think babies are selfish,
egocentric and a slave to their biologi-
cal needs. But this study shows they’re
not selfish. They’re social!”REVIEW
M
any Americans
hold deep-seated
convictions that
they are uncom-
fortable sharing,
especially when the subject is divi-
sive. Yet occasionally, the truth
will out: While writing a book
about the history of Shakespeare
in America, I learned that such
views often reveal themselves in-
directly and unexpectedly, in hon-
est and unguarded responses to
Shakespeare’s plays.
John Quincy Adams, our sixth
president, offers a striking exam-
ple. Adams is widely—and justly—
celebrated as one of the great abo-
litionists. He joined the House of
Representatives after leaving the
presidency, spearheaded the oppo-
sition to the 1830s “gag rule” in-
tended to prevent Congress from
considering petitions against slav-
ery, fought against the annexation
of Texas (and thereby the creation
of additional slave states) and suc-
cessfully argued the 1841 Amistad
case, in which he defended cap-
tured African slaves before the Su-
preme Court. His advocacy led to a
spate of death threats. His con-
gressional opponent (and future
Confederate general) Henry Wise
described him “the acutest, the as-
tutest, the archest enemy of
Southern slavery that ever ex-
isted”—and Wise didn’t mean that
as a compliment.
Yet for all of his efforts against
slavery, John Quincy Adams had a
profound aversion to miscegena-
tion. He just couldn’t stomach the
idea of a black man having sex
with a white woman—something
overlooked by his admiring biog-
raphers. Few Americans have lefta more detailed record of their
thoughts, but one searches Ad-
ams’s correspondence and diaries
in vain for any reflections on mis-
cegenation—or, as it was called at
the time, amalgamation. Yet it is
easy to understand why Adams,
like many at the time who shared
his views, didn’t want to come out
and declare that while slaves
should be free, they should not be
free to marry someone of a differ-
ent race.
That is where “Othello” comes
in. What Adams couldn’t readily
admit to, or even wrestle with in
his private diaries, he would pub-
licly address when describing Des-
demona’s elopement with Shake-
speare’s Moor. Even as a college
student, Adams had refused to ac-
cept the popular view that
“Othello” was “the most perfect of
all” of Shakespeare’s plays; he told
his Harvard classmates in a talk he
gave there in 1786 that it couldn’t
be, because the “very foundation
upon which the whole fabric is
erected appears injudicious, dis-Desdemona’s “fondling with Othello
is disgusting,” he wrote, and her
“passion...for Othello is unnatural,
solely and exclusively because of
his color.” For Adams, any pity we
might feel as we watch Othello kill
Desdemona must give way to the
grim satisfaction that she got what
she had coming for loving a black
man: “when Othello smothers her
in bed, the terror and the pity sub-
side immediately into the senti-
ment that she has her deserts.”
The story had one more turn to
it. Soon after the 1833 dinner,
Kemble, who had abolitionist sym-
pathies, married Pierce Butler,
from a wealthy Philadelphia fam-
ily. Butler subsequently inherited
the second-largest slave plantation
in Georgia and took Kemble and
their daughters to live there. In
Georgia, as her marriage was
crumbling, Kemble turned to writ-
ing again, in the form of letters to
a friend up North that she would
eventually publish.
“Did I ever tell you of my dining
in Boston,” she wrote, “and sitting
by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who,
talking to me about Desdemona,
assured me, with a most serious
expression of sincere disgust, that
he considered all her misfortunes
as a very just judgment upon her
for having married a ‘n—’?” She
spelled out the N-word. Learning
that Adams—a stalwart abolition-
ist, a liberal New Englander, one of
the best-educated men of his
day—could have used the epithet
so casually comes as a shock. Per-
haps it was easier for him to use
this slur when alluding to a fic-
tional black man.
I don’t believe that Adams was
at all an outlier in his views on
miscegenation or in his casual use
of the N-word, even among aboli-
tionists. If anyone was an outlier,
it was his extraordinary mother,
who wrestled with the possibility
that her revulsion was a result of
what she had been taught to be-
lieve. What makes the case of
John Quincy Adams so fascinating
is that he was willing to go on re-
cord with his views of interracial
unions, though obliquely, by writ-
ing about Desdemona and Othello.
John Quincy Adams made ex-
traordinary contributions to this
nation, and his disheartening if
not atypical views on miscegena-
tion do not diminish them. But
they must be part of the historical
record. If we are to reckon hon-
estly with the more painful as-
pects of our nation’s past and
move beyond them, we will need
to know more about what our
forebears thought but could never
say outright. A useful place to be-
gin is to look at what they have
ended up inadvertently acknowl-
edging when talking about Shake-
speare on issues that continue to
divide us: race, marriage, immigra-
tion, inequality and the nature of
our republic.Prof. Shapiro teaches English at
Columbia University. This essay
is adapted from his new book,
“Shakespeare in a Divided
America: What His Plays Tell Us
About Our Past and Future,”
which will be published on
March 10 by Penguin Press.FROM TOP: ALAMY; GETTY IMAGESBYJAMESSHAPIROJohn Quincy Adams (1767-1848),
the sixth president of the U.S.,
in an image circa 1825.gusting, and contrary to all proba-
bility.” What he meant by “disgust-
ing” would only later become
clear.
In this respect, he was partly
echoing the views of his mother,
Abigail Adams. The former first
lady also strongly opposed slav-
ery—yet she too had problems
with black men touching white
women, even when they were
white actors impersonating black
men. After seeing a production of
“Othello” in London in 1785, she
wrote to her son-in-law William
Stephens Smith that her “whole
soul shuddered whenever I saw
the sooty Moor touch the fair Des-
demona.”
But unlike her son, Abigail Ad-
ams went on to question whether
her reaction was natural or
whether she had been taught tofeel this way: “Whether it arises
from the prejudices of education
or from a real natural antipathy I
cannot determine.” John Quincy
Adams, however, had no doubts:
Revulsion was the natural re-
sponse—though we only know this
from his writings and recorded
conversation many years later.
He might never have revealed
his views if not for a disastrous
dinner party in Boston in 1833.
The former president was seated
next to one of the great Shake-
speare actors of the day, the young
British star Fanny Kemble, who
was touring America. Adams spent
the evening mansplaining Shake-
speare to her. Kemble wrote down
what Adams had told her—among
other things, that “Othello” was
“disgusting.” Not long after, she
published this in her account of
her travels in America, and al-
though she used dashes instead of
spelling out the former president’s
name, many readers knew that it
was him.
A mortified Adams retaliated by
publishing a pair of essays on
Shakespeare defending his views:For all of
his efforts to
combat slavery,
Adams
had a profound
aversion to
miscegenation.A 19th-century depiction
of Othello and Desdemona.John Quincy Adams’s secret
views on race came out in his unguarded
reactionsto‘Othello.’The Mirror
Shakespeare
Holds Up
To America